Royce Howland Print Studio

Coming soon! A shipment of Korean hanji paper from Durico C&T in Seoul has just arrived at RHPS. We now have stock of two versions each of their Hanji Maru and Hanji Gureum papers. Our thanks to Durico for their generosity in sending us this paper to try out, and to our friend Sungpil Han for putting us in contact. As far as we have been able to confirm, we are among the very first print studios in North America to work with this paper, and we can't wait to get to trying it out! What sort of images should we try printing on it first?

It's always a good day when we get to work with other service providers and institutions in Calgary's art community. While we usually work directly with creatives to print their own work, there comes the occasional project brought to us by galleries who need prints made for a particular exhibition. These images and others were printed and mounted for our friends at Masters Gallery for their upcoming exhibition of the works of J. E. H. MacDonald of the Group of Seven and present-day photographs of the painting locations taken by Patty Cucman and her late husband Stanley Munn. For the photographic prints, we chose Hahnemuhle H**p paper. This paper's blend of h**p and cotton has a fine-grained texture and slightly creamy off-white tone that fit well with the vintage and aesthetics of MacDonald's masterful paintings. We also got the chance to shake some of the rust off of our graphic design skills for a quick text layout.

J.E.H. Macdonald Lake O’Hara 1924-1932: Works From Private Collections will be on display at Masters Gallery from October 26th to November 6th, so please take a look at their Instagram and website for more information.

The internet is a wonderful place, and it keeps getting easier and easier to share artwork to a wide audience. One of the clever new ways that artists have found to sell artwork on the internet is to sell digital downloads for print - like these two posters that one of our clients purchased on Etsy. Printing digital design work is a different kind of challenge from photographs and reproductions of physical artwork, and something we would always like to do more of. We chose a printmaking-style textured matte paper from Canson to suit the classic silkscreen aesthetic of the Over The Garden Wall poster by .us and a more smooth paper from Hahnemühle's natural line so as not to conflict with the subtle background texture present in the Toyota poster by

As printmakers, it's our responsibility to ensure that all of our prints are made with the authorization of the copyright holder. Usually that means that we are working with the original artist to create prints that they will then sell, but online sales of printable files are a great new way to get prints out there without dealing with production, packaging and shipping costs on a finished print. If you are an artist selling digital artwork online, RHPS would love to work with your clients to get the files they have purchased from you hanging on their wall - and if your favourite online artist or content creator offers digital downloads of their work for purchase, talk to RHPS about making it shine in print!

Long-standing editions create interesting challenges when paired with the rapid pace of change with modern technology. For these editioned prints by Bill Peters it is critical that print #1 and print #12 of 12 are well-matched, even when they are being made to order over a period of years. During that time, changes could occur with the printers, inks, papers, colour controls, printing systems, or all of the above.

This body of work has been in print with RHPS since 2019, and we have done some equipment upgrades since then! The first image was printed on an HP Z3200 that has since become no longer economical to maintain. The two smaller proof prints were just produced on our current fleet of Epson P9000s, after a couple of rounds of edits to make sure the output colours match between two different ink sets from different manufacturers, as well as two different colour profiling systems.

The second image is a new addition to Bill's body of work, and so the print from the P9000 is our "original". A few years down the line, when we can no longer source parts to keep those printers running, we will find ourselves doing the same colour-matching process for this image as well.

For artists concerned about good matching of editioned prints over time, we will create a match or proof print. It is also known as a "bon à tirer" print, a French term from classic intaglio print-making meaning literally "good to pull". Stored with care, a BAT print becomes a reference that future prints can be matched against.

Swipe to the end for a look at early test prints of both images that did not make the cut. Whenever possible, we don't produce a full-size print until we have jointly approved a test print with the client. The real test is always how the ink looks on the paper, regardless of how the digital file looks on any screen.