How are people finding vintage poster artwork good enough to sell?

Hi,

I'm looking for some help in finding old vintage poster artwork which is good enough to print.

We find high definition JPEGS online but then when we turn it into a pdf & print it it is coming out slightly pixellated on our xerox 550.

We've tried vectorizing the artwork online & also editing in photoshop but can't seem to get "sellable" quality.

The vintage posters seem very popular online so thinking we could try this & actually get some use out of our printer.

Thanks for any help.
 
Why not just make them yourself?

There are LOADS of tutorials on how to make stuff look vintage/retro/distressed.
 
Thanks for suggestion but we don't actually want them to look old. We're just wanting to print the old designs but struggle to find the artwork.

Many online are taking 50's b movie poster artwork & turning this into saleable wall art, when we try the same the posters are slightly pixellated.

We have a full on xerox machine so you would think it wouldn't be an issue but we can't find good enough artwork that comes out clear.

Thanks
 
You will probably struggle as most will still be owned by publishers etc and be covered by copyrights.

You may be able to find some on stock sites, you would have to pay a premium of course for the extended licence.

Apart from that, you could always commission some yourself from a designer/illustrator if you wanted to do it properly, then you wouldn't need to worry
about copyrights etc.
 
Copyright is an issue i agree, but i believe the very old posters are public domain now. I'd like to be able to print war of the worlds posters for example & maybe old victorian advertising posters as a lot of those are quite cool.
 
Yes, 70 years from first publication used to be the cut-off point, but then I read something about 1923 being important.

It's worth going into it properly- just because other people are doing it, it doesn't mean they're doing it legally.
 
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