A Guide to Ordering Personalised Canvas Prints

Choosing quality canvas art from among the spectrum of print suppliers on the web can often be tricky.

The best canvas prints are all made by hand using high resolution digital photos or artworks. Great results require both technical and manual skills to design, print and frame to consistently high standards. Processes and skills we've been honing since 2003.

We often find that canvas printing websites provide scarce information about their actual manufacturing processes, ultimately leading to confusion and disappointment when customers receive their orders. In light of this, we feel it's vital to provide you with extremely detailed information about our canvas printing processes and materials in order for you to make an informed decision.

Canvas printing process and inks

Premium canvas prints available on the market today are all printed using specialist inkjet technology in a process commonly know as giclée. It's a wonderful printing technique which enables fantastic quality reproductions at extremely affordable prices.

All our fine art canvas prints are created using a 12-colour giclée printing process: the best quality you’ll find online. We operate some of the most sophisticated printing machinery currently available; ensuring every image we print has the opportunity to look like a masterpiece.

Other methods of printing canvases include dye-sublimation and solvent, which generally offer less-vivid colour palettes. All our products are printed at high resolution on superb 100% cotton canvas substrates using UV inks.

UV (pigment-based) inks provide enhanced light fastness and durability over dye-based inks, ensuring your wall art remains vibrant for years to come.

Whilst no form of print, canvas or otherwise, should be kept in direct sunlight, UV inks contain light stabilisers that can keep canvas prints looking new for anything up to 200+ years in ideal conditions.

Canvas material

Our canvas art is printed on a heavyweight 400gsm canvas material. Over the years we have tried countless different canvas materials from various manufacturers located all over the world. 

Our current media scores extremely highly in all key areas. It's extremely durable, provides amazing colour reproduction and detail and the surface is very consistent and bright. If there's a better media for printing striking canvas art, we've yet to find it.

Canvas stretcher bars

Each canvas print frame is milled with a curved profile; minimising contact with the face of the canvas; preventing unsightly impression marks and surface cracking.

We use finger-jointed canvas print frames which create corner tension helping resist warping. For larger sizes, we add wooden 'wedges' to each corner; ensuring your canvas print surface remains taut and allowing easy re-stretching in future years. 

Canvas framing

Your stretched canvas print is then hand finished by one of the UK’s most experienced canvas picture framing teams. We ensure each corner fold is perfectly smooth, tight and that all fixing staples are covered with special protective tape.

Canvas depths

The depth of your canvas frame determines how far your canvas print will stand off the wall.

You can choose from three depths of canvas print: Thin (19mm), Classic (38mm) or Deep (44mm). Unlike other low cost canvas printers we only use premium European knotless pine canvas frames (i.e. the internal stretcher bars around which the canvas is stretched).

Canvas coatings

All our canvas prints can be finished with a matt or gloss varnish coating. Varnishes help to preserve the integrity of your canvas image, protecting against airborne dirt/dust, sun fade, abrasions and fingerprints.

Colour management and quality control

Everyone of our canvas prints is thoroughly checked by our staff at each stage of the production process for possible faults, however minor. If a canvas print doesn't meet our high standards, it won't be shipped.

One of the most important aspects of the canvas printing process is colour management, which involves the calibration of printers, monitors, scanners and software. This ensures that the colour of your canvas prints closely match the previews you on the site.

Thorough colour management is a complex, on-going process that requires attention to detail and specialist technology such as a Spectrophotometer. Our software, displays and printing technology are professionally colour-managed at each stage of the production process to the ensure accurate colour consistency.

As computer monitors and settings vary greatly, it is important when deciding on canvas art that your own monitor has a basic level of calibration. This ensures that it is displaying colours correctly, giving you a true accurate representation of our artwork. To do this in the absence of specialist equipment, we would recommend using a free tool such as QuickGamma (or Adobe Gamma, if you have Adobe software installed). Often, monitors display too much blue, making colours look dull and dark. You will be surprised at how much better things look on a neutral monitor.

If you have any further questions about our canvas art prints or service, please don't hesitate to contact us.