New Product: Self-Adhesive Cloth

At Canada on Canvas we now have an exiting new product for designers and crafters. It is called removable adhesive cloth and it is unlike anything I have ever seen.

This material has the texture and durability of cloth, but has a self-adhesive backing like a sticker. It can be stuck on most surfaces, and even better, can be removed and re-positioned without loosing it's stickiness. It is also water resistant and very flexible, so it can be used to wrap around corners.

Of course, the best thing about this material is that it is receptive to the Giclee process. It can be run though our fine art printers, so we can print it with any image you can imagine in beautiful full colour. 

Ideas for Designers:

This product can be used in many home decor applications. Many designers have started incorporating vinyl cut decals into room design, and Self adhesive cloth is another easy to apply wall decoration, but with a softer look and more colour. I have designed some lovely wall murals as examples. These repeating patterns can be printed any length and can stretch all or part way around a room.

Ideas For Business

Businesses could also make good use of this easy advertising solution. We have already had an order a full fridge door sticker, with a beautiful full colour image related to the organization’s philosophy. The great thing about this material is that it can be used to turn any surface into an opportunity for delivering a message. 

Ideas for Crafers

There are also many smaller projects that could be done with this material. It could be:

---Placed on the front of a light fixture or lamp shade for a personalized back lit image.

---Made into stickers to hand out in gift bags at events.

---Used for decorations on computers and personal electronics.

But my favourite idea comes from my own love of bookbinding. With this material it would be easy to design and create custom cloth book covers – think the old fashioned Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, but in cloth! With a little measuring and cropping, and some text, any journal, note book, old, beloved hardback, or hand-bound book project can have custom designed cover art! No gluing required! I for one can't wait to try this.

With all these possibilities, I can't wait to see what you come up with!

New! Fine Art Cards

It has been said “T'is better to give than receive”, and judging from our customers, this is certainly true! Or customers love to give gifts, especially personalized gifts. Since we know no gift is complete without a card, We are now offering personalized card sets printed with images and text that you choose.

These card sets are great for sending out family Christmas cards from home or from a business. They can be used as wedding invitations or birth announcements, party invitations or thank – you cards. We always include envelopes, you just add the address!

Personalized cards are great to include with gifts, as it is a little something extra to remind the receiver of you! Because you are using your own image or design, you will never have to agonize over the racks of cards at the store, and your gift will always be unique.

For artists, gift cards are a wonderful way to give your work some exposure. People who love your work will be happy to have a copy of the beautiful images to keep, even if they can't buy the whole painting. Many artists Find that art cards are a great way to supplement their income. At Canada on Canvas we always use pigment-based inks and high quality paper, so you know that your cards will be bright, sharp and long-lasting.

Ordering is not easier than ever with our online order form. The only hard part is choosing the picture!

Father's Day

Special offer to blog readers: 15% off canvas art when you use the coupon code LOVEDAD

Father's day is approaching, And on june 19^th, I am sure all of us who where blessed with good dads will get a little nostalgic for that first and most important man in our lives. Not everybody has a good dad, but that fact just makes those of us who do all the more grateful for the family we lucked in to. I personally had a really amazing father. He was, and is, totally supportive and caring, and even if he can be a bit of a jerk sometimes, he always made it completely obvious that he loved me and my sister more than anything else in the world. And I forgot to call him on his birthday.

This is the thing about fathers. Somehow, even though they know you love them, and you know it means so much to them, they seem to rarely ever get told it. Maybe because they are men, and men are supposed to be less demonstrative than women, we think it would be better for these things to remain unspoken. No mater how much we think something is understood, however, it is always good to let someone know for sure how special and important they are to us.

It seems like we never forget Mom. We send her flowers or a gift, or at least a phone. We will never forget mothers day, because we are reminded months in advance. It is estimated that, on a national level, we spend 4.8 billion more on mothers day than on fathers day. Mothers are important, of course, but so are fathers, but it seems we tell them so less often. This June, maybe it is time to make up for past silences and make sure dad gets the message loud and clear.

Loud and clear does not have to mean unsubtle or not beautiful. At Canada on Canvas we can create a personalized canvas print or fine art paper print from any photo you like, so you can give Dad a very personal gift that he will love. Pictures, especially family photos, are records of all of the good times you have had together, and of how far you have come. We can create a canvas print from an old family photo, or we can design a custom collage on canvas of pictures from the photo album or of his grand-kids.

Photos of the grand-kids are another great gift idea for Dad. His grandchildren are the most precious gift you will ever give him, and seeing their smiling faces will always bring him joy. These do not have to be professional shots. Some of the best photos are candid snapshots that happen to record a special day or moment. Kids tend to make the best subject for candid shots, since they are vary active, and often most adorable at their most infuriating moments (it's their survival tactic).

At Canada on Canvas We are starting to offer a new service that we are calling 'Text Art'. It works this way: you send us a text document with the message that you want printed. It could be a collection of memories, A short letter or poem, or a collection of words that express how you feel. Let us know how you want it to look, and we will create a piece of text art to be printed on canvas. We will send you a proof, and if you like what we have done, we will print it for you!

Any text can be made into art. I have created two examples using the text of this blog post!

You know what dad would like best, Just be sure not to forget him on June 19^th, Father's day.

Text as Art

I have been seeing an interesting trend in the art that our customers at Canada on Canvas have recently been sending us. The trend is Text Art, and in reminds me both of the concrete poetry of the 1950's, and of the tradition of embroidered samplers. It is always interesting when old traditions get re-cycled and re-vamped by new technology.

Writing is perhaps our second-most common means of communication. In the past, we used to write letters to those we loved to share our feelings. Nowadays writing is more ephemeral. Whether it is an email or a text message, we read it and forget it.

But it seems that people still value heartfelt words, and look for ways to preserve their thoughts and send them to loved ones. Recently at Canada on Canvas, we have received many orders for canvas prints that are not photos or even images at all, they are made up entirely of text. Usually these will be collections of memories or thoughts about the person the gift is for, letting them know all the ways they are cared about and appreciated. We always say that when giving gifts it is the thought that counts, and these original people have discovered a way to give the thought itself!

Text is the perfect way to convey a message, but it is also a visual form that can be beautiful in itself. In the 1950's poets and artists experimented with the visual quality of text to produce pieced that combined the visual and the linguistic. With the renewed interest in typography and design, there has recently been a new interest in this type of art. Many digital artists are investigating the possibilities of text or font-based art with exiting results.

There are also some great tools on the internet that can generate text art out of text that you make. One is Wordle, which will create a “text cloud” based on the most used words in your text.

Here is one I created using the text of this blog post there are also many online tools that will create ascii art. They allow you to feed an image into the programme and it “writes” it using keyboard characters. Digital artists and designers can create personalized images that combine art and text in innovative and beautiful ways. At Canada on Canvas we can print these images on fine art paper or canvas, creating one of a kind gifts or wall decorations.

Fathers Day is coming up in June, and what better way to let dad know what you really mean to him than with a canvas print cataloguing the memories that you treasure, or the lessons he has taught you. Often these things go unspoken...but they deserve to be recorded and remembered.

Classic Art Prints from Canada on Canvas

At Canada on Canvas we we know how important art is in people's lives. Art can make you happy, it is something beautiful that can be enjoyed by everyone. Canada on Canvas believes that everyone can be and artist. We know this because very day we create Fine Art giclees from the stunning photos and art images send us by our customers. We also host an online art gallery of Canadian artists, helping them with selling their art more easily. We believe that the single best thing about Giclee printing is that it can help make art available to everyone.

We also know that Art, specifically painting and drawing, has a long history. Painters like Renoir, Monet, and Cezanne, people who worked in many different times in history and in countries in the world, are still loved today for the striking, beautiful, and sometimes unsettling images that they produced. Many of these images have become iconic, like Van Gogh's “starry night” , but many more are less well known, but are just as beautiful and interesting.

To view a selection of some of the best classic art of the past, visit the Classic Art Gallery at CanadaonCanvas.com, where we have a gallery of high resolution images of many great artists. The best part is, all of these images can be ordered as a giclee canvas print in a variety of sizes for only the price of the print. Because we use the highest quality of inks and canvas, and high resolution files of these classic art images, the canvas prints we make for you are as close as possible to owning the original painting.

Of course not everyone can own an original Morisot. The treasures of art are kept in museums so that they can be seen by everyone. But this art was made to be enjoyed, and a treasured painting is something you want to be able to see every day, not just once in a while. Fine art printing can let you own the painting for a tiny fraction of the the cost, and also allows and unlimited number of people to own the same painting, without taking away from the enjoyment of others. This is made possible due to fine art scanning technology, which convert the colours and brush strokes to digital information so that it can be reproduced digitally. The power to convert and image to digital has greatly increased the availability of fine art to its audience. A great example of this is the Google Art project, which has digitized and mapped dozens of galleries and thousands of artworks.

Digital images are great, but no one wants to look at a painting on a computer screen for very long. This is where giclee printing comes in. Before it was possible to print on canvas, the only way to hang a classic art piece in your own home was either to be a millionaire, or to purchase a poster print of the classic work. Paper, however, lacks the physical presence and texture of a classic painting. The giclee process has allowed printers a much greater choice in the materials they print on, and many companies not make canvas for the giclee process this canvas can be stretched in exactly the same manner in which artists and their assistants once stretched the canvas on which they worked. A canvas print is one step closer to the look and feel of the original and for this reason it has become a popular choice for art reproduction among artist and art lovers.

To view our Classic Art Gallery and order prints, please visit CanadaOnCanvas.com

Mothers day is coming up fast! if you are considering buying mom a personalized canvas print, or a print on canvas of a classic art work, be sure to use the code "lovemom" and recive a 15% OFF!

The code is valid until may 8th, but order now to make sure mom gets her gift on time!





Give her flowers that won't fade! order a beautiful canvas print!

Giclees Explained

Giclee is a word used to mean a fine-art printing process that uses digital images and high-end printers, inks, paper and canvas material. The word literally means “to spray” and is a reference to the way the printer sprays the ink onto the canvas. Giclee is a relatively new process that has been increasing in popularity among artists and photographers over the last ten years.

How It Works

The Giclee process starts with a digital image file. Most of the time we print from files taken from a digital camera. We can also print from scans, or digital art created on the computer or though a combination of scanning, photography, and digital imaging programs. The image is prepared for printing. It is sent to the printer, and the image is sprayed on a “substrate” (paper or other material) using pigment-based inks.

The word “Giclee” is also used more specifically to refer to printing on canvas using the Giclee process. Since Giclee printers can print on a wide variety of materials, it is popularly used to reproduce fine art, or make photographs into canvas pieces. The image is sprayed onto canvas, and the canvas is stretched on a wooden frame.

In order to create Giclees on canvas, the canvas print is taken by a framer and “gallery wrapped” to create the traditional look of an artist's canvas. (gallery wrapping refers to a canvas being wrapped or stretched around a wooden frame. This is the method that artists have been using for centuries to prepare their canvases for painting and hanging. Many paintings in museums are mounted using this same process) the canvas can then be framed using almost any type of frame, or left unframed for a more modern look.

Alternatives to Giclee:

There are other ways to produce printed artwork. Previous to the development of Giclee, artists used four-colour offset lithography to produce copies of their work. This process is still used, and is more economical for large print runs, but due to the difficult and time-consuming setup involved, offset printers often require print runs of 1000 or more. For individuals or artists running on-demand businesses, Gilcee are much more economical.

Artwork can also be transferred to canvas using a chemical canvas-transfer process. This works quite well, but it requires a printed original that can be sacrificed, since the process strips the inks out of the print and transfers it to the canvas. This is a physical rather than a digital process, it can only be done once, and the image can not be re-sized for the size of the original. It is quite effective for mounting posters that deserve a more elegant display, but it is not recommended for irreplaceable originals, and it is not actually a reproduction method, since you start with one print and end with one canvas.

Advantages to Giclees

The major advantage to the Giclee process is its accessibility and quality. With this process, it is possible for anyone to make almost any image into a fine art print or canvas. Professional artists can use it to reproduce work and sell to more customers, photographers can use it to create beautiful displays of their shots, and others can use it to make art out of family photos, great vacation photos, or any image they just happen to like. Because the setup for Giclee is digital, it is no problem to do single prints. There is no time-consuming chemical process or expensive setup, but the high quality of the pigment-based inks, the precision of the printer, the fine texture of the material and the high quality available from digital files insures that the print rivals other processes in colour, detail, and texture.

If you are starting with a physical image, whether an old photograph, a poster or a painting, the image can be scanned to create a digital copy, and then printed using the Giclee process. The quality of the final product will depend on the quality of the scan. The improvement in digital scanners means that paintings, photos, negatives, and slide can yield very excellent results. A major benefit of digital reproduction is that it you can increase and decreasee the size easily, making both posters and art cards, large canvases and small, from the same image.

Please visit out site at canadaoncanvas.com for moer information and to order your giclees

Rules Of Composition

Rules, Rules! I hear you say. Not in this day and age!

No-one want s to be told what to do, especially when it comes to creative expression, but everyone wants to know how to do it better. There are things to be learned from even the most outdated compositional techniques (they where, after all, perfected over hundreds of years). So as long as we all realize that rules are meant to be broken, let's see what we can learn.

The rule of thirds:

The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.

The rule of thirds for portraits is that the subject's eyes should be positioned at the one-third mark from the top of the frame.

Rabatment of the Rectangle:

This is another (strangle named) rule for dividing up pictorial space. It is based on the idea that each rectangle contains 2 squares, one built from one of the shorter edges and the second form the other. This rule states that important

compositional elements should be placed along the inside edges of these imaginary squares to create visual tension.

the golden rectangle is a special case of rabatment. The squares made by the short side divides the rectangle into thirds that are the same ratio as the original rectangle.

“if it's not good enough, you're not close enough”

It is a good idea to focus in on the important part of your picture, give the viewer all the good stuff and none of the filler...unless of course the background context gives important details or positioning in the frame creates tension....like all rules, this one works well, except when it doesn't.

Colours:

Sometimes a colorful image is not one with a lot of different colours, but one that has a lot of one colour. This is one advantage of really focusing in on your subject, you can get a lot of one very vibrant colour without the distraction of other elements. Also, a scene in which there is a lot of one colour often makes an interesting and pleasing composition.

Black and White:

What makes a good black and white photo is a complete tonal range. This means that the whites white in the image is pure white, and the blackest black is pure black. This does not mean that there has to be an equal amount of blacks and whites in the image. Although there can be, you can also take very dramatic photos that are mostly dark or mostly white. Images with a lot of dark tones are referred to as “low-key” and images with a lot of paler hues are called “high-key”. However, even in these images it is important to have a complete tonal range.

Complimentary Colours:

Every colour has it's opposite, and when these composites are put together, they enhance each-other. Here are a list of complimentary colour pairings.

Red and green

blue and orange

yellow and violet

if you can create compositions using predominately one pair of these colours, the colours will appear very vibrant.

Of course, often what is most important about a picture is not that it has textbook composition, but that it captures a moment that has become a treasured memory. Pictures of loved one and special times have something that no amount of composition can make up for, and that is why they are our favorites!

Selling YOUR Art

Our Artist's Gallery Program is a great way to make your art available online, and make money without hassle. All you need to do is create an account, and you can direct interested buyers to your page, where they can order prints-on-demand of your work. This is a detailed run-through of how it works. For a quick overview see the page on our site.

Physical art galleries have many advantages. they are social meeting places and they allow viewers to be in the presence of the work in real life. Galleries also exist in only one place, so the work they display is only ever available to a select number of people who happen to be in the right place at the right time. Online galleries, on the other hand, have the potential to be seen by millions of people all over the world. Google's new Art Gallery Project is an example of how major art galleries are taking advantage of that very fact.

The Artist Gallery Program provides local artists with an online space to display their work and sell on-demand prints. This allows artists to take advantage of our expertise in creating custom art works on canvas and fine art paper and our shipping system. Artists can sell reproductions to customers all over Canada and the USA without the time commitment and cost of printing and shipping themselves. This gives you more time to do other things, like make work!

Get Started

1) Register online at Canada on Canvas. Please ensure you have entered your billing address, so we know where to send you your checks! Please note that at this point you are registering as a customer. We will create you artist account later.

2) Send us an email indicating that you want to be part of the Artist Gallery Program. Include a link to your website, if you have one, or 5 examples of your work.

3)We will send you an email once your account has been created. You can then log on to your account and upload high resolution JPGs of your artwork.

How to Upload:
1) Log on to you account
2) Click the "My Uploads" tab at the top of the screen
3) Click on the "browse" button and select the files from your computer, then hit "upload". (the file type must be JPG, and the maximum file size is 16 MB)
4) Once the image has been uploaded, click the "add to my gallery" button under the image.




Complete your profile

Your customers will want to know some information about you and your work. Completing your profile will give them some extra information if they are curious.
All of this information can be entered under the "My Gallery" tab in your profile.
You can include a Bio by in the "Gallery Settings" section. This will let people know a little more about you and the ideas and experience behind your work.
In "My Gallery" you will see two words under each image you have uploaded, "edit and "del"


If you click edit, you will be taken to a page where you can enter a description of the work and keywords to help people search.

clicking "del" will remove the image from the gallery.
This is also the page where you adjust your pricing.
Don't forget to hit "save" at the bottom of the screen when you are done!



Pricing

Now you get to define the price we will sell your work for. Canada On Canvas makes its money from the printing cost, so you may increase the price by adding a percent of the printing cost, all of which you will receive. We set the base price at printing plus 10%, so if you do not adjust the price you will receive ten percent of the printing cost whenever your work sells.

Since we offer your customers the option of ordering your canvas prints in a variety of sizes an media, the base price is variable. This is why your commission is a percentage and not a strait dollar amount. An example might make this clearer.

If you upload an image and leave the price as "base price", and someone orders a 16X20 gallery wrap, they will pay $121.00 (before taxes and shipping). You will receive $11.00. If they order a 20X30 gallery wrap, they will pay $161.70, and you will receive $14.70.

If, however, you set the percentage in the drop-down menu to 30%, they the customer would see the price as $154.00 for a 16X20, and you would receive $44.00 (30+10(base commission)=40% of printing price).

Getting Paid

If your account balance reaches $100.00 in any month, we'll send your payment before the end of the following month via check or PayPal. For example, if your account balance reaches the payment threshold during August, we'll send you a payment at the end of September.

if you have further questions please check our FAQ, or contact us.

Metalic Paper Gives Brilliant Results

Here at Canada on Canvas we love photo Metallic Paper. It is a great product with a unique effect that has become popular with professional photographers. Since it is a relatively new paper for the inkjet process, we thought our other customers could benefit from knowing a little more about it.

This innovative product from Lexjet, when printed with pro-quality pigment based inks, gives the final print a deep metallic sheen that is unlike any other photo paper. It works amazingly well for textures like satin, chrome, and glossy skin, and gives prints the sense of luxury that those materials imply.

Until the development of Lexjet Photo Metallic paper, results like these where only available to photographers using chemical photo-processing equipment. This Lexjet product makes the process of getting stunning metallic prints simpler and more environmentally friendly. At Vancouver on Canvas we can print directly from digital files from your camera onto metallic paper, giving your pictures that extra 'pop' that catches the eye.

Since the surface of this paper is one of it's selling points, it is a good idea to think of mounting options that don't use glass. Spray mounting on foam core or wood is a simple option that works well.

What others are saying:

Ron Martinsen of Ronmart.Blogspot.com raves about this paper in an article with the provocative title “This Paper Sells Prints”. He makes the point that a beautiful, eye-catching print is more likely to attract attention that an image on a hard-drive. Brian Hampton told the Lexjet blogger that the paper gave him the best of both worlds -durability and excellent detail, such as he had not found in other products.

Photo by Mario Werder, via Flikr

TIPS: Which images to try

From what I have seen there are no hard and fast rules about what works and what doesn't, but here are a few tips on what images to try, based on my experience and discussion forums by those far more experienced that me.

-black and white images, the metallic paper gives them a silvery sheen

-images of naturally glossy or shiny things, like satin, water, or new cars.

-images with a lot of high-impact reds and oranges (like sunsets)

-High-contrast images with deep colours.

-Very sharp images.

We invite you to try out your images on the Lexjet Metallic Paper available at Canada on Canvas. You just might love what you see!

photo by Shadowgate Via Flickr

Art Scanning: Reproducing the Irreplaceable

The wonderful thing about digital images is their infinite promise...the promise of infinite copies, that is! As long as that file exists, your work of art or treasured photo can be altered, touched up, re-sized and re-printed as many times as you desire.

(a doodle I scanned and coloured using digital colouring book techniques)

Digitizing your images

The best way to make a digital copy of an original image is using a scanner. It is also possible to use a digital camera, but that's a little trickier. Flatbed scanners are pretty common and can produce good quality scans that are editable and printable. The process of scanning is quite easy, but there are a couple of tips that will help you to get good results.

Tip: Output Type

Scanners usually have a couple of different settings for how they will see an image. This is called the 'output type' and you need to set it before you hit scan. You usually have a choice between “millions of colours” colour palettes of various sizes, gray scale and black and white (sometimes called 'line art'). Millions of colours works best for photos and artwork, and 'line art' works for scanning text documents. This setting creates an effect that looks like an photocopy.

Tip: Set the resolution

All scanners can copy at various resolutions. The higher the resolution, the larger the file, and the more information the scanner will pick up. So if you want to increase the size of the image, it is a good idea to scan at a higher resolution, say 600 dpi.

-72 dpi (ppi) is the size of most web images.

-300 dpi is print standard for many types of print media.

So if you are not looking to increase the size of something, 300 dpi is enough. There is no need to make a meticulously large and hard to handle file. Especially since often the thing you are scanning does not have any more information that 300 dpi.

Tip: Adjust the white point

Most newer and higher quality flatbed scanners have an option to set the white point on the scan before capturing, this is like setting the exposure on your digital camera. It allows you to optimize the image your scanner captures by aligning the darkest part of you image to true black, and the whites part of your image to true white. Basically, you can do this by using the “levels” tool in the scanner interface. This shows you a box with a histogram of the distribution of white and black in you image. By adjusting the whitest and blackest points available to match the lightest and darkest points in your image, you can force the scan to expand the tonal range of the image. This is a little complicated but worth it. For a more much more detailed explanation see here.

High Resolution Scanners

Some pictures are too large or too detailed to scan using a desktop flatbed scanner. If you want to get a good, reproducible image of original art work, especially large paintings with lots of detail or texture in the paint, an ordinary scanner will not be able to give good results. Here at Canada on Canvas, we use a Cruse brand scanner for fine art reproduction. This is a large flatbed scanner that can scan objects up to a depth of 4 inches and 42x78 inches square. This scanner allows us to produce giclees on canvas that get as close to the original as is possible with digital technology. With this service, artists can produce prints of an original, which means more people can enjoy the work, and the artist can make a little more money!

Scanners are a great tool for artists. They facilitate all kinds of printing and editing options, and they are essential if you want to display your work on the web. Some artists even use scanners to produce work, using a technique called scanography, but that will be the subject of my next post.

New From LexJet: Satin Cloth!

Satin cloth is a new material developed for the Giclee process. It has many of the advantages of canvas, and offers new possibilities for displaying your art. It can be sewn, stretched or hung like canvas, and it has even been hung outside!

Satin Fabric has a very smooth texture which does not conflict with the fine detail in your image bright whites give it superior colour response. Some people describe it's look and feel as being like vellum. This product is exiting for us here are Canada on Canvas because it's translucency allows for highly creative and beautiful mounting options.

Satin cloth and canvas printing have various pros and cons. We have created this chart comparing them

attributes	Lexjet Water-Resistant Satin Cloth Giclee	Canvas Giclee
texture	Smooth texture, good for capturing fine detail and sharpness. Vellum-like feel	Woven texture, good for softening images and masking defects, traditional canvas feel
Colour response	Excellent. Accepts high levels of ink saturation. PreLume technology provides brighter white points.	Excellent. High levels of ink saturation and bright white point.
opacity	90% (translucent)	Greater that 99%
weight	Very light-weigh (130g per sq meter)	Heavy (410 g per sq meter)
Stretch-mounting?	yes	yes
Water resistance	Very high	High

Mounting Options:

Lexjet water-resistant satin cloth is stretchable like canvas, and can be mounted for wall hanging. Other mounting options offer the possibility of taking advantage of the material's transparency. Mounting using back-lighting works very well with this material, because the smooth weave of Satin Cloth acts as a natural diffuser, making the whole image glow with light.

Window Display:

One simple option is to use poster hangers to create a banner that hangs in front of a source of light, like a window or a indirect light source. This could be done by using poster hangers like these:

or these,

OR by sewing a pocket into the top and bottom of the cloth, and inserting a dowel to suspend the banner from.

The satin cloth is water resistant, so consider using it in outdoor applications as well. Here is story from the Lexjet web page that attests to the durability of this material

“ [the artist] took the [satin cloth] screen down to the beach for a marketing shoot, he placed it in the water and shot it. Then, the screen tipped over into the surf and was soaked with salt water. He took it home, rinsed it off with a garden hose and left it standing outdoors exposed to the elements for two months. The colours remained totally colourfast.”

Commercial Banner Display

Another mounting option is using a commercial banner displays like these, which can be back-lit, or use the ambient light in the room or outdoor area to show off the Satin Cloth's transparency. Displays like these are available here.

the Lexjet blog has a great post on innovative business ideas using this material.

Light-boxes

A very beautiful and original option for displaying your Satin Cloth print is to create a light-box. A light-box is a framed box that with light mounted inside, and a translucent image on the front. They are often used commercially and by professional artists, but Satin Cloth printing allows them to be created affordability for home decor.

A Light-box turns your image into a creative ambient lighting solution, as well as highlighting the particular beauty of your image. Back-lighting increases the presence and richness of saturated colours, it lends an ethereal quality to soft or misty images, and it makes skin really glow in portraits.

Cost comparison: Satin Cloth Mounting Options

for a 20x30 print ($61 printing cost)

mounting	Do we do it?	Cost	Advantage
Stretch mounting	yes	$62.00	Finished and, ready to hang. Beautifully textured fine wall art.
Poster Hangers	no	$16.95	Simple to order and install, can be hung on wall or window for natural light back-lit effect.
Commercial banners	no	$49.00	Professional displays for trade shows or point of sale displays
Light Boxes	No right now: check back soon	$250-300	Original and beautiful wall are and lighting solution. Makes any photo come alive.

I came across this book review while browsing Ken Rockwell's extremely informative photo site and I though I would share it with you:

“Bruce Barnbaum's The Art of Photography is the best book I've read in over 40 years of reading about photography.

This book is for people with visual imagination. If you're a scientist or engineer looking for some fast 1-dimensional formulae that will let you pop out great photos without having to stop and think long and hard about your subject and your message, you won't understand this book. This isn't a book about rules and exposure. It's a brilliant book that finally explains everything that goes into making a serious photograph — and why rules are "...mindless things that raise you quickly to a level of acceptable mediocrity, then prevent you from progressing further."

Read the rest of the review here

Here is Barnbaum's description of what makes a good photograph. It is interesting that he talks about what the photograph does, rather than what the photograph looks like.

“a meaningful photograph - a successful photograph - does one of several things. It allows, or forces, the viewer to see something that he has looked at many times without really seeing; it shows him something he has never previously encountered; or, it raises questions – perhaps ambiguous or unanswerable - that create mysteries, doubts, or uncertainties. In other words, it expands our vision and our thoughts. It extended horizons. It evokes awe, wonder, amusement, compassion, horror, or any of a thousand responses. It sheds new light on our world, raises questions about our world, or creates it's own world.”

Tilt-Shift Photography

Photographs where once celebrated because they could show us the world as it is, but as soon as the photographic technique was invented, people began finding ways to use the camera to show us the world as it isn't.

The one beautiful example of this is tilt-shift photography, a technique used by photographers like Vincent Laforet use to create the uncanny effect of making the real world look like a miniature model.

“Tilt shift lenses focus on a single part of the photo and shift (blur) the surrounding area to create an optical illusion of miniaturized scenery. Real tilt shift lenses are quite expensive, but a similar effect can be achieved by using Photoshop after you take the photo.”

Notes the Visual Photo Guide. (click the link for a great tutorial on how to achieve this effect in photoshop)

with the current popularity of photoshop effect like pop art, we no longer have to rely on paint and canvas to show others the world of our imaginations.