Illustration

Greetings cards, Christmas cards and Prints

Once my design is finished I scan the work at 300 dpi, and 24 bit RGB colour in my Epson 3170 Photo scanner. This scanner has 16bit greyscale which gives excellent definition and picks up details and the qualities of the various media that I use like pencil and watercolour. The image is adjusted in Adobe photoshop with brightness and contrast and image size being tweeked to give a sharp image.

My printer is an Epson Stylus Photo R2400 and it uses 8 Epson UltraChrome ink cartridges. The colour quality is excellent and the inks are lightproof for approximately 75 years and waterproof. The cartridges are replaced individually when that colour runs out so this means that you never throw away a cartridge which is still half full of ink. A little red light flashes on the outside of the printer telling you that you are running low on one or more of your cartridges. This is the only problem. You will find that the red light always seems to be flashing because the inks run low at different times. Apart from this it is an excellent printer, big but can handle A3 and even rolls of paper. I print the cards on thick card blanks from Craftcreations Ltd and these have no problem going through the printer. Craftcreations sell a wide variety of blanks of different sizes and surfaces. The more you buy the cheaper they are. I could go to a printer to print my cards but a print run with 4 different cards could cost up to £800 for 5000 cards. A big outlay and a lot of cards to sell.