Printing from Procreate
A few things you should know
I’ve had some questions on Instagram about printing. Especially digital marbling pieces coming from Procreate. Here’s what I do & what you should think about:
- When you want to print (because who wouldn’t want to print a marbling piece?) choose your print size before you paint. You don’t want an amazing piece of marbling to be too small for what you want to print!
- Work out your print size in mm, cm, inches—some real world unit of measurement. Then figure out how many pixels that equates to. The dpi matters here! The higher the dpi the more pixels you need for that space. Here’s a handy tool you can use.
- I work in 300 dots per inch (dpi) because the quality is very good—but you can probably get away with 150 dpi. It’s not all about dpi though! Resizing your artwork from small to big, even though your dpi count is high, won’t magivally make your artwork good quality—it will likely look fuzzy, blurry, or pixelated.
- When exporting from Procreate, export in a format your printer likes to use. You want the printer on your side. This will depend on the type of printing you’re doing. Chat to your printer and ask them what file format you should use. PDF, jpg and tiff are pretty standard.
- I use The Print Space for bigger prints. They’re a UK company. Their quality and customer service is excellent. But their prices are pretty high. And They have amazing paper (giclée and c-type). I use tiffs when printing with them and I export my work at an A2 size which is 7016 x 4961px when at 300dpi.
- Please share photos of your prints—I’d love to see them!
The Right Paper
I’ve printed a few pieces through The Print Space. They’re amazing. My favourite, by far though, has been the piece below. I printed it on Hahnemühle Bamboo Giclée paper. It’s amazeballs! Have a look at a few more photos on Instagram. I’d suggest choosing a paper that’s right for you kind of work. The Print Space has a lot of information on choosing the right paper. Have fun here!
Here’s a closeup of the printed ‘Vermicelli’ on Hahnemühle Bamboo Giclée paper.