Setting a Canvas Printing Standard at FinerWorks

FinerWorks Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas
Close-up of a fine-art reproduction by FinerWorks on the company’s new standard canvas: Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas.

As the name implies, FinerWorks, based in San Antonio, is dedicated to reproducing finer works of art on a variety of printable materials. FinerWorks serves mainly artists and photographers, with a focus on high-quality output.

Fine Art Canvas Reproductions
A combination of canvas gallery wraps and canvas mounted to PVC board printed by FinerWorks on Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas.

Toward that end, FinerWorks recently set Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas as the standard for its canvas reproduction printing. Moreover, founder and COO James M. Theopistos has leveraged the Sunset and Fredrix brand names in marketing to his customer base.

“We’ve been excited about it, and the feedback from our customers has been very positive as well. I attribute a lot of the success with the new canvas to the Fredrix name. Since most of our customers are artists they’re familiar with the Fredrix name, especially if they do oil or acrylic paintings. They’re used to buying Fredrix canvas for their work,” says Theopistos. Given that, it was a no-brainer from a marketing standpoint. The cost of the canvas is the same, we can push the name brand, and customers appreciate the history and quality behind the Fredrix name.”

FinerWorks Canvas Printing
Close-up of Sunset by Fredrix mounted to PVC board using LexJet RubberMount Adhesive.

Moreover, says Theopistos, though Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas is OBA-free, it retains a very high bright point and faithfully reproduces the artwork of a given client on the company’s Canon iPF8300 and iPF8400 inkjet printers.

Perhaps most importantly, Theopistos reports that the canvas provides consistency through a print run and from project to project.

As Theopistos put it at a recent blog post at finerworks.com: “Sunset by Fredrix Matte Canvas brings the expertise of LexJet and Fredrix together for a breakthrough in canvas, featuring one of the highest white levels available for an OBA-free canvas. It’s easy to work with for stretching, mounting and framing, and is ideal for fine art and photographic reproductions on canvas. The acid-free, pH neutral, poly-cotton base provides consistency throughout the print run.”

Click here to read the rest of the story at the FinerWorks blog.

Printing Historic Art for the Historic Otesaga Resort Hotel in Cooperstown

Otesaga Resort Hotel Decor by Creative Interior Imagery

When you hear (or read) “Cooperstown,” the first thing that comes to mind is the National Baseball Hall of Fame located in this historic New York village.

Printed Decor by Creative Interior ImageryHowever, Cooperstown is steeped in American history far beyond baseball, not the least of which is its most famous son, James Fenimore Cooper, who penned the classic America novel The Last of the Mohicans (the town is actually named after his father).

Given the rich history of the area it was entirely appropriate for the historic Otesaga Resort Hotel in Cooperstown to enrich its interior décor with reproductions of fine art housed at the Fenimore Art Museum.

The hotel, which was established in 1909, turned to Creative Interior Imagery to faithfully reproduce the fine art pieces in the guest rooms and bathrooms. Creative Interior Imagery produced a total of more than 800 framed prints ranging from 13″ x 22″ to 20″ x 32″ for the Otesaga Resort Hotel.

Creative Interior Imagery Fine Art ReproductionCreative Interior Imagery is known for its ability to take a project from conception to completion, providing end-to-end capabilities from high-end photography and scanning to printing, finishing and installation, all in a tightly-controlled, color-calibrated system.

In this case, the Fenimore Art Museum scanned the original artwork and provided Creative Interior Imagery with the files, which were printed on Sunset Velvet Rag 315g on the company’s Epson Stylus Pro 11880 and Epson Stylus Pro 9900 wide format inkjet printers.

“They wanted a premium-quality archival paper for the high-end artwork. Based on that, we used the Sunset Velvet Rag: it’s been much more consistent for us than other similar fine-art papers,” says Keith Tomkins of Creative Interior Imagery. “We use it quite a bit for high-end artwork, and we’ve been getting very consistent results with it. People like the look, texture and feel so it’s been a very good product for us.”

Creative Interior Imagery Combines Fine Art and Industry on Canvas

Canvas Decor by Creative Interior Imagery

Creative Interior Imagery is located at the epicenter of an oil and gas boom in Pennsylvania. Williams, an energy exploration and production company, recently opened new offices in nearby Tunkhannock, Pa., as part of its continued expansion in Pennsylvania over the past several years.

Inkjet Canvas by Creative Interior ImageryWilliams and Creative Interior Imagery collaborated on interior décor for the new offices, combining the industrial work Williams specializes in with a fine-art ambiance on canvas.

From Williams’ initial direction, Creative Interior Imagery took the project from photographic capture through the print process to installation.

“When we first met with Creative Interior Imagery, we were comfortable with them right away. They took extra time with the images and produced quality work,” says T.J. Gentile, facility services rep. sr. for Williams.

Gentile adds that Williams was looking for a clean, timeless look and felt that framed pieces would not have the same impact and could start to look a bit dated over time. The solution was to reproduce photos of Williams’ machinery and pipelines on canvas, which fit the company’s distinct vision of what it wanted the décor to portray in the new building.

“After an intensive two-day photo shoot at Williams’ production sites we gave them a choice of hundreds of photos and they picked out the ones they wanted to use in their offices. We zoomed in and cropped some of the photos as necessary to prepare them for printing,” says Betsy Green, design consultant for Creative Interior Imagery. “We wanted to merge the industrial look with fine art using the technology in our business.”

Canvas Wrap Creative Interior ImageryCreative Interior Imagery produced about 20 canvas wraps, most of which were 4′ x 6′, on Sunset Select Matte Canvas with an Epson Stylus Pro 11880. One 10′ x 5′ giant gallery wrap hangs on the wall in a stairwell just outside the lobby.

“Northeast Pennsylvania is considered one of the top production areas for natural gas in the world. The fact that Williams built this brand-new gorgeous building up here me says to me that this company intends to be here for many years to come,” adds Green.

Using Print-N-Stick Fabric as an Art and Photo Medium at Elizabeth’s Art Gallery

Print-N-Stick Fabric Demo
Bethany, an employee at Elizabeth’s Art Gallery, shows how they have been printing, sticking, peeling, crumpling and re-applying LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric.

As you can tell from recent posts at the LexJet Blog, print shops, artists and photographers are finding creative ways to use the versatile LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric. At Elizabeth’s Art Gallery in Goderich, Ontario, Canada, its most recent photo exhibition, DPI 2014, features Print-N-Stick Fabric.

The proprietor of Elizabeth’s Art Gallery, Elizabeth Van den Broeck, is a custom framer, fine-art printer, painter and photographer. And, Elizabeth’s Art Gallery is not only a gallery, but a custom frame shop, fine-art print shop and art supply store that also holds workshops for children and adults, hosts art and camera clubs (the current exhibition is for a camera club), and is active in the local arts community.

Elizabeth's Art Gallery
Some of the photo art printed on LexJet Print-N-Stick Fabric at the DPI 2014 exhibition at Elizabeth’s Art Gallery.

“I’m always looking for something different to print, paint and make images on; that’s always been my quest: to find different ways of looking at images. I’m also an equipment collector. I like having access to everything I could want. I like being able to do everything from absolute scratch,” says Elizabeth. “Everyone is doing canvas and different photo and fine art papers. We’re looking for other ways to work with photos. In addition to Print-N-Stick we’ve been experimenting with photo-sensitive dyes on fabric, and of course, the traditional canvas and photo prints.”

The DPI 2014 exhibit is just the beginning of Elizabeth’s use of Print-N-Stick. As part of a public art group, Elizabeth is looking for ways to provide seasonal public art, as opposed to permanent pieces. She calls it a “back-door deal” that literally makes use of the back doors in Goderich.

“I’m thinking it would be cool to do temporary pieces that can be applied and removed with no indication they were there. I want to apply art with Print-N-Stick to my whole back door and see if we can do the back doors of the back alleys of all the spaces in the town square, so it’s kind of a back-door deal,” she says.

Elizabeth already has a test piece on her back door that she says has been “seriously mistreated,” meaning that it’s been crumpled up, applied to various surfaces, peeled off and applied again, finally on the back door. “The print quality is perfect, and it’s very easy to apply,” she adds.

Elizabeth's Art Gallery
One of Elizabeth’s encaustic paintings, which won Best in Show at Paint Ontario.

Elizabeth has an Epson Stylus Pro 9900 that she’s had for the past five years. The printer, through no fault of its own, has a mind of its own sometimes. The printer was a victim of an F3 tornado that ripped through Goderich in 2011, damaging or destroying most of the buildings and ripping out all the trees in a park adjacent to Elizabeth’s building.

Elizabeth’s Art Gallery sustained roof and water damage and was out of commission for about eight months. It could have been worse, as the building next door was completely torn away by the tornado.

That’s probably why Elizabeth describes her business, beyond its eclectic photo and art mix, as “enduring.” She’s been in business for 22 years and has been printing since the inception of digital printing back in the ‘90s.

Elizabeth's Art Gallery
A sampling of some of Elizabeth’s oil paintings. Check out the collection of her work at www.elizabeths.ca under ELIZABETH’S ART.

You should check out her magnificent original paintings, which you can find at www.elizabeths.ca under ELIZABETH’S ART. There you’ll find her encaustic, pastel, oil, acrylic and textured acrylic paintings.

“I try to push colors and paint negative space. I paint the space between things first, so that whatever the subject is, they just arrive,” she says.

Step 2 in Color Management: Printer and Media Color Gamut

In Step 1 of the color management to-do list we discussed how the quality of your monitor impacts the precision of your output. Step 2 of 3 focuses on understanding how your printer and the inkjet media choices affect color.

Print accuracy doesn’t rely solely on your use of a custom profile and an accurate monitor, though these two components guide you toward the closest possible result. There are two additional variables that can have a big impact on the types of colors you can hit with any printer…

The first is the gamut of the printer. How an ink is formulated in order to print a Coca-Cola red or a Pepsi blue, for example, may differ slightly from technology to technology.

These days I field a lot of questions about choosing between an 8-color system and a 12-color system.  Or, should I use the 9-color or the 11-color printer? Is there a noticeable difference between them?

The answer is yes, there is a noticeable difference any time you add colors. However, the next question I usually follow up with is, “What are you using the printer to print?”

When considering printing technology, there are printers made for higher-speed production (HP Z5200, Canon S Series, Epson T Series, to name a few) that can print a sellable photographic image, but would not be the ideal to use for an artist, photographer or fine art reproduction house. These printers have fewer inks, which cuts down on gamut but improves on speed in most cases.

If you’re in the market for a printer, talk to a LexJet customer specialist and explain the market you are in. We will make sure that you are using the right equipment for the job.

If you are seeing a color that is in your photograph or art piece that you just can’t nail with your printer, it may be out of gamut for the printer or out of gamut for the media you chose to print to.

If you’ve calibrated the monitor, make sure your printer is running at 100 percent capacity, that you’ve soft-proofed the image with the chosen rendering intent, and used a specific printer profile to print. If it still doesn’t portray what’s on your screen, then either of the above mentioned may be at fault.

Now I just spit out a bunch of jargon that may be foreign to you, so click on the links to the tutorials here to find out more…

Download and install ICC Profiles:

PC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W-F-k8z5io

MAC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuOhztAqoyY

How to Softproof before Printing using Photoshop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahf9yEPO4zA

How to print using ICC Profiles (find your printer and computer combination):

http://www.youtube.com/user/LexJet/search?query=Printing+Through

Color gamut difference between a gloss and matte photo paper.
Figure 1 shows the difference in gamut between a gloss and a matte paper in the high, mid and low range of color (top to bottom). The gloss paper is our Sunset Gloss Photo Paper (red line) and the matte our Premium Archival Matte Paper (green line) as profiled on the Canon IPF8400 with the X-Rite DTP70. Click on the image for a larger version.

You can’t do anything to increase the gamut of the printer, but you can make the right decision based on your needs at the time you purchase the equipment. Making sure you use the right equipment for the type of work you are doing will dramatically increase the quality of your print.

Our second extremely important variable to understand is the media with which you choose to print. The less reflective the media, the less light that reflects back into your eyes, and therefore, the lower the gamut and detail your print will realize (see Figure 1).

Artists have come to love matte watercolor papers and canvas, yet always demand the best color on those surfaces. This is where the owner or production manager at a fine art reproduction house runs into the biggest conflict.

The reflectivity of your media is not the only aspect of the printable supplies that affects color outcome.  White point can change your gamut as well. The brighter the white point, the more gamut you’ll pick up, not to mention an increase in that lovely term the experts like to use, Dmax, which is the darkest measurable value your printer-media combination can hit.

For canvas, Sunset Select Gloss Canvas has the highest dynamic range and color gamut of the canvas offerings LexJet produces. The highest-gamut matte canvas is our Sunset Select Matte Canvas, which has a very punchy white base. Partnering the Sunset Coating line with Sunset Select Matte Canvas has been a very popular choice amongst artists and photographers.

If you are trying to appease the artist crowd who prefer fine art papers, the highest-range matte paper is Sunset Fibre Matte (a very smooth bright-white fiber cellulose paper). If you need 100% cotton with a smooth finish, Sunset Hot Press Rag will be close behind.

If they would like texture on their cotton paper our latest addition to the line is Sunset Bright Velvet Rag.  This paper has the highest Dmax of our cotton line and prints very elegant-looking velvet-textured prints.

On the photographic side of media options, all of our bright white glossy and semi-glossy fibre-based papers put out a phenomenal range. They are all meant to emulate different versions of old-style air dried chemical bath papers that film photographers were used to exposing in the darkroom. These papers include Sunset Fibre Gloss, Sunset Fibre Elite and Sunset Fibre Satin.

Our newest paper in this category is Sunset Fibre Rag, which is 100% cotton and has a warm tone to the base. Even though it is warm in tone, the range is very large and the texture is very fitting to that style of paper.

For RC photo-based paper replicas, nothing tops the gamut of the Sunset Photo Gloss Paper. It reflects the most light, has a high-gloss wet-looking surface like one you would receive from a photo lab providing chemical-style glossy prints.

Also ever so popular for printers looking for a beautiful thick luster paper (e-surface) is our Sunset Photo eSatin Paper. This paper has a very cool white point and the surface is the most popular amongst the RC-emulating class of papers.

LexJet will provide you with the ICC profiles for every media above mentioned. If we do not list one here for your technology we will happily make one for you free of charge! Next time, we’ll tackle Step 3 in the color management to-do list: understanding ICC Profiles and settings. In the meantime, feel free to call us any time at 800-453-9538 with questions.

New Canvas Maximizes Quality for Solvent, Latex and UV-Curable Printers

New Era Portfolio Print on Sunset by Fredrix
Fine art print on Sunset by Fredrix Satin Canvas SUV by New Era Portfolio, Austin, Texas.

 

For print shops looking to maximize the quality of their canvas production output, LexJet and Fredrix co-developed Sunset by Fredrix Satin Canvas SUV. The new canvas was designed to maximize image quality when using solvent, low-solvent, latex and UV-curable inks.

“Best canvas to date. Our color came out perfect; we have never seen a truer white hue before.  We have received numerous customer compliments, so they can definitely see the difference. Thank you for helping our business produce the highest quality at the best price,” says Zach Gardynski, Director of Operations, New Era Portfolio, Austin, Texas.

The poly-cotton canvas has a traditional two-over-one weave with a bright-white, pH-neutral, acid-free base for consistent, high-quality printing, whether it’s a production run of 1,000 décor canvas wraps or a custom fine-art print.

“Canvas print production is a high-growth market segment. Our goal is to help print shops with solvent, latex and UV-curable printers maximize their success in the canvas market. This new canvas, with its bright white point and consistent print surface, is designed to do just that,” says Jaimie Mask, LexJet product manager.

Sunset by Fredrix Satin Canvas SUV is easy to work with during production and post-production: it won’t crack during stretching and can be mounted and framed. Now available from LexJet’s North American Distribution Network, Sunset by Fredrix Satin Canvas SUV comes in 30″, 36″, 54″, 60″ and 64″ widths.