Stretch Your Canvas Dollar into the 70s with Dynamite Prices

LexJet takes you to the 70s with three new top-shelf canvas products on sale until October 4 for less than $0.79 per sq. ft. You won’t find a better price on high-quality canvases like these in the market.

Discount CanvasSunset by Fredrix Satin Canvas SUV: Groovy! Priced at just $0.70 per sq. ft., it’s the “best canvas to date. Our color came out perfect; we have never seen a truer white hue before,” according to Zach Gardynski, New Era Portfolio, Austin, Texas.

Sunset by Fredrix Gloss Canvas SUV: Far out! At only $0.70 per sq. ft., this canvas maximizes quality and production for solvent, low-solvent, latex and UV-curable printers: print, stretch or frame, and go.

Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas: For only $0.78 per sq. ft., you’ll get the brightest white point available in an OBA-free canvas with consistent print quality and high-performance finishing.

And on the flip side… LexJet Poly Select Blockout Fabric gives you 100% opacity and exceptional photo image quality on a smooth fabric surface, and is also on sale until Oct. 4 at 35% off the regular price!

Call a LexJet printing expert today at 800-453-9538 to take advantage of these prices today. This offer is available over the phone and online at lexjet.com.

The Perfect Combination: Amazing Photography and Amazing Canvas

Sky on Fire The Canyon Gallery
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison, just east of The Canyon Gallery in Montrose, is one of Harmsen’s favorite places to shoot. This particular capture Harmsen describes as possibly “the most stupid shot I’ve ever taken,” being at altitude overlooking the canyon with a lightning storm enveloping the area.

Wil Harmsen, owner of The Canyon Gallery in Montrose, Colo., is a busy man. Not only does Harmsen run the gallery with his wife, Amy, but they do everything soup to nuts, or capture to framing in this case.

Sunburst at Painted Wall by Wil Harmsen
Captured at sunset, Harmsen says the sunburst over the Black Canyon of the Gunnison is about 18 seconds of light as the sun disappeared behind the canyon walls. “The clouds rolled in and I thought I would have complete overcast and get shut out. Patience paid off and I just sat there and captured the sunburst,” says Harmsen.

One of the Harmsens’ specialties is canvas printing and finishing, either framed or as a gallery wrap. Wil Harmsen says canvas is the gallery’s most popular medium, providing a painted look that gallery browsers crave.

Gallery wraps are typically less expensive than framed pieces. If we have a really nice photo, the person who can’t afford a framed print can buy a less expensive gallery wrap. When we print something that big, it could be a $600-700 difference simply because of the frame,” explains Harmsen. “My wife is the framer extraordinaire. What I like about the frame is that it makes it feel like a painting, a piece of art, that gives it a different look and it’s been fairly popular. We usually mount the canvas on archival mount board and put it in the frame. It’s a simple process and the canvas stays flat and beautiful. We’ve been doing it for about five years and haven’t had any problems.”

To get the most out of their images for those who buy their prints, Harmsen has recently switched all of their canvas output to Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas, the new OBA-free canvas from LexJet with an unusually bright white point for an OBA-free print medium.

The Canyon Gallery
Harmsen chalks up this spectacular eagle capture to pure luck. Shot at Ridgway Reservoir in the winter, Harmsen recalls, “I’d like to attribute that to my incredible skill, but that was just luck. We printed it on the Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas because we get such spectacular detail in the feathers and the trees, but with a painterly effect people like.”

“I love the brighter white base and the wide color gamut I get out of it. I don’t lose any detail, sharpness or tonality. It tends to be spot-on,” says Harmsen. “You cannot tell the difference between printing on this canvas and photo paper other than the canvas gives you the feeling of a painting that many people like.”

Before framing or making a gallery wrap, Harmsen says they coat each canvas with Sunset Satin Coating or Sunset Gloss Coating three times, coating horizontally, then vertically and horizontally again.

Sneffels Range by Wil Harmsen
The Sneffels Range near Ridgway, Colo., is an iconic Colorado photography spot. Harmsen says you’ll see hundreds of photographers flocking to the area to capture the mountain range in the fall.

“I’ve learned in working with canvas is that if you have dark areas and shadows in the image, one coat typically doesn’t cover the dark spots correctly. It takes multiple coats so you don’t see any lines from rolling on the coating. That way it makes sure to even out the entire photo so there aren’t any issues,” explains Harmsen. “And here’s a big one, especially for galleries: a lot of times when we coat canvas we might get some ink peel coming up with the roller when we were coating. For some reason the new canvas is absorbing the ink a lot better and to date we’ve had zero ink pickup on the roller. That’s huge for us. I’ve got a Denali shot that I can’t print on other canvas because the blue in the sky would pick up on the roller. Now that we’re printing on Sunset by Fredrix, problem solved… gone.”

Layers of Imaging Opportunities at Image-Tec

Fine Art Canvas
Image-Tec has full canvas production capabilities in-house. This canvas fine art reproduction printed on Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas is in process.

Tom Grassi likens his business – Image-Tec, based in Methuen, Mass. – to Photoshop. It’s an apt analogy: Photoshop is arguably the iconic representative of the digital age of photography and imaging, and Photoshop is almost infinitely organic in the various ways you can get from point A to point B through its tools, filters and layers.

Commercial photography at Image-Tec
Commercial photography continues to be an important part of Image-Tec’s business.

“This business has layers and layers to it, and you can keep digging and keying off those layers, and marketing off those layers to build a huge customer base,” says Grassi. “It’s like Photoshop… How far do you want to dig and how many layers do you want to build?”

Though the majority – a thin majority – of Image-Tec’s work is fine art reproduction, the business is diverse and nimble enough to find those proverbial layers, bringing clients along to take advantage of the opportunities presented when you dig a little deeper.

“I tell artists during demos we put on here at the studio that the possibilities of taking your art and doing something with it are endless, and go far beyond the typical reproduction on canvas or fine art paper. Once the digital age came in, you could do just about anything with the digital file,” says Grassi. “But to find out what the client really needs you have to stop selling people and listen to them. From that, you can find other products that might do well in the market with their work.”

Artist Note Cards
Artists love the note cards Image-Tec prints for them on LexJet Premium Archival Matte Paper.

It may be that Grassi sees more of those layers of opportunity since the advent of digital imaging and reproduction, and the liberation it brought.

Image-Tec was founded in 1982 as a commercial photo studio with an in-house lab and Grassi recalls: “We were limited in what we could do for artists. We were shooting film and making some color prints; basically, we were producing transparencies to go to offset, which was extremely expensive versus now where you can print on demand.”

Grassi says that on-demand is a point of emphasis at Image-Tec where the main goal is to get the artwork scanned and recorded and then work with the artist to market the images.

Image Tec's drive in photography studio.
Image Tec’s drive in photography studio.

“There’s no need for us to sell them inventory in a print-on-demand environment. They can spend a couple of hundred bucks, get a bunch of paintings scanned, print some note cards, see what images sell and email us the order,” explains Grassi. “If customers are going to spend money with you, why not make the process as easy as possible? You don’t have to commit to a thousand dollars worth of prints; just bring the scans in, we’ll get them scanned – that’s the first step – and then from there you call us and we print them on-demand. People appreciate that because we tell them to do baby steps, especially in marketing their artwork because you don’t know what will sell.”

The original impetus for the founding of Image-Tec was control. Grassi went to the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., to study photography, then returned to the Boston area to ply his trade as a photographer where the processing side was a thorn in his side.

Product photography for Pet Edge at Image-Tec.
Product photography for Pet Edge at Image-Tec.

“I was going down to Boston to process film and thought it was nuts because I was losing all this time and paying all this money to get it done. I knew how to print color so I got a loan, put a lab in and ended up generating a ton of money and saving a ton of time,” says Grassi.

That philosophy has stuck over the years. As Grassi puts it: “If we don’t do it here, we don’t do it. For me to send something out, have it come back wrong, and then go back and forth, I’ve lost money trying to make 20 percent on something I don’t handle. I much prefer to give the client the name and number of someone who can do something we don’t do here.”

There’s very little, however, that Image-Tec can’t do when it comes to photographic and fine art reproduction, including artwork capture with the BetterLight system. Capture, in fact, is an important part of the business, since about half of what Grassi does is commercial photography.

Fine Art Reproduction by Image-TecThe two sides of the business – capture and output – balance each other and reveal more layers of opportunity. Plus, the combination helped ease the transition from chemical to digital in the late ’90s as both sides of the business made the transition together and shined the light on new niche markets, like fine art reproduction.

“Back in 1999 we moved to a new facility and went digital with a BetterLight scan back to shoot catalog photography. By going digital we could save a lot of money in film, Polaroids and processing and be able to hand designers digital files, which sped everything up. However, everyone was reluctant to do that because digital photography wasn’t that great in the late ’90s, but the BetterLight was a very high-res scan back,” says Grassi. “We offered both chemical and inkjet during the transition and as inkjet took over we found we were using less of the chemical process. Plus, buying a high-end Epson scanner allowed us to pull from the thousands and thousands of 4×5 and 8×10 negatives so we can just scan one and make an inkjet print.”

Grassi estimates that the split between print production and capture now is about 60/40 in favor of printing. For commercial photography there’s a drive-in studio for photographing cars and other large pieces, and the subject matter runs the gamut from food to manufacturing.

Stretching canvas at Image-Tec.
Stretching canvas at Image-Tec.

“It’s a whole workflow. Over the past three weeks, for example, we’ve been taking in over 100 paintings per week for digital capture. Along with that are all the print orders. Some weeks we’re producing a ton of prints while other weeks we’re bringing in a lot of work to capture,” says Grassi. “All we use the BetterLight for is capturing art. The DSLRs are so great now that I use them for commercial photography. We bought a Horseman, a view camera you can mount your DSLR on, so you can correct perspectives, swings, and tilts and do selective focus a lot easier without buying a bunch of different lenses. It’s kind of a throwback to the old-school 4×5 process.”

For output, Image-Tec runs a Canon iPF8300 and an Epson Stylus Pro 9900 and has a full frame and finishing shop, including a Tensador canvas stretching machine. One of the keys to the output, says Grassi, is in the BetterLight scan back’s ability to create a file size that’s the same size as the artwork.

“File size is what drives this whole process, so we can tell a customer they’ll end up with a 40×60 canvas that will look just as nice as the original because it’s the same file size,” says Grassi. “We’ve perfected some specialized lighting techniques for different paintings that get us closer to the original. You still run into colors that tend to want to give you a hard time, but you just stick with it and run proofs. We’ll run strips in selected areas, match them up and get them as close as possible. We also spray the proofs because you might see some color shift when you spray something.”

Product Photography at Image-Tec
One of the many layers in the Image-Tec business mix is product photography of all kinds at the company’s studio.

Grassi’s favorite inkjet print materials for reproduction include the new Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas, LexJet Premium Archival Matte Paper, Sunset Textured Fine Art and Sunset Hot Press Rag. Grassi says Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas helped solve issues in finishing since the ink stays on consistently when it’s stretched.

Grassi describes LexJet Premium Archival Matte Paper as a workhorse for about 60 percent of what clients want to do with their artwork, including note card and bookmark prints that are popular with artists as alternative products.

The choice between reproductions on Sunset Textured Fine Art and Sunset Hot Press Rag will depend on the type of medium on which the original was created. “When we scan a watercolor on a watercolor paper we pick up the texture as well, so we print it on the smooth Hot Press Rag paper because you don’t want to add more texture to what has already been picked up by the scan,” explains Grassi.

It’s great to have every step in the process nailed down to ensure a quality capture or print every time, but Grassi says it’s all for naught if the customer isn’t comfortable or feels like the process itself is a black box they’re not privy to understanding.

“When we do a demo or have an artist come in as a new customer we spend 45 minutes with them. We show them the process, show our personality and have fun with what we’re doing. There’s a lot of technical stuff that goes on and if you can shed some light on it, they appreciate it,” says Grassi. “They go through the process, and then after they leave with their work we follow up to find if they loved it or if there are any problems we can correct. We make sure they’re 100 percent happy with a follow-up. How we can judge if we were successful is through consistent re-orders.”

This approach builds invaluable word of mouth, but Grassi is also active through the use of Google ad words and social media marketing. The most effective marketing piece so far in the social media/Google age, says Grassi, is a video he posted on the Image-Tec website that gives an overview of the print process.

Width Variety Key to Consistent Canvas Print Projects

Sunset by Fredrix Satin Canvas SUV.
Sunset by Fredrix Satin Canvas SUV.

A common issue in multiple-print canvas projects, like a gallery exhibition, is finding enough different roll widths for all the sizes you need to print. The ability to use the same canvas for one project ensures production efficiency and image consistency across all the widths you print.

That’s why the new Sunset by Fredrix Canvases for solvent and aqueous printers are available from LexJet in widths up to 64″.

Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas for aqueous printers, which features one of the brightest white points for an OBA-free canvas, comes in 17″, 24″, 36″, 44″, 60″ and 64″ widths.

Sunset by Fredrix Satin Canvas SUV for solvent, low-solvent, latex and UV-curable printers – which  provides consistent and accurate color on a bright-white, acid-free base – comes in 30″, 36″, 54″, 60″ and 64″ widths.

Now, whether you’re printing all sizes yourself, or outsourcing your largest prints, you can ensure that all your prints match in finish, texture and image quality: one canvas, one color profile and a consistent, high-quality project every time.

Give a LexJet customer specialist a call at 800-453-9538 to find out more and to get the sizes you need for your printer with the new Sunset by Fredrix canvases.

The Next Evolution in OBA-Free Canvas: Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas

OBA Free Canvas
This giant gallery wrap reproduction of a photo Jorge Blanco took of Mesa Arch in Utah was printed on Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas in three panels and stretched on 1 1/2″ stretcher bars. Blanco says huge pieces like this are great alternatives to wall murals since they can be easily detached and moved to a new home or office.

 

Based on demand from fine art reproduction companies, print shops and photographers for a consistent, high-performing OBA-free canvas, LexJet and Fredrix Print Canvas introduce Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas.

The new canvas has a brighter white point than other OBA-free canvases, provides consistent print quality, and is easy to stretch and finish.

Jorge Blanco, owner of Gallery Works, a fine art and photography reproduction company based in Tampa, says, “I’m very impressed with it so far. I think it’s a hit. I don’t know of anything like it. I’ve tried other canvases and they always seem to have one problem or another with cracking when you coat and stretch, but this canvas performs very well for me. And, the output is as good or better than any canvas I’ve tried.”

Compatible with the latest aqueous inkjet print technology from Canon, Epson and HP, Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas is built on an acid-free, pH neutral, poly-cotton base.

“Our customers that prefer to use an OBA-free canvas also want more consistency than they’ve seen in the past, both in output and finishing, whether they’re coating and stretching a canvas or simply framing it,” says Jaimie Mask, LexJet product manager.

Sunset by Fredrix Canvas is now available from LexJet’s North American Distribution Network for fast delivery in 17″ x 40′, 24″ x 40′, 36″ x 40′, 44″ x 40′, 60″ x 40′ and 64″ x 40′ roll sizes. Contact a LexJet customer specialist at 800-453-9538 for more information.