Art Process a Booming Shrinking Business : Torrance: A studio uses a painstaking procedure called serigraph to reproduce designs in smaller sizes. It can take up to three months.

Painter Leslie Sayour likes to splash color across big canvases when she paints.

But Japanese consumers, who pay as much as $55,000 for her impressionistic oil paintings, want art that fits into their small homes.

So Sayour, who sells most of her work in Japan, takes her paintings to Kolibri Art Studio in Torrance, where Herta Hedrick uses a painstaking printing technique called serigraphy to reproduce the designs in smaller sizes.

The prints, valued between $2,500 and $3,500, look so much like an original painting that it can be hard to tell the two apart. Typically, artists request 200 to 500 copies of each work.

Since the studio opened at 2908 Oregon Court 3 1/2 years ago, it has reproduced about 55 works. Only about five studios in the Los Angeles area do fine-art serigraph printing.

Serigraphers separate and print each color in a painting. For brightly colored works such as Sayour’s, each print passes through the press more than 100 times.

The layers of ink coat the canvas and combine colors to duplicate the effects created by an oil painter. Special overlays of web-like black lines imitate the artist’s brush strokes. Five artists work full time for Hedrick to separate the colors.

It takes up to three months to complete a reproduction. Because of the hour it takes to set up the machine and the time it takes to dry, only about three colors can be put on each day.

Hedrick said the hardest part of her business is finding workers patient enough to endure the handiwork who also have an artistic sense. It takes technical skills and a good eye to do the work well.