Printing Digital Arts

DVG

So I'm going to make a couple drawings for a few friends for Christmas this year, and need some advice on having it printed. I'm more or less a newb at digital art.

1. About what size digital canvas should I be working with to get a good looking 8 1/2 x 11in print?
2. Is there anything I need to do to the digital art beyond the inking and coloring to achieve good looking results in print? The last time I had something printed, I went to kinkos and it came out with this weird blue tint not consistent with the base art with a pure-white background.
3. Can Kinkos serve my print needs or is there somewhere else I should look for art prints?

I appreciate any help you guys can give me.

Grenn

1. About what size digital canvas should I be working with to get a good looking 8 1/2 x 11in print?

Set your canvas to 8.5" x 11" -- just make sure you're working at 300DPI and it'll print fine.

2. Is there anything I need to do to the digital art beyond the inking and coloring to achieve good looking results in print? The last time I had something printed, I went to kinkos and it came out with this weird blue tint not consistent with the base art with a pure-white background.

Your monitor displays things in RGB (red green blue) and can easily display very bright colours (because each pixel is lit up brightly by your screen), which can't really be reproduced via most printing methods because printers don't use white ink and can only really make white paper darker.

If you set your colour setting in Photoshop (or whatever you're using) to CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow key/black) then the colours available to you will print more accurately as these are the colours which printers typically print. You will notice you can't get quite a bright hues as you can when using RGB but at least things will print closer to how they look on the screen.

3. Can Kinkos serve my print needs or is there somewhere else I should look for art prints?

Never used a Kinkos, but for stardard colour digital printing on heavyweight paper I'm sure they're fine. (It's not like you're producing a giclee or anything). Might be best to ask they what format they prefer to print from, as many places like you to provide a PDF or a TIFF rather than a flattened .psd file or a JPG.

Good luck!

EggyToast

The new Kinkos/FedEx stores are pretty good. Make sure you're working in CMYK, embed your fonts, and potentially convert to a print-ready format (like PDF) to make your life easier.

DVG

Reviving just to show the completed product, since I got around to actually drawing it last night



Thanks for the advice, I'm going to go get it printed this afternoon so long as I don't decide that I hate it.