Sundry Works

Sundry Works Help · Batch Print

Story cards, show labels and a portfolio

More than one at a time: a whole show's story cards or labels, or a portfolio to send.

What this page is for

Nearly every page in Sundry Works works on the one painting you have open. Batch Print is the exception, and its name is the whole of what it does: it works on several paintings at once - ten story cards in one press rather than ten visits to the Card tab, a whole show's labels on one sheet, or a portfolio of the work you chose to send.

It is in the Catalogue, next to Sales, because picking several paintings is a catalogue job. It is not the Papers tab over in Making - that one is the certificate and the back label for the painting you have open, the ones that get glued to the back. What Batch Print does is the two cards from the Card tab - the Story card and the Show label, the small one that stands on the wall beside the painting - and the portfolio.

You do not have to come looking for it. Both of the Card tab's cards and both of the Papers labels carry a link through to here for when you want more than one.

Nothing here has to be opened first, and nothing here is saved to a painting. The page reads your catalogue, draws a document and sends it to the printer.

Whatever you pick stays picked while you go off to another tab and come back, on this device.

Picking the paintings

The list on the left is your catalogue. Search it, narrow it to a category, or show everything rather than only the work that is on the market. Press a row to pick it and press it again to put it back.

Take all picks everything the filters are currently showing, and Clear starts again. The order you choose in the Order box is the order the cards and labels print and the order the portfolio lays the paintings out in, so it is worth setting before you print.

There is a cap of sixty. Narrowing the search never un-picks anything - a painting you have chosen stays chosen even when the filters hide it.

A story card for every painting

The story card is the big card from the Card tab - the painting's name, its story, and how to buy it - that goes home with the buyer. Batch Print makes one for each painting you picked, all in one press: two cards to a US Letter sheet, each at its true size of 6.5 by 4.5 inches, with cut marks in the margin. Ten paintings is five sheets of card stock.

Each card prints the way it is set on the Card tab. If you changed something for one painting there - a smaller story, a footer line in your own words - that card keeps it. A painting you have never opened there gets your saved card settings, and its story is sized to fit its own card, the same as it would be the first time you opened it. Nothing is saved back to the painting.

A painting with nothing written yet is left out, and the page tells you which ones before you press anything. A story card is laid out around its story, and without one it is a card with a hole in the middle - so it offers to print those paintings' show labels instead, which is what the show label is for.

It reads each painting's story as it goes, so it takes a moment and counts out loud while it does.

If a painting's price, size or sale changed after its card was saved, the line of details under the story is rebuilt from the record before it prints, so a card never goes out offering a sold painting. The one exception is a line you wrote yourself on the Card tab: that is kept as you wrote it, and the page names those cards afterwards so you can check them.

Print at 100% - "actual size", not "fit to page" - or the cards come out the wrong size. The two cards on a sheet touch, so the cut between them is one cut.

A whole show's labels on one sheet

The Show label is the one you stand beside a painting at a show - the same label the Card tab makes, where it is the second of the two views. It is 3.5 by 2 inches at 300dpi, which is Avery 5371 and 8371 business-card stock - ten to a US Letter sheet, already cut, so there is nothing to trim.

Pick ten paintings and you get ten different labels on one sheet, in the order the list shows them. A longer show simply runs onto as many sheets as it takes.

Print at 100% - "actual size", not "fit to page" - or the labels land off their cuts.

Already peeled six labels off a sheet? Set Start at position to the seventh and put the same sheet back in the tray.

What each label says, and how it looks

Name and details prints the painting's name, what it is made of, its size, and whether it is for sale - all built from the painting's record, exactly the way a fresh card on the Card tab builds them.

Number only prints just a number, as large as the card will hold. That is how a museum, a juried open or an art society annual hangs: the wall carries numbers, the visitor carries a list, and nothing on the wall competes with the paintings.

Either way you can have a page of the whole show printed after the labels, and it is two documents depending on which labels you chose. After numbered labels it is a room sheet: every painting numbered to match, so a visitor who is looking at number 7 can find out what number 7 is. After name-and-details labels there is no number anywhere in the room, so it is a plain show list instead - title, medium, size, year and price - which is what you hand the venue, keep as the record of what went, and tick off at take-down.

The look - the ink, the panel colour and whether there is a border - comes from your saved card settings, and every label on the sheet uses the same ones, so the show looks like one show. A label you edited by hand for one painting on the Card tab is not used here: the sheet says what the painting's record says.

If you have a QR code on your Business profile, it can go on every label - handy for a show where somebody wants to look the piece up on their phone while standing in front of it.

The portfolio

The document a gallery or an open call asks for. A cover with your name on it, your artist statement on the second page, then one record for each painting you picked - the photograph, the name, the year, what it is made of and how big it is - and a page at the end saying how to reach you.

Every figure on it comes off the painting's own record, so the titles and the dimensions are the ones you typed once when you catalogued the piece, and there is nothing to keep in step.

There is no Save - it goes to the printer, and in the print dialog you choose "Save as PDF" to get a file you can attach to an email.

Ten to twenty pieces for a general presentation, six to twelve for a specific open call. A portfolio of forty does not get read.

Three layouts, and prices

One to a page is the one to send a gallery or an open call: each piece gets the whole sheet. Two to a page is for a large body of work, when one to a page would run to forty sheets. A grid is a contact sheet - good as an appendix, poor as the portfolio itself.

Prices are a switch rather than a rule, because the right answer depends on who is receiving it. Off for a gallery or an open call: a portfolio is a document about the work, and a price list is a different document. On for a collector who has already asked what is available.

The full CV does not go in it. That travels separately, and only when somebody asks for it.

What it does not do yet

Batch Print handles the story card, the show label and the portfolio. The certificate and the two back labels on the Papers tab are still one painting at a time.

That is deliberate rather than forgotten: printing a back label stamps that painting's certificate number as issued, for good, and doing that to ten paintings on one press is a decision worth taking on purpose rather than by accident.

Your artist statement

One paragraph, in your own voice, written once on the Business tab under Who you are. The portfolio puts it on its second page.

It lives on your profile rather than on the document because the same paragraph is what an open call form asks for, and what a CV wants, and what goes on a website - and typing it fresh into each of those is how three different versions of it end up in circulation.

Leave it empty and the portfolio simply has no statement page. It will not print a heading with nothing under it.

The rest of the Help

Start here

Your catalogue

Making things from a painting

Running the business

Connections and setup

Try it on one of your own paintings

Sundry Works is a catalogue for painters that also drafts the story, the card, the certificate and the reel from one photograph of the painting.

See Sundry Works

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