(aller à la version française)
Some time ago, comments from some Steemit members to my previous posts made me interested in approaches I had previously ignored or neglected, such as the sale of copies of my work.
This was a problem for me with regard to the status of artist in France, which severely limits commercial opportunities. But there are service companies that can act as intermediaries.
Rather than scattering and trying everything and anything at the same time, I decided to start with one of them: displate.com, that I discovered mainly thanks to @Nyarlatothep and his fractals.
Since my drawings were initially made on wooden fibreboards, the idea of converting them into metal-printed posters had a little digital alchemist side that first made me smile.
The transition to practice made me wince: none of the photos I had taken of my work so far met Displate's requirements. I must say that I am not a good photographer, and I have the equipment that suits my skills in this field.
So let's see. Minimum: image of 2900 pixels for the smallest side, ratio of 1.4 for the largest… or 2900*4060px, and in 300dp
Erm... My old camera doesn't meet these requirements, but I'll have to deal with it: investing in equipment with which I have very little affinity dos not inspire me, especially since I don't know what I'm getting into.
So here I am, taking the drawings in several sections with the intention of connecting everything under Gimp.
As a support for the camera, I use the articulated foot of an old desk lamp, decapitated for the occasion.
I slide the painting along a plate that I use as a guide, in one direction and then in the other, in order to obtain four images that can overlap and complete each others.
Gimp then goes into action to adjust the angles and erase the transitions. Krita and ArtRage will come to the rescue for the drawing and final rendering corrections of an image much wider than what my old camera allowed.
At this stage, there is still a lot of work to be done: the objective is not to make a simple reproduction of the original, but a specific conversion for the displate support… The territory to be explored is still vast:
Nothing very complicated, no costs. The new displates are validated after a few hours during which some points are screened, including artificial resolution increase of a low quality image flaws.
A priori, no problem with my first one, validated within the hour. The second one took a little longer, but was validated in less than 24 hours.
Here, displate.com acts as a presenter and place of sale, which does not contravene the limitations of french artist-author status.
In the case of purely organic sales, artists receive 10% on the sale, which may seem meagre. This commission can increase up to +30% if the artist manages to attract buyers to the platform by himself (through a personal code integrated into the URL link to Displate)
Displate therefore prioritizes self-promotion, and as a result the artist finds himself in a position to play the commercial role for the platform.
For the time being, it would be very difficult for me to say whether the system is viable or not, but it confronts me in a concrete and practical way with a very personal difficulty that I must correct: my hermit side and absolutely not commercial.
This is an opportunity to learn new things :)
I will certainly come back to the subject as learn more about it...
...but for now:
Thank you for your reading!
See you, all, and have fun!
(c)berien 2018
