20080823

The Importance of Good Documentation

Here's what I've been working on for the last couple days:
Three Apples, version 2.0 12" X 9", o/cp

This image might look familiar, because it's based on a previous painting which sold during my show earlier this year in San Diego. I *thought* I had a decent photograph of it, as documentation. Then, recently, I was contacted by a major textbook publisher in Boston. An editor had come across my work on the internet, and they offered to pay me a substantial sum to use the image for the cover of a forthcoming textbook if I could provide a hi-resolution image. When I sent them what I had, it turned out that they were all low-res photos of it. Photos good enough to blog and to have a record of what I had painted, but not nearly good enough for publication with a top-rate publisher.  Almost a missed opportunity. I repainted the work, and shot it in high resolution. I've always loved this image, and felt it could have been done better than before. And I'm actually much happier with this version. I've seen a preliminary mock-up of the cover--it looks great!

So the moral of the story is, always ALWAYS have good, HIGH-resolution photos of your work. Even though a painting sells, you retain the copyright to that image, and you never know when someone will find it and want to pay you generously for its use!

20080819