[Valerie Gudorf]

I engaged the services of Micropix a couple of years ago in order to satisfy demands from my immediate family for copies of the kid with the red boat you see on the Drawing Forum, and was very disappointed.

I had been reading about how wonderful the giclee process is for rendering copies of original art, with fidelity so exacting it's hard to discern the original from the copy without a magnifying glass. I was happy that I could order just a few copies, thereby fulfilling my very limited demand for such, and still have money left over to buy groceries. It was not available to send the original to Micropix, which is just as well in my view, because they do not insure the safety of your art work, stating only that "reasonable care" will be taken in its storage and handling. So I employed the services of a professional photographer with quite a bit of experience photographing art work. I watched him produce three 4x5 bracketed transparencies of my work which I felt were very well done, and sent the one which appeared to be exposed most acurately off to Micropix.

The first proof I received was horrible. It was very dark and lacked subtlety in the values, resulted in value clumping. The red boat, which was the only color in the drawing returned a grayed down, cool red, whereas in the original, the boat is quite a bit warmer and brighter, expressing both temperature and value shifts to account for the rake of sunlight across its structure. There was an overall green cast to the graphite which comprised the rest of the drawing, and worst of all, there was a graininess caused by very obvious pixalation. I received four different proofs before I had something I felt I could live with. All efforts to personally speak with the person assigned to produce my order were in vain. Twice I called, requesting to do so. Twice I was promised that someone would call me. I never heard a word.

The final product was still less than satisfying. It is very easy to discern the original drawing from the Micropix copies---no magnifying glass needed. There is quite a bit of pixalation, which I'd hoped would be corrected. I had to go back into the copies with a pencil to downplay this effect. Everyone who saw a side by side comparison was appalled at the discrepancies. That which I posted in the Drawing Forum is a digital photo of a Micropix copy. I have not seen the original drawing in a over two years, so this print is starting to look "normal" now.

I have since seen ads in art magazines from other Giclee companies, expresssing that they understand the importance of working personally with artists to insure satisfactory results. Should I ever decide to undertake this process again, it will certainly not be with Micropix.