Canvas Printing
With prices from £26.99 inc VAT and delivery our canvas printing and photo to canvas services offer the best value without sacrificing quality. With years of experience our trained craftsmen use only the finest 100% cotton canvas and handmade redwood frames to ensure that your canvas print will have pride of place for years to come. Our craftsmen are more than happy to discuss any questions you have about canvas printing or photo to canvas prints and are available through the details listed on our contact us page.
Canvas printing is a surprisingly complex topic with many variations and styles of print currently available. The finished product basically breaks down into three areas. The canvas, the frame and the mounting or framing style. The canvas itself is perhaps the most important area and perhaps the one that is the most divisive. Most mass produced canvas prints are printed onto a mostly plastic material that gets away with being called canvas simply because of the rough canvas like texture that is moulded into the plastic. These prints look fine at first but are considered to have a shorter life span and will more than likely degrade over time. Most reputable canvas print makers will use a 100% cotton material that it actually a real fabric with a white emulsion applied to provide the brilliant white backing for the customers image to be printed onto. Materials are available that have less emulsion on but they tend to give the images a fairly strong dull yellow tint. One trade off is that the brighter the emulsion the more prone to cracking the image is around the edges of the frame. One of the skills of canvas printing is producing a bright, tight image whilst minimising the amount of cracking. A well made frame will generally only have a rounded edge touching the canvas to help cut down cracking. On a normal photo to canvas print cracking would be almost undetectable on a well made canvas but dark images that wrap around the frame can cause problems. Another aspect to consider is the method of printing used. Most short run canvas prints are printed on a large format inkjet printers. The actual print technology used does vary between printers with the two most popular being dye and pigment. Dye inks actually stain the canvas where as pigment inks coat the canvas and sit on top of it. The main difference for the user is that normal dye inks aren't UV stable and will begin to fade relatively quickly. Canvas printing using dye inks will begin to change colour after only a few months where as pigment inks are usually certified to be fade resistant for many decades.
The second important considerations for canvas printing and photo to canvas prints is the fame used. Different woods have quite drastically different properties and these properties can then be affected further by the method in which the wood is cut and prepared. Perhaps the two most important aspects are the sap content and moisture content of the wood. If a frame has a lot of sap in it then it would generally be unevenly weighted and difficult to hang and also risk staining the canvas and wall. Wood with a high moisture content won't cause dampness as it dries but it will often drastically warp out of shape or even collapse. The moisture content is usually reduce by kiln drying before the wood is cut and milled to shape. Sap content can't be reduced but it can be minimised by selected a wood type such as redwood that generally has a lower sap content and then additionally discarding any sections of wood that are deemed too sappy. Good quality canvas printing can be prone to cracking around the edges. So that a customers photo to canvas print isn't overly cracked most good quality frames have a specific shape. This takes the form of a rounded edge where ever contact will be made with canvas and also a sloped inner edge that allows the canvas print a little room to flex without causing indentations.
The last major consideration for canvas printing or for people looking to buy photo to canvas prints is the framing style. The printed canvas is usually mounted onto the wooden frame and stapled into place. Small bulges are usually visible on the outward edge of the frame in all four corners where the canvas is folded during the mounting process. The actual image on the canvas itself can either be printed on just the forward facing front of the canvas with the outside edges left white or alternatively it can be mounted in the gallery wrap style. A gallery wrap involved printing the image a few inches bigger than the dimensions of the frame so that the image itself is big enough to not only cover the front of the frame but also wrap around the edges so that when mounted on a wall no blank canvas is visible from any direction. Which style is chosen is often simply a matter of taste however photo to canvas prints often have little space between the subject and the edge of the photo. This can lead to part of the subjects head being wrapped around the frame which is rarely the desired outcome. When framing a canvas accurate positioning and sizing is the most difficult aspect to perfect every time. So much so that it is usually considered acceptable to have a slight wander in canvas printing which can lead to a few millimetres of an image on a front only print to wrap around the edge of the frame slightly and this is considered preferable to having any blank canvas visible on the front of the print. As canvas printing has become more popular an increasing number of options are now becoming available as standard. These include removing date stamps, black and white or sepia finishes, printing the edges of a front only print to a solid colour and adding mirror bleeds to images. |
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