We Brought Printing In-House: Gallery Paper and Canvas, Made Here

We Brought Printing In-House: Gallery Paper and Canvas, Made Here

Send the same file to three print labs and you will get three prints back. Not slightly different. Different enough that you would not hang two of them on the same wall.

One comes back with the shadows crushed to black. One has a green cast in the highlights nobody noticed because nobody looked. One is fine, but arrives with a bruised corner because it was rolled by somebody paid per unit. You did not choose any of that, and neither did we, because until recently the person who pressed print worked somewhere else.

That has changed. There is now a large-format printer in the building, and everything on gallery paper and canvas comes off it.

What Actually Goes Wrong When You Outsource

Colour is the obvious one, and it is the least interesting.

The real problem with a third-party lab is that nobody there has seen the artwork before. A print operator handling four hundred jobs a day cannot know that the point of a particular piece is the warm brass in the pub lamps, or that the deep green baize is the thing holding the whole composition together. They print to a profile and move on. If the profile is slightly off for that image, it is still slightly off when it reaches you, because there was no step in between where somebody looked at it and said no.

The second problem is the loop. When a print does come back wrong, the correction takes a week: email the lab, wait, receive, compare, email again. In practice that means most small shops accept the first result, because the alternative is a fortnight and an awkward conversation. The customer receives whatever came out of the machine.

What Changes With the Printer Here

Three things, and they are all mundane rather than glamorous.

We can look at it. Every print is checked against the artwork under the same light, by somebody who knows what the piece is supposed to do. If a shadow has gone muddy or a skin tone has drifted, that print goes in the bin and the next one comes out four minutes later.

We can iterate. Getting a piece right at A1 sometimes takes three attempts. When those attempts are four minutes apart rather than four days, you actually make them. Several pieces in the curated collection had their colour and sharpening reworked specifically because we could see the failure quickly enough to care.

Nothing sits in a queue. Your order is not third in line behind a corporate job. It is printed, checked, and packed here.

Gallery Paper and Canvas

The printer takes both, which is the reason we chose it.

Gallery paper is a heavyweight fine art stock with a slight texture to it — the surface you want under a painted image, because it holds detail without adding the plasticky sheen of a photo paper. Prints come with a printed white border and are rolled in a tube. This is the format to buy if you already have a frame, or a framer you like.

Canvas is the same file printed onto a matte cotton-blend canvas and stretched over a solid pine frame with the edges wrapped. No glass, no reflections, hangs straight out of the box. On a painted piece it is the most convincing of the formats, because there is nothing between you and the brushwork.

The largest we can print is 84 × 61 cm, which is set by the roll width rather than by taste. Above that we would be joining paper, and we are not going to do that.

What It Does Not Change

Framed prints still go through a proper framer, because a good frame is a joinery job and a printer does not help with it. Acrylic is still face-mounted by a specialist, because bonding a print to acrylic without a single dust speck needs equipment that costs more than a house.

We are not going to pretend we make everything ourselves. We make the part where making it ourselves is the difference.

The Practical Bits

Print production takes 1-2 business days before dispatch, then standard UK delivery of 3-5 business days — free over £75, £4.95 under. International is 7-14 business days with rates at checkout.

Everything is made to order, so returns and refunds are not available unless a piece arrives damaged or defective. If it does, send us a photograph and we will replace it or refund you in full. That policy is easier to stand behind now that we can simply print another one.

See It On Something

The gallery paper and canvas formats are both live across the curated collection, and every design has a room view that shows the piece at its true size on a real wall before you commit to one.