by Tim Stringer

There are lots of POD (print on demand) sites out there through which an artist can offer their art. Of all of them, there are three currently that are fairly well known and attracting a lot of artists. They are in alphabetical order Artist Rising, Imagekind and Redbubble. Each of them has their strong and weak points.

Artist Rising, as part of Art.com should be the biggest and best but doesn’t offer different product options like Imagekind and Redbubble. The one big advantage that Artist Rising does have is that an artist might get their uploaded images onto Art.com based on sales or by selection. The selection process is a bit misty and not always clear but prior sales through the Artist Rising site seems to be the most consistent requirement. Artist Rising also limits the size of images to 6 megabytes and below that can be uploaded and only accepts jpegs. Larger images can be mailed on disc for what Artist Rising calls fine art prints, but processing charges per image applies and only paid member can offer fine art prints. Another drawback to Artist Rising is that pricing is set and there is no markup allowed. Artists receive a 15% royalty on the print purchase. No royalties are paid on matting or framing. Artist Rising also has a vetting procedure where images must be approved before being displayed on the site. At times the vetting procedure can be slow and rules applied haphazardly. I once had an image rejected because my signature was mistaken for type. It took a couple of emails to straighten it out, but it did get straightened out. Artist Rising has two membership levels, free and paid. The free membership includes up to 50 images. The paid membership which costs $50 per year includes up to 2000 images.

Redbubble is something of a maverick. Creativity in general seems to be what Redbubble is all about. Prints (paper and canvas), cards, t-shirts, calendars and even space for creative writing are among what can be found on Redbubble. There is a highly active community with myriad topics, groups and contests which Redbubble currently calls Challenges. Best of all Redbubble offers artists individual storefronts that feature their art and only their art. Redbubble has one membership level and it is free with no limits of the number of products uploaded. There is a 100 megapixel limit on images but in most cases that should not be a problem. In my mind Redbubble’s greatest strength may also be its greatest weakness. There is so much going on there that it is difficult to view it as a serious art site. But maybe that is the point and I just need to lighten up.

Imagekind has the broadest substrate, framing and matting options of the three. Imagekind also has a reputation of delivering consistently superior print quality. It is also the most expensive with three levels of membership, free, Pro @ $7.99 per month and Platinum @ $11.99 per month and a third option of getting Platinum benefits by paying the entire year at Pro cost. A free account will allow you 24 images, a Pro account unlimited galleries with a maximum of 50 images per gallery and a Platinum account will score you unlimited images per gallery with an unlimited number of galleries.

Redbubble and Imagekind both let you set your own markup on your art. You can do it by percentage or a flat dollar amount. Imagekind also pays an additional 15% royalty on framing, matting and glazing.

Here’s where things start getting sticky. Imageking and Artist Rising both charge membership fees for anything beyond a basic account. Unless you have a client base buying your art, you may want to avoid those paid memberships. Otherwise you might be wasting your money.

Imagekind does do a few things which I find strange. Imagekind will actually offer art larger than it was created. Printing technology is advanced enough that a scan or digital image can be safely enlarged as long as the pixel count is high enough. I personally don’t like this and wish that Imagekind would allow me to not have my art enlarged. The other oddity is that Imagekind actually displays the larger size options on the purchase pages and crosses them out if there isn’t sufficient pixel depth to support it.

Artist Rising is my opinion seriously behind the times when it comes to payouts and product offerings. As cheap as bandwidth and server space is these days, it really makes no sense to limit images to below 6 megabytes and only accept jpegs. There is that chance that you could get your art on Art.com or AllPosters.com, but aside from that there is little benefit of being on the site. I keep telling myself that I keep some art on there for the additional exposure.

In my mind I have the idea of the perfect POD site. Fees would be low if any at all. There wouldn’t be any limitations on the number of galleries or the number of images in a gallery. All the art would have to be submitted by the artists. Sorry, no distributors or so called museum art. Living artists only. Each artist would have their own storefront where only their art would be seen and a have a unique URL for that storefront. Different substrates would be available as well as allowing the artist to choose what sizes and substrates are offered. And best of all, the site would be seriously promoted. You would see the odd magazine ad, or a nice Flash ad on CNN.com or other major sites. Anyone have a few million they would like to invest?