FINE ART PRINTS

For information on prints by
artists not listed here, please e-mail
Air Art Northwest. A more
complete list of artists we
represent is located on the
Artists page.

Limited Edition Prints

The most widely collected form of aviation fine art are limited-edition prints by "name" artists. Limited-edition prints are very high quality reproductions of original paintings or drawings, produced in strictly limited quantities by specialty printing firms under contract to a fine arts publisher. The edition is printed, with input and final approval by the artist, on high quality acid-free archival paper. Each individual print is hand-signed and numbered by the artist. Often it is also "countersigned", or personally autographed, by the pilot or air crew depicted or by someone figuring prominently in the history represented by the piece.

Each limited-edition of prints is issued by a publisher and sold to collectors through the publisher's dealers at a specific preset retail price called the "issue" price. The length of time it takes for an edition to sell out varies, the more popular the artist and subject, the quicker the edition will sell. Signatures of famous pilots like Chuck Yeager, Jimmy Doolittle and Günther Rall can cause an edition to sell out in a few months. When all prints in a limited edition are sold, continuing demand usually causes the print value to appreciate - often substantially.

The publisher of a limited-edition supplies a Certificate of Authenticity with each print, certifying the number of prints in the edition, giving historical information on the subject and confirming that the plates and negatives used in printing the edition have been destroyed and no more prints will ever be produced, thus making the edition limited.

An edition of 500 prints would be considered relatively small; an edition of 1,500, large.

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