Preparing your artwork so it prints the way you drew it

Work large, always

Start bigger than you need. Scaling a design up loses detail that was never captured; scaling down loses nothing. An artist who works small and hopes to enlarge later is the most common cause of a disappointing print.

Upload the original, not an export made for social media. Those are compressed for speed and stripped of the resolution a press requires.

Understand what happens at the edges

Anything printed is trimmed, and trimming is never perfectly precise. Designs that run to the edge need to extend past it so a slight shift does not leave a white line.

Equally, keep anything that must not be cut — text especially — well inside the edge.

• Extend backgrounds past the trim
• Keep text away from the edges
• Check what happens at seams on garments

Colour will shift, and that is normal

Screens emit light and paper reflects it, so a colour can never match exactly. Deep blacks, bright oranges and vivid blues shift most.

If a specific colour matters — a brand colour especially — say so, and expect to approve a printed proof rather than a screen.

Transparency and backgrounds

A design that assumes a white background will not look the way you expect on a coloured garment or a transparent sticker. Decide deliberately whether the background is part of the design or absent.

Keep your source files

Save the layered original somewhere you control. It is what lets you adapt a design to a new product later, and it is the strongest evidence that a piece is yours if it is ever copied.

Check it at the size it will be seen

Zoom to the actual printed size before you upload, not to fit the screen. A design examined at 200 per cent always looks better than the object somebody receives.

It is worth printing one at home, badly, on ordinary paper. It will not match the final result but it shows immediately whether the composition survives being small.

Name your files like somebody else will read them

You will have hundreds of pieces eventually, and the version you uploaded needs to be findable when somebody asks for a change two years later.

A simple convention — subject, date, version — costs nothing now and saves an afternoon later. Keep the layered original beside the export so the two never drift apart.

How to start

Everything runs through one place. Artists sign in at the artist studio, upload work, choose which products each piece suits, and see what they have earned. Customers browse the artwork, pick a design, and choose what to put it on.

Nothing about it is exclusive. You can sell the same work elsewhere at the same time, and there is no listing fee and no minimum.

• Apply with three pieces so we can see how you work
• Choose which products each design belongs on
• Get paid by bank transfer on what sells

Common questions