We had a visit from my friend Paul MacDermot last week.  Paul and I did A-level Art together at school but where I headed off to a career in biology and conservation, Paul has remained with his art all his life and his great experience and talent shows in his subtle paintings of natural history topics in the English countryside and elsewhere.  It was a great catch up and we spent much of our time testing various methods for getting the right reproduction of colour and texture from his beautiful paintings onto print..

We worked from his own image of his painting of baby Kestrels first.  This is a classic Paul MacDermot painting made from many hours of observing the chicks through a telescope as they grew and developed at a Wiltshire nest site, and from his brilliant expertise with gouache paint.  We tested a few papers which were a bit contrasty at first, before eventually settling with best result on Olmec Archival matt which matched the softness and the high key tones of the painting.  Even so, when Paul compared this print to his original at home, he was surprised to find that the original was lighter still overall.  We are still testing using photographs of the original combined with a colour-check profiler but we have a digital copy on file which the artist is satisfied will produce a lovely print.

Following on from this, we turned to Paul’s much admired painting of a Barn Owl flying against an impressionistic backdrop of newly emerged willow leaves.  We have had a couple of admirers of this painting who have asked whether we could produce a print.  First of all we used our outdoor photography method which often works well.  We had to take several images of this large painting and stitch them together to ensure the resolution meets the Giclee standard of 300dpi at capture.  Then we scanned the painting by moving it across our flatbed scanner and again stitching together several images.  Finally, we photographed the painting indoors at night with controlled lighting, both daylight globes 6500k and tungsten globes 3500k.  We make near life size prints of all the different methods so that we could compare them all for colour, detail and texture against the original.  We found the closest colour match to be indoors photography with daylight globes, but only scanning captured the detailed texture of Paul’s unique technique.  This is a series of layering of oil tempera colours using spraying and stencilling, so it was quite a challenge to get the reproduction exact.  The end result was a scanned and stitched image which we then adjusted the colours slightly to match the original satisfactorily to Paul and his sharp eye.

This whole process from artwork to print is called ‘colour proofing’ and is a facility we can offer to any artist looking for exact reproduction into prints.

On Paul’s page with us you can find ‘Hawk Nest, Baby Kestrels’, as a print now and two versions of the Barn Owl print: a smaller open edition and a large, near life-size, edition which Paul is limiting to 100 copies only.  These will be numbered, and all prints are to be supplied with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.  Both size prints work well but the larger print really does justice to the beautiful glowing owl.  The limited edition is already selling so please place an order soon if you are interested.

Please see Paul’s website for further information on his work.

Rob Davies