Welcome
| We are a UK mail order bespoke art printing company. We print using state of the art equipment, using a six colour fully pigmented inks on a 60 inch large format machine. We print digital images onto a range of substrates such a photo paper, art paper, foam board and canvas. We also make stretcher-frame canvas using standard finger-jointed 3/4 inch, 1.75 inch, 2 inch or 3 inch profile to any size (to the nearest millimetre). | "A Really great experience -
you can choose exactly the size of image you want rather than a limited
choice of sizes - only site I saw that did this. The price for canvas
printing was very very competitive."
"Awesome service, delivered as promised on time, with quality, exceeded
expectations." |  |
The majority of our work involves the manufacture of high quality real cotton canvas prints mounted on sturdy wooden frames. Our hand-made canvas prints are mounted on frames 40mm inches deep made from renewable
first class quality pine forestry
resources. We use only 100% 340gsm White Artist Canvas, printed with environmentally responsible inks.
We began our business in 2004 after five months of researching into the printing industry and looking for a suitable niche. We chose canvas as one of our products, among a number of others. We 'comfort zone' in manufacturing stretched canvas prints.
Glossary Of Terms Used In Canvas Printing
Art Print
An art print is one that is a reproduction of an original piece of art work. An art print is produced on inkjet machines using the CcMmYK color model are generally called a giclee print (see below).
Canvas
It's the most common support medium for oil painting and has been used for hundreds of years. One of the earliest surviving oils on canvas is a French Madonna with angels from around 1410 in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. It is typically stretched across a wooden frame called a stretcher, and may be coated with gesso before it is to be used; this is to prevent oil paint from coming into direct contact with the natural fibres, which will eventually cause it to decay. It is usually made of cotton, although historically it was made from hemp.
Canvas Printing
The process of printing a digital image onto a specially prepared canvas and then laminating and mounting the resulting canvas print onto a wooden stretcher frame. Also known as a stretched canvas, photo canvas or canvas art, a canvas print is the result of an image printed onto canvas which is stretched, or gallery-wrapped, onto a frame and displayed. Reproductions of original artwork have been printed on this material for many decades using offset printing. Since the 1990s, canvas print has been associated with either dye sublimation or ink jet processes (often referred to as Repligraph and Giclee print respectively). The material used is generally cotton or a cheaper alternative plastic based Poly Canvas often used for the reproduction of photographic images. After the image is printed, the canvas print is trimmed to size and glued or stapled to traditional stretcher bar frame or a wooden panel and displayed in a frame or as a gallery wrap. An image that is designed to continue round the edges of a stretcher frame once gallery-wrapped is referred to as full-bleed. Texture in the material enhances the three-dimensional effect of the finished product.
Digital Photo
Digital photography is a form of photography that uses digital technology to make images of subjects. Until the advent of such technology, photography used photographic film to create images which could be made visible by photographic processing. By contrast, digital photographs can be displayed, printed, stored, manipulated, transmitted, and archived using digital and computer techniques, without chemical processing. A digital photo is one of several forms of digital image. A digital photo can also be created by non-photographic equipment such as computer tomography scanners and radio telescopes. A digital photo can also be made by scanning a conventional photographic image.
Foam Board
Foam board is a very strong, lightweight and easily cut material used for the mounting of digital print, as backing in picture framing, in 3D design, and in painting. It consists of three layers — an inner layer of polystyrene clad with outer facing of either a white clay coated paper or brown Kraft paper. Its construction shares some similarities with cardboard, though its composition differs and it is slightly stiffer. Foam board is commonly used to produce architectural models, prototype small objects, and produce patterns for casting. Scenery for scale model displays and dioramas and games such as Warhammer 40,000, Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game and Void, is often produced by hobbyists from foam board. Foam board also often used by photographers as a reflector, in the design industry to mount presentations of new products, and in picture framing as a backing material; this latter use includes some archival picture framing methods, which utilize the acid-free versions of the material.
Giclee Print
Giclee print (Giclée in the vernacular) is an invented name for the process of making a fine art print from a digital source using an inkjet printer. The word "giclee" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital reproduction used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris Proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean output from any high quality ink-jet machine.
Wide Format (or Large Format)
Wide format (or large format) printers (contrast to vector-rendering "plotters") are generally accepted to be any printer with a width between 17" and 100". Printers over the 100" mark may be called Super-Wide or Grand format. Wide format printers are used to make banners, posters and general signs and in some cases may be more economical than short-run methods such as screen printing. Wide format printers generally use a roll of material rather than individual sheets and may incorporate hot-air dryers to prevent prints from sticking to themselves as they are produced.
Mount Board
Daler Rowney Mount Board (commonly known as Daler Board) is used extensively by professional framers to mount artists paintings and photographs. It is also frequently used in schools for mounting exam work on display boards. There are a variety of colours to provide a complimentary or contrasting background as required. Surface paper, core and backing are specially treated to minimise the effect of atmospheric pollutants and to enhance their useful lifespan. Our Mount Board product takes the form of a self adhesive photo print mounted onto a board of about 0.1 in thickness. This makes it suitable for mounting directly into a picture frame (not supplied) as the paper is held flat against the board.
Photographic Print
Any picture made by the action of light on sensitive (usually) silver salts. At first, the image was produced from glass plates or paper negatives , or the image was reproduced directly, as in a daguerreotype or tintype. (Daguerre took the first ever photo of a person in 1839). The term "photographic" (rather than photograph) is used here as a more precise term than "photograph," which technically can cover both positive and negative images.
Stretcher Bar
Four stretcher bar lengths are used to construct a wooden stretcher frame used by artists to mount their canvases. The mitre joint is the most popular method of adhering corners on a stretcher. When fastening, tension is distributed evenly around the stretcher to minimize warping due to unequal distribution of pull.