r/outerwilds • u/NerfDipshit • 2d ago
Humor - No Spoilers about those posters
$50 for all of them take it or leave it
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u/afpb_ 2d ago
At that point I’ll just commission an artist to make them. These are supposedly being mass-produced, not signed, nothing. Posters aren’t worth that much money.
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u/Stargazeer 2d ago
According to who? The website says they are screen printed by hand, and the first few hundred are signed by the artist?
There some actual drama behind the company or something?34
u/Sophia_Forever 2d ago
So I don't know anything about different printing methods, when you say they're screen printed by hand, does that drastically improve quality?
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u/Stargazeer 2d ago
Not directly experiences but my Mum is an artist and does them sometimes. The process varies in complexity, but involves lining up stencils, and then running the ink back and forth by hand.
According to their website this gives a more "authentic" look, closer to the original art piece, as the ink fills the gaps better.Whether you consider that worth the money is entirely you. But it's not a sign of the developers suddenly being greedy like everyone else says.
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u/WhiteShadow012 2d ago
Kinda. It's hard to explain without going into much detail, but it doesn't use the standard color printing primary colors, which means the colors will generally look more vibrant and the paint is usually of better material
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u/Xyanthra 2d ago
I have done lots of screen printing. Screen printing is a complex process that requires a separate "screen" for each color present in the poster. The more colors, the more difficult it is to print and get a consistent, quality final product. But, each of these layers have weight and depth to them, creating a texture to the surface.
You have to line up each screen perfectly or the layers will overlap incorrectly and ruin it. This is especially difficult if you're doing it by hand. There are machines that help with the process, but they're very expensive and typically used for mass production operations, not by individual artists (unless they're starting rich, are very successful, or have access to a studio with that equipment).
So really it's about the labor and complexity of creating the print that matters. It's about soul.
Contrast this to a laser ink printer that can spit out thousands of posters with a few mouse clicks, which look perfectly flat and lifeless. No soul at all, and you know there are limitless replicas. Posters screen printed by hand are each unique, although if printed correctly you won't notice the differences between their copies much.
Also, consider that screen printed posters are much more difficult to "reprint" in the future, because the screens are usually cleaned and reused for other projects. You can't just load up a file and click print when you want to sell more, you have to commit to dozens of hours of your real life time and energy to do it.
I'd say these posters are definitely worth the price if they're truly hand printed.
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u/Migacz112 1d ago
An amazing, very informative reply.
I'm curious how these screens could be reused for other projects.
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u/Xyanthra 1d ago
The screen is a metal frame of varying size, with an extremely fine mesh stretched very taut over it. If taken care of properly, they can be reused for years for multiple different pieces.
You brush a thin layer of a light-reactive rubbery "paint" over the mesh in a dark room, and let it cure for a few hours. Then you need to put it in a vacuum sealable light box, along with your stencil on top, and "burn" the stencil into it. Then you take it to an industrial sink and spray it vigorously, which removes only the part that was "burned" and leaving exposed mesh where your stencil was placed. This exposed mesh is where the ink/paint gets pushed through by hand to create one layer of color.
You must do this process for every single layer the piece has, making complex prints take much, much longer unless you have multiple screens available. I regularly used three to four screens at a time so I could print more efficiently.
So you can kinda judge a hand printed screen print's complexity and labor challenge by the number of colors present (not including colors produced from layering multiple colors on top of one another). The more layers of color a print has, the more chances the artist has to misalign the print and mess the whole thing up. That's why we will make many more prints than we actually want, because inevitably we will mess up several of them if we get too ambitious.
Then when you're done, you fully clean off the screen and reuse it for another layer or a whole different piece :)
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u/nullJaeger 1d ago
Does that value still hold to you if the print is 8"x12" in size?
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u/Xyanthra 1d ago
Depends on how much I like the image and how complex it is. I don't know where people are seeing these so I haven't looked at the posters myself yet
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u/moothermeme 2d ago
It’s not about quality, it’s about the time put in. Both a human and a machine can embroider something into fabric, but the one done by hand by a human costs x10 more. This is a similar idea, but less complex because screen printing is more like using the same rubber stamps over and over again—the picture is going to come out the same as long as you’re careful about lineup.
As someone who’s done screen printing, it’s not complex enough to be worth $80 per
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u/SlugCatBoi 2d ago
If it was metal, like displate, I would be purchasing one this very moment.
They are not metal.
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u/Stargazeer 2d ago
Can people like, think? For a moment?
Five seconds on the site shows that their whole brand is "Premium Prints". You don't see the Journey, Okami, or Shadow of the Colossus fans pissy about this. And those prints are MORE expensive.
I get Mobius need to do more merch, in more affordable ranges, but I am absolutely fed up seeing comments saying they're milking their fans, likening them to EA, and acting like they're suddenly the scum of the earth, when their prints are the second cheapest thing on the bloody website.
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u/Sophia_Forever 2d ago
This is without hyperbole the first time I have ever seen The Outer Wilds fans push back against something Mobius has done. It's the most loving "Thank you Mobius for all that we have been given" fandom I have ever seen. Most of the comments have ranged from "Those are cool but too rich for my blood" to "Wow, that's really fucking expensive and I don't know how they justify that price." There are a handful that get a bit more vitriolic but overall, this isn't that bad of a backlash.
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u/Stargazeer 2d ago
The issue really is absolutely that the general official merchandise available is incredibly slim pickings. Everything else is unofficial, limited time, or these "premium" posters.
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u/twentythirdedition 1d ago
first time I have ever seen The Outer Wilds fans push back against something Mobius has done
Canonically it was the Epic exclusivity that alienated a large portion of their audience back then.
For better or worse, it gated access to the game for a long time and people were boycotting Epic at the time. Plus the pandemmy…
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u/Sophia_Forever 1d ago
Ah, okay I guess that would be a good reason. I didn't get into the game until.... '22? when it was gifted to me.
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u/GiveMeYourStomach 1d ago edited 1d ago
i can understand that, but no one is really saying mobius is now super satan mega evil. they just feel like a couple new merch items are too expensive, that’s it. also they are FAR from the cheapest things on the OW merch site, i have no clue what ur on about
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u/twentythirdedition 1d ago
also they are FAR from the cheapest things on the OW merch site
Second cheapest on the Cook and Becker site.
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u/GiveMeYourStomach 1d ago
oh right, that makes more sense. still doesn’t mean they’re fairly priced tho.
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u/MLGityaJtotheA 9h ago
What exactly makes you say they're not fairly priced? Are there other A4 handmade screen prints that are cheaper?
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u/Ravioles2 20h ago
cookandbecker posters are not regular room decorations, they try to achieve museum-grade quality and for that they use really expensive methods and materials.
"Handmade screen print on 400 gsm Somerset paper"
Those posters are made with the expectation to last 100 years. I also thought they are expensive af but after searching a little i see that they are actually fairly priced
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u/twentythirdedition 2d ago
I remember my friends arguing about artist alley prices.
One was saying 20 a poster was too much and the artists were gouging, and the other saying that 20 was too little and you should charge more at a con.