How to Start Sandcarving Glass Awards: Artwork

When you are in the recognition businesses, you are confronted with many different kinds of situations in terms of artwork. By far, the largest part of our work consists in reproducing company logos and incorporating it with text to create an award or recognition piece. Some logos are available in clip art collections for purchase, while others, like those for local companies, need to be obtained from the respective company.

Sometimes your client does not have good-quality artwork for you to work from and you have to create it. When asking for the artwork, it is important to know a couple of facts. First, it is necessary to make sure that you are not infringing on any copyright and get a written release. Next, in asking for graphic artwork, you need to make sure that you get camera-ready art, meaning a file that was created for publication purposes and has an image of at least 300 DPI. It could be a bitmap image, even though vector art is preferable as its quality does not depend on resolution.

The DPI needs to be in relation to the size you want to product the image in. 300 DPI is standard for an etched image. You create your layout on the computer by using any of the commonly known programs such as Adobe Creative Suite, Photoshop, or CorelDRAW.

It is crucial to learn about good design and the importance of selecting appropriate fonts. In order to not confuse our clients with too many choices, we produce a sheet of specific font choices that we know work well on almost any substrate. I recommend that you create your own list.

Another fact to keep in mind: if you use a water washout film, the black areas in your layout are the blasted areas, while with the dry-process film, it is the opposite: the white areas are blasted.

-Ruth Dobbins, Professional Glass Consultants