When an artist creats a painting, how is it copied, and how are prints created and distributed.
and how did they do this with reasonable quality before the 1950s or even 1970s when colour wasn't too good. And before this around the 1930s when there was no colour film.
Obviously modern techniqes allow copying, but i just don't know how the do it and especially how the did it over 50 years ago, or did they just not have prints back then?
i realise some prints were created by other artists manually copying, but i can't see that being a good copy, nor a quick process.

Anyway, i've just wondered that for a while.

i just like to say "you just bored arent ya?" :D

I think most are manually copied. How would you be able to sell a copy when it isn't painted. Everybody can easily find the difference between a real painting and say a print.

In olden days, you didn't have mass-produced art to the extent you have it today. The only "copies" that you might see would likely be forgeries, AFAIK.

Today, most mass-produced and limited-run art is made through a multi-color printing process. And the quality does deteriorate, so print #10 looks much cleaner and crisper than print #1200.

There's also a process called masterizing whereby you take a poster and make it look like it was really painted. My in-laws have had that done before... it's quite impressive at the end.

Well, the way it used to work was that if you wanted to have more then one copy of an image you wouldn't paint it, rahter you would use some form of printmaking. This really stated with woodcuts, which basically consisted of blocks of wood that had the image cut into them, and were then used to transfer the image onto paper or something similar. This was capable of producing some fairly impressive pieces Click here for an example. It didn't take long before someone thought of replacing the wood block with a piece of metal. This process, called intaglio, devolped over a long time. The earliest versions (which generally relied on etching or engraving the plates) were only capable of producing black-and-white images. Eventually once the ability to vary the tone of images was devolped, it became possible to generate color images using multi-plate processes Click here for an example.

These days artists use coloured copiers (my sister uses that technique, she does art) but in the olden days they used manual copying....or used black and white copying.

I thought art was supposed to be unique?

it is...some people copy their own pictures so they can distribute them to companies so they can find a job.

I see. LOL I missed that it was about legal distributions as well. Thought it was only about false versions.