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A wall painting can make your home look more beautiful and if it is a work of a good artist, then with a beautiful showpiece it can also be a very good investment option too. But if you are not ready to (or can't) invest lakhs in a painting then don't be disheartened there is another good option - serigraphs.

They are also commonly known as silk-screening. Serigraphy is a technique based on stenciling, for creating prints by hand. Separate hand-cut stencils for each colour of the original illustration are made. Ink or paint is carefully brushed through a fine fabric screen, portions of which have been masked for impermeability. The stencil is transferred to a mesh screen - one for each colour - and the paper is hand-fed through the press as many times as there are colours, creating a richly textured final print that captures the vibrancy of the original painting.

So, a serigraph is actually a copy of an original painting and is considered as multiple original works of art, and being a multiple of the 'original' work, the prices of serigraphs differ in the market.

Within Rs.1 lakh, one can purchase an original serigraph of all the big artists of the country. You can have serigraphs of the big artists like SH Raza, Paritosh Sen, Jogen Chowdhury, Sakti Burman, Ram Kumar and thirty others. There are 125 editions of these serigraphs and the first edition costs Rs.18,000 and the last one cost Rs.90,000. A good serigraph should have a few number of editions, preferably 100 to 125, while every edition is signed and dated by the artist and it should also have the painting's title and the edition number handwritten by the artist too.

Serigraphs can be procured from art galleries and art dealers. Every serigraph edition comes with a authenticity certificate, which with the edition number and size also has a guarantee from the artist, that after this he will not come out with any other serigraph series for the same painting, thus maintaining exclusivity.