Before machines became so advanced and mechanical reproduction was introduced, duplicates of art works high in demand were made by being copied by hand, the artists would sometimes create numerous versions of a painting or made very similar replicas, but the usual occurrence would be that students, apprentices or assistants produced the copies.
Handmade copies were using just as sort after as the original, but there were obvious drawbacks to this technique being the artist would have to pay the person who produced the copies a good wage, so it was expensive, time – consuming and involved hard labour. And still there is only a few of the copies made and they were never exact but usually just a translation or an interpretation of the original.
The need to multiply an image or a design has become more popular as the design world and industry has developed, it is hard to believe that people would actually sit and reproduce the same thing over and over by hand now we are living in a world full of high quality colour printers and photocopiers, we take for granted the easy method of reproduction, you can scan a piece of work into a computer and print it 1,000 times over in a matter of a few minutes.
This also is a example of how the digital era is making us as human creatives lazy, and the appreciation of an original piece of artwork or design is becoming almost unheard of due the fact artwork is repeatedly reprinted in art books, on canvas and even onto cups and mouse mats, all these factors result in loosing the ‘special’ element of seeing the artwork.