How to Make Your Own Canvas Prints

Body Text – As a designer, creator and retailer of canvas prints, we love people to get in touch and send us their own artistic ideas and bespoke creations to be taken from either an image or photo to canvas. This article will look at how to make your own canvas prints from your home, work or anywhere you choose.

Although creating bespoke canvas prints and masterpieces can be a tough process to master this guide will help you understand the mechanics behind how to make canvas prints and increase your own artistic skill set.

To start with you will need a photograph or hard drive image on your computer and a good quality printer to ensure your print is of the required standard to showcase in your property. The printer will need to be able to print the colours of the image effectively onto canvas paper, some printers will have the option to print to canvas which is a good indication that it will be able to produce good end results.

In general most home friendly printers will print canvas between 13-19 inches wide which should be enough to make your own canvas print of choice. Once you have a printer and the canvas to print on you will need to decide on an image or photograph to use. A handy tip is to upload images from your digital camera straight onto a computer instead of scanning photographs, this prevents any distortion of the image and the end result should be a nice looking canvas print.

Once you have chosen the image using a programme such as Adobe Photoshop will help to enhance colours, contrast and the overall sharpness of the image, if you are skilled using such programmes you may even choose to completely change the image and create a piece of funky pop art style canvas to hang on the wall.

Adding a border around your canvas print will ensure that none of the image disappears around the back of the frame when it comes to the fitting stage. Using your chosen photo editing software you will need to crop the image to the relevant size whilst allowing for the border.

You are now ready to save and view the image, if you are happy with the image the next step is to choose the correct printing quality and view the printing options, these are accessible simply by clicking print on the menu bar or by right clicking the image and hitting print.

This is the most vital stage of how to make your own canvas print, as mentioned earlier in the article a good quality printer may have a canvas setting, if so select this printing option and set the quality of the printer to 100% for maximum effect. You will also need to choose the size of print which will be within the parameters of your printer’s capability.

At this stage when you have all printing options and the quality set it is advisable to do a test print to ensure that your image and canvas are compatible producing a nice finish. This also allows you to make sure the size selected and borders of the canvas print are indeed correct. If not, go back and adjust the border size within your photo editing software before trying another test print.

Canvas paper is a high quality, fine material, as such you will need to take care when handling it, use gloves to ensure you do not smear any colour or get fingerprints embedded within your chosen image. At this stage you need to carefully place the canvas paper in your printer tray and then print.

Always allow the to the colours and ink of the canvas print to dry before you handle it as you could make a mess of the image, patience is a virtue!

The final step is taking your perfect creation and fixing it to a wooden frame, for this you will either want to buy a frame from a retailer of art or make the frame yourself if you are skilled in woodwork, joinery and are confident of getting the dimensions right. The canvas print is fixed to the wood frame with staples and an industrial staple gun.

You will need to stretch the canvas so that the image is flush on the viewing side and the border is safely tucked over the top of the frame behind your canvas print, at this stage you need to use the staple gun to fix the image with the staples, ensuring they do not split the wood and are hidden at the back of the frame.

The question of how to make your own canvas prints has now been answered!

If you would like to view our range of canvas prints or view our photo to canvas print service please visit http://www.whoartnow.co.uk/art/category/18/photo2canvas.