Pluses and Minuses

As with most things, there are pluses and minuses to the concept of Digital Collage Sheets. We have our collage sheets professionally printed at a copy center using high quality, heavyweight, ultrawhite photo paper, which we purchase separately and take to our copy center to use rather than their standard photo paper. This ensures that the quality of our images, including color definition and clarity, etc. is maintained. We burn our collage sheets to a CD, from which the copy center prints our collage sheets.

We strongly recommend that you follow the same procedure to ensure that your collage sheets are crisp, clear, and as beautiful as our paper ones are when we send them to you. Most copy centers will accommodate your needs, but you may have to shop around for the best printing price per sheet and ask if you may use your own paper rather than their standard color copy paper. We found a local, individually-owned copy center near us that met all of our needs!

We would also recommend that you have the copy center print out a sample collage sheet for you the first time you go as even copy center laser printers are not equal in their quality; for example, you may need to ask them to lighten or darken, etc. Luckily for us, our copy center just purchased a brand new state-of-the-art laser printer, so our's are even better than ever!

The bottom line is that no matter how good the images are that we or any other company sends you, the quality of the product you print will be determined by the quality of the printer and the paper used!

Printing on an Inkjet Printer

You may, of course, print our collage sheets on a really good InkJet color printer - we just want you to understand that the quality may not be as high as those collage sheets that we have professionally printed (laser) for you.

We do print our transparencies and fabric collage sheets on an InkJet printer that uses Durabrite inks (archivally and color superior). And, if you are using your paper collage sheet images to do image transfers (e.g., gel medium, caulking, packing tape), you should have no difficulty using your InkJet printer as you are wanting to create a different "look" (more muted and ethereal) for your images anyway. But again, the quality of the paper, transparency, fabric you use is a huge factor in the quality of the final product.

If you are currently a member of Lesley Riley's Yahoo Inkjet Transfer Group, you already know that there are 1000s of posts discussing both inkjet printers AND paper/transparency quality. This is an excellent group to join, if you have not already done so, to learn everything there is to know about Inkjet transfers and ask questions of this very knowledgable group of outstanding artists!

Questions

As with all of our products, if you have any questions whatsoever, please do not hesitate to contact us! We are always happy to help you in anyway we can. We want your ARTful journey to be a wonderful and stressfree experience!