What is the Best Size to Create Designs For the Art Licensing Industry?
There are no definitive standards for art in art licensing, what a manufacturer needs will vary from company to company. While greeting cards have a pretty standard 5″ x 7″ format, other product size requirements cover a wide range. If you are designing a quilt top, your art might need to be 40″ x 80″ and a magnet manufacturer may need 2″ squares. Size depends on where the art is going.
Size gets trickier in licensing since the goal is to license the same designs to multiple manufacturers for use on multiple products. The design you first license for a magnet may later become a card. If the original image is 2″ square, you might lose resolution and have to start over to fill the 5″ x 7″ card parameters.
Then there is the actual artistic process to take into account.
Every artist has a different process and you need to do what works for you. Some art that is licensed started out as large canvas, others did not. If you paint or draw too small, the resolution will suffer and not reproduce well if enlarged.
I have a large format scanner and dislike having to scan art in pieces and get them to go together seamlessly on the computer. It just doesn’t work for me! So I never paint larger than 11 x 15. But I don’t paint full “paintings” either. If I create a holiday scene for example, Santa, the tree and each and every gift are painted and scanned separately then put together in Photoshop. So they may not all be on the same piece of paper to start with. An entire collection of images never fits on a single sheet of watercolor paper.
Bigger is better when dealing with hand painted designs for licensing.
Art can be scaled down and look good but if are enlarged too much, they will get blurry. If you know what the end product will be or have something in mind, I recommend you paint larger than you think the art will need to be.
One thing that is certain, you will need to get your art into a digital format if you want to license it. So figure out how you can get it from the easel to pixels in a way that puts your work in its best light!
