Royce Howland Print Studio

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Royce Howland Print Studio

RHPS is a large format photographic and fine art printing service in Calgary, AB. Our goal is excellence in expressive print-making for our clients.

08/11/2024

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?

07/11/2024

It's a real treat to see an RHPS print "out in the wild", especially when it's far from home. Among the exhibitors at the Art Toronto art fair was Calgary's own TrépanierBaer with works by several of their represented artists, including Sungpil Han . His landscape photographs on display at Art Toronto include three large-scale prints made by RHPS - imagine our delight to stumble across this while playing tourist all the way in Toronto!

01/11/2024

The last time we saw these photographs by Bryce Krynski was as large-scale 42" prints for his exhibition "mass market krappy kamera lonesome land", which was shown at the Christine Klassen Gallery as part of the 2024 Exposure Photography Festival . Now they are back on our table at a comparatively tiny 7.5" - and no less awesome for it! It's always neat seeing projects come around again, and to get to observe how scale changes the impact of a print. The almost cameo-like quality of the smaller prints lets us see these images in a whole new way.

28/10/2024

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.

23/10/2024

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!

20/10/2024

Today's tasks in the print studio:

1. Send off a project quote. Check. Approved, check.
2. Edit high resolution files digitally captured from large paintings. Check.
3. Make test prints to verify colour accuracy. Check.
4. Deliver a new print to another happy client. Check. 😁

5a. Climb up the 12-foot ladder to deep clean a filthy gas-powered heating unit that clearly hadn't been cleaned since, oh, maybe the fall of the Berlin wall.
5b. Then purge the gas line and re-light the pilot light, since it had gone out when the previous tenant ran into problems and their utilities were disconnected.
6. Install new carbon monoxide detectors, because the 2 gas furnaces in the "new" print studio are nearly as old as I am. The inspector said they're still solid, but I don't mess around with CO.

Check, check and check.

Now the printers won't freeze as the nights drop below zero. Just another action-packed day of print-making! 😀

10/09/2024

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.

03/09/2024

At RHPS, we use a lot of digital technology, but we also unabashedly love paper. The tools may be high tech software & hardware, but the end result that people walk away with & experience for years is ink on paper.

David Sax, in his book The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, writes the following in his chapter "The Revenge of Paper":

"... Paper has existed, in one form or another, for thousands of years. It is the backbone of the economic, cultural, scientific, and spiritual core we call civilization. [...] Our relationship to paper is older, deeper, and more varied than any other analog technology out there. [...] While paper use may have shrunk in certain areas since the introduction of digital communications, in other uses and purposes, paper's emotional, functional and economic value has increased."

As fine art printmakers, we're admittedly biased, but we believe it's for good reason. Pigment on paper brings durable material and aesthetic qualities that remain unsurpassed in delivering an expressive, emotional experience. For all of the immediacy and global reach of digital imaging and the Internet, this is an area where paper is superior.

When the image matters, print it!

29/08/2024

Small prints can make a big impact! Since we have been featuring a few larger pieces recently, it seemed about time to let some smaller-scale prints have their moment in the spotlight. This set of portraits by Joanne Liu range from 4x6" to 8x12" and will soon be sent all the way to Nepal! The images don't need to be printed large to have value for their recipients, and they are far easier to display than wall-sized pieces. They are also easier to package and ship.

27/08/2024

Some test prints and a finished work for Gloria Gelo on several exciting Japanese papers. The final full-size image is printed on a sheet of handmade Ilford Tesuki-Washi Echizen paper. Because it is an expensive and specialized paper, the test strip is printed on Hiromi Asuka washi, which we often use as proofing paper for prints that will be finalized on the Tesuki-Washi Echizen.

The other test strips are printed on another Hiromi paper, the Mulberry Thick. It is not coated for inkjet printing, but takes ink very well nonetheless. This new series of Gloria's is well-suited to a more traditional printmaking paper, taking inspiration from classic techniques such as silkscreen and woodblock prints, and the Hiromi has the right combination of qualities to make it shine. Printing on a media not specifically designed for inkjet inks means a bit more fine-tuning of settings to get the best possible results out of the prints. For Gloria's series, several sets of test prints were needed to get the best possible balance of colour density and delicate treatment of the paper to get results that will make the images shine without the paper rippling from the moisture in the inks.

21/08/2024

A behind-the-scenes look at some of the work that goes into photographing artwork for reproduction, featuring a painting by Julie Lamoureux . In order to capture a highly accurate image of the original artwork, we go through a series of calibration stages before the actual piece ends up in front of the camera. This includes leveling the camera relative to the easel using a set of mirrors, shooting a translucent white tile to correct for any uneven light coverage, and using a grid of known colour values to create a reference point for the original paint colours.

20/08/2024

The job jar at the print studio is never empty. Today it was finally time to swap out a part in one of our Epson P9000's. This task apparently was considered so straight forward by Epson that the service manual doesn't mention the process at all! Not even a hint.

Hmmm... wonder what happens if these certain screws are removed? Aha! 10 minutes later, the printer is ready to print once more. Just another action-packed day making fine art prints...

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Opening Hours

Monday	10:00 - 18:00
Tuesday	10:00 - 18:00
Wednesday	10:00 - 18:00
Thursday	10:00 - 18:00
Friday	10:00 - 18:00

Telephone

+14036079324

Website

https://roycehowlandprintstudio.com/, https://roycehowlandprintstudio.com/link-in-bio/

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