We recently bought a Groupon for half off a “wrapped canvas” picture from Canvas on Demand. Basically, this is where the picture is wrapped around a frame, so the sides are thick, but you don’t need a frame. We wanted to get a large version of the “train tracks” picture that I’m using as the header of the blog. In fact, we ended up upgrading to 20×30, which cost a little extra on top of what we paid for the Groupon.

It turned out fantastic! But that is not why I’m recommending the company, per say.

We had a lot of difficulty sizing the picture. First off, the canvas wasn’t exactly the same dimensions as the picture. Second off, because the picture is wrapped around the frame, it was difficult to determine exactly how much space to leave to account for the wrapping. This was especially difficult because my outstretched hand comes very close to the picture on one side, so we didn’t want that to get wrapped around the edge.

After fumbling around for hours trying to get it right, we eventually just sort of threw our hands up. It said on their website there was a special technique they could do to stretch the edges of the picture for the wrapped sides, and that they would do the cropping if you left explicit instructions. So we just submitted it to them, gave them instructions on what we wanted to see, and crossed our fingers.

This is the sort of thing that makes me very nervous. I like to see a preview. I like to know that everything is exactly right before committing anything. This was especially true in this case, since it is a *huge* picture, so any minor error was going to be magnified, and it was a significant expense. And you know how these things usually go: some clock-puncher who’s just grinding out his 40 chops off the hand and prints it, not caring how it looks. Or maybe some glitchy computer program decides on the best configuration, without anybody looking it over.

We never heard back from them or saw any kind of preview. So when the picture arrived, I practically tore open the box to see how it came out. They did it perfectly! A human being obviously looked at it, understood what we wanted, and made it so. Sadly, this is noteworthy in this day and age.

So we are very pleased with our picture. It is decently pricey, but if you consider how much it would have cost to have the picture blown up and then custom framed, it is actually very cost effective (custom framing is expensive!).

If anybody is looking to get something like this, I’d recommend these guys (though you already missed out on the groupon…sorry!)