TechRevu Review

Fine Art Printing on Canvas
Review by David Em
Epson ISBN/ITEM#: 1002CANVASPRINT
Date: 21 January 2010

Links: Epson Canvas / Breathing Color's Chromata White / Glamour 2 Brush On Coating /

Contributing Editor David Em hits the trenches to take digital printing into another dimension with wall-size inkjet canvases.

A few years ago I tried producing digital prints that looked and felt like paintings. The results were dismal. The inks peeled, the surface coatings cracked, and the color gamut of the images sucked. There wasn’t a whole lot to like, so I gave up on the idea.

Then last year, while testing Epson’s Stylus Pro 7900 printer, I ran a few feet of the company’s Premium Canvas Satin, and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the images. The colors were strong, the tonal range was reasonable, and the overall visual impact had a painterly rather than photographic quality. I decided it was time to give canvas printing another whirl.

THE MATERIAL WORLD

Although I was impressed by the image quality of the Epson canvas, I had some reservations about the end product. The surface of Epson’s Premium Satin canvas looks speckled, as if the elevated “ridges” of the weave have been spritzed with a shiny spray that reflects light differently from the lower “valleys” of the weave where the spray doesn’t penetrate. (I later tested their Premium Matte Canvas, which is nice and smooth.)

However it turns out that if you want to produce a print that’ll last a while, the surface qualities of the print when it emerges from the printer are irrelevant because the inks are so easy to scratch or scrape, you must protect your canvases with some sort of coating. The coating’s reflective properties will determine the final optical surface the viewer of the picture perceives.

I sprayed my Epson Satin Canvas tests with a can of Premier’s lacquer-based Print Shield, which works well on paper prints. That evened out the Premium Satin Canvas’s speckled surface nicely, but didn’t do much good in the abrasion-resistance department, so I poked around the internet looking for a solution.

NEW PLAYERS

The first interesting data point my search turned up was that it appears canvas printing is the fastest growing sector of the digital print market. There are now a host of media suppliers producing inkjet canvas products, including Hahnemuhle, Fredrix, Premier, and LexJet, among many others. One manufacturer I turned up was Breathing Color, a company whose primary business is dedicated to museum-quality archival inkjet canvas printing.

Breathing Color’s commited to creating a complete canvas printing solution, from a canvas substrate with an ink-receptive ground to a coating layer that protects the finished product from the vicissitudes of life in the real world.

GOING LYVE

A little more online research revealed Breathing Color’s Chromata White canvas has a good reputation among professional photographers. I called the company and learned about a new product slated to replace Chromata White called Lyve. Breathing Color sent me a roll of each to test. I proofed several small photographs and art images on Chromata White with the Epson Stylus Pro 7900 printer, and quickly determined its reputation is well-deserved: the canvas produces strong colors and a wide range of tones.

Next I ran the Lyve tests, which delivered even better color saturation and Dmax levels (the range of tones from black to white), leaving no doubt that inkjet printing on canvas has come a long, long way over the last few years from its early dismal incarnations.

Further testing showed that the uncoated Chromata White and Lyve surfaces are just as subject to damage as the Epson canvas, so I prepared for Stage Two of the process, coating the images with a protective layer.

ROLLING YOUR OWN

Breathing Color’s developed a water-based liquid acrylic for just this purpose called Glamour II that you can roll or spray. It comes in Gloss and Matte. You can mix Gloss and Matte together to produce a Satin finish that’s fine-tuned to your particular presentation needs.

I tried the rolling option first by applying Glamour II to the Chromata White and Lyve test prints using a dense-foam paint roller. Glamour II has a goopy consistency that rolls out easily. It contains a leveling agent that eliminates bubbling and other surface inconsistencies to produce a tough, even coating.

Undiluted Matte Glamour II produces a very flat, almost dead surface, while the Gloss is way too shiny to my eye. After some experimentation, I came up with a formula that consisted of about twenty percent Gloss to eighty percent Matte. This produced a very satisfying surface that’s easy on the eyes.

The 100 percent Matte formulation adds a slight yellowing filtration and makes the prints measurably darker. Adding Gloss to the mix increases light transmission and contrast, making the blacks blacker and the colors punchier. The darkening and warming effects are more pronounced in Glamour II than in similar acrylic varnish coatings from Liquitex and Golden Artist Colors, however Glamour II’s big win over its competition is that it produces a superior level surface when it dries, without brush strokes or bubbles.

Mucking around with rollers and liquid goop is decidedly messy. Once you start working with these materials you need to trade in your squeaky clean digital darkroom for what amounts to a painting studio, complete with spills, splatters, and fumes. I quickly realized that to do any but the most rudimentary testing of these materials would require creating a new kind of lab environment.

THE BIG PICTURE

As it happened, my colleague Mark Beaulieu and I had a show of our California Freeway photography coming up at Gallery 262, an exhibition space associated with the Escondido Arts Center, a community arts organization in Escondido, California. We’d been thinking about creating a wall-sized piece for the show, but hadn’t come up with a practical way of creating and mounting a piece on that scale. I suggested we try to produce the image by printing it on strips of canvas, giving us a chance to test the limits of every aspect of the technology.

Pulling this off turned out to be a less than trivial exercise. First we composited a dozen high-resolution photographs shot with a Canon 5D of a freeway under construction into a single image in Photoshop. This yielded a file about two gigabytes in size, the largest visual dataset we’d ever worked with (I’ll pass over the gory details here, but suffice it to say this kind of activity’s not for the faint of heart). Then we divided the composited image into four vertical files, each measuring two feet wide, to be printed with the Epson Stylus Pro 7900 on Breathing Color’s Chromata White.

The printing side of the operation went without a hitch; the canvas prints had great color, tone, and detail. But if the printed strips were going to survive a crowded gallery opening, they’d need to be coated properly. To do this, Mark built an outdoor spray booth made out of polyethylene sheets. We tacked a set of test prints to angled plywood boards inside the booth, loaded up a spray gun with Glamour II thinned with water and mixed to my 80%/20% Matte/Gloss formula, donned protective coveralls, headgear, air filters, gloves, and goggles, fired up the air compressor, and started spraying.

Getting the spray mixture’s consistency thinned with water just right took several passes, then we went after the actual print strips we were going to exhibit, spraying them one at a time. Once coated, we took each print indoors to dry while the next one in line was being sprayed. From my earlier paint roller tests, we deduced the prints would need at least two coats of the thinner spray to resist scratching and scuffing. The whole production consumed somewhere between two and a half to three hours.

The end result was fantastic, but I’m not eager to repeat the process. Despite our considerable efforts to insulate ourselves from the spray, the interior of our improvised spray booth was filled with a sticky plastic mist that somehow managed to cling to our eyelashes. I shudder to think what extended exposure to the material does to one’s lungs, making the roller method potentially more attractive.

THE PROOF IN THE PUDDING

A couple days later we rolled up the prints, took them down to Gallery 262, and started puzzling over how to get them up on the wall. Here we were helped by gallery director Joshua Boszan, who came up with the idea of attaching two horizontal lengths of wood lathing to the wall, one at the top of the image area and another at the bottom. Josh painted these white, then tacked the canvas strips to them with a six-inch separation between each vertical canvas strip. The image covered the wall and looked spectacular. Everyone was blown away.

Thinking back on the whole experience, there were some pros and cons to the whole process, with the pluses outweighing the minuses. The biggest win, of course, was that it all worked. The wall-sized freeway image we showed at the gallery would have been prohibitively costly to create, transport, and display if we had produced it with any other form of printing. As it was, our only cost was a couple hundred bucks worth of materials, far less than framing, glazing, packing, and trucking a similar sized traditional print.

We did some further display tests, stretching the canvas prints onto stretcher bars. Again, the end result was great, but there were some hiccups along the way. Typically, when you attach canvas or linen onto bars, the material’s unprimed, so it stretches easily. When you prime it with gesso on the stretcher bars, the canvas becomes tight as a drum. But in our inkjet scenario, all the priming and coating layers are applied first, so there’s very little give to the canvas, making it difficult (but not impossible) to pull it tight enough that it doesn’t sag.

I also found that with less than three rolled layers or four sprayed layers of protective coating, the pigment layer can still crack when bent around the stretcher bar edges, making this a time- and labor-intensive process. And as mentioned above, even with considerable protection, the working procedure’s potentially toxic.

JOBBING IT OUT

I’m not a big fan of handing over my printing to service bureaus. The ability to produce your own world-class color prints distinguishes the digital darkroom workflow from the nasty old days of color chemistry when almost every step of the process, from film developing to printing, had to be entrusted to third parties.

Nevertheless, every day there are more print houses such as Pixel2Canvas in Lake Forest, California that cater to artists and photographers and offer quality canvas printing, coating, and mounting at very reasonable prices. One of the selling points of higher end inkjet printers from Canon, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard is that the output’s supposed to be consistent from device to device, so presumably if you can create a satisfactory canvas proof in your own studio, you should be able to duplicate that result in any size on another machine from the same series that uses the same ink and media.

Imagekind is another outfit you can upload an image file to, after which they will print it on canvas, frame it, and send it to your customer at very reasonable prices. You can even get canvas prints made in an hour at Costco for prices that start as low as forty bucks.

AN OCEAN OF OPTIONS

Most of the big players in the world of art and photography materials have jumped on the canvas printing bandwagon in one way or another. All these companies are developing and refining new inkjet canvas-related products in what’s rapidly becoming a bewildering array of options and competing claims of superior print quality and longevity.

In addition to the canvas makers mentioned earlier, Golden Artist Colors and InkAID make digital grounds, and Premier, Drytac, Golden, and Liquitex make liquid and spray UV coatings, to name only a few.

Some companies like Breathing Color are actively pushing the envelope of this rapidly growing market segment, while others such as Liquitex are lagging behind the curve, with less understanding of the practical issues involved. For example, Liquitex’s acrylic coatings don’t have a leveling agent in them, making brushing or rolling them impractical unless what you’re after is a textured coating.

To make canvas prints on your own, you’ll need to combine products from different outfits, starting with your choice of printer and inks (be sure to use only archival pigment inks). On the canvas front, I liked the image quality of Epson’s Matte Canvas and Breathing Color’s Lyve. Lyve doesn’t use Optical Brighteners in their ground formulation, so their canvas should be more archival than most on the market.

A coating three or four layers thick of Breathing Color’s Glamour II works well for protecting your canvas from the elements, but there are no UV inhibitors in the mix. These can be added with reversible varnishes from Premier, Golden, and Liquitex that can be brushed or sprayed. For reasons mentioned above, I’d elect to use a brushed varnish over a sprayed one (warning: the Liquitex UV spray varnish produces astoundingly noxious fumes).

WRAP

If you’re looking for an alternative to matting, framing, and displaying your pictures under glass, inkjet canvas printing’s now a great alternative. Once you’ve got all the elements in place, you’ll be able to produce bright, detailed, and tough digital paintings that should last over a hundred years.

Return to Index