Calligraphy to Letterpress?

Hello Ladies!

 

I’m working on a price quote for a client who is shopping around for calligraphers in our area, but I’m wondering for those who have dealt with calligraphers before, how do you receive their work and what’s involved with getting it ready to send to Boxcar for plates?

 

I’m going to have her ask how I’d receive the calligraphy, but I’m assuming this is something I would need to scan into the computer, pull into Illustrator and do a Live Trace on it? Am I on the right track, or is it something much more involved? Have you encountered a lot of problems doing this? Is it a ton of Illustrator hours to get it ready for Boxcar? Any insight would be greatly appreciated…I want to be sure to bill my time accordingly!

 

Thanks, as always! 🙂

Kristina

Hi Kristina!

 

That is exactly how I did it.  Just make sure the .jpeg file is high quality (300 dpi or better), and you should be good to do a live trace.  From there you can send it straight to Boxcar as usual!  🙂

Thanks Dondrea! I was hoping it was this process, but I wanted to be sure before I charged to little and ended up with a ton of work on my plate! 🙂

Kristina,  did you ever figure this out?  I printed my sister-in-law’s wedding invitations a few years ago and the map was hand drawn and she wrote everything out in her own handwriting.  I had to scan it, bring it into Photoshop and clean it up there before bringing it into Illustrator.  It was a LOT of work, but it came out great–you can see pics on my site. http://www.fiorepress.com  — go to the gallery page.  Good luck!  Carmela

Hi, I print calligraphy a lot these days. And what I have found (and after talking to Boxcar about it as well) is, you want the calligrapher to send the artwork to you as a 600dpi bitmap tiff file (you can do this in Photoshop). Bitmap will make the file just black and white pixels so Boxcar can make a plate from that. 600 dpi will help it not be too pixelated. And by doing this and not tracing it in Illustrator you keep the hand written feel of it without making it so smooth and stylized as tracing can do. I have brought the tiff file into an Illustrator file that has other elements for the plate (that may be vector etc) and sized it etc. Since it is a bitmap you can leave it in that file and send the ai file to Boxcar like that. Not sure if that made sense. Let me know if you have questions. I’m happy to help.

kathryn

This was all so helpful!!! I agree on staying away from outlines in Illustrator for that handwritten feel. Would you think it’s worth providing the calligrapher or artist with some of my super white/bright and smooth paper to do the work on?  After scanning, it seems like you’d have less work in Photoshop with contrast/brightness. Might actually save some time???  advice?

The calligrapher I work with is very selective about her paper, so I don’t provide her with paper, but she knows to work with black ink on bright white paper.

I do something similar to Kathryn, but I scan in everything (all hand drawn things) at 1200 dpi as line art. Then I open the file in Photoshop and change the mode to bitmap. Again I’ll save it at 1200dpi, with 50% threshold. Afterward I might erase little bits of specks here and there, but I don’t mess around with contrast or brightness, or anything else. I know that 1200 dpi is a bit extreme, but this method is nearly zero fuss and prints just like my original drawings (or the original calligraphy), so I stick with it. I send the file to Boxcar as a tiff and another pdf for the proof.

So basically, I ask for a 1200 dpi line art scan of the image from the calligrapher, and go from there.

Hey Kristina, 

I’ve done a fair amount with calligraphers and I usually have them send me a digital file, open it in PS and bitmap it 600 dpi, with 50% threshold…like most of the commenters.

Dana

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