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How to detect fake art |
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| I see many fraudulent artworks that are being sold on eBay. Some go for hundreds of dollars. It is sad to see many art collectors getting ripped off by these scam artists. eBay does not do anything to stop them. Believe me, I know.
Most of the fake art is created by applying paints and varnish to the printed images and/or using wet brushes to manipulate the dots created by inkjet printers. You can see the dots by a hand-held 30X illuminated microscope, which costs only about $10 at Amazon.com. What you look for is uniform dots usually in colors of yellow, blue, and magenta. The dots are more easily detected in light-color areas and the areas where one color changes to another. See the sample images below. An original painting should NOT have these dots anywhere on the painted surface. Scam artists print a photograph on a canvas or paper by a printer, apply paints or graphite (in the case of a graphite drawing) to the image to create textures to make it look like a real painting or drawing as well as to conceal the dots. Nowadays, you can buy large-format inkjet printers at a reasonable price. As you can imagine, this is easier than a paint-by-number painting because the complete image is already on the support. Misrepresentation of a product advertised for sale or sold through an Internet auction site is called "auction fraud," which is a federal offense. To report an auction fraud, contact FBI (click "Report Internet Crime"). The following are example artworks that I created using Photoshop. In the microscope images, notice the uniform dots that prove that the artwork is a print. Most of the fake art would contain more paints, so there may be only a small area where the dots are visible. Please check back as I will add more examples.
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