From a Thought to Your Door: The Canvas Ordering Process
The whirr and crunch of machines provide a soundtrack for a light billow of sawdust scenting the air in the warehouse. Rows of wooden planks, soon to be cut into stretcher bars, sit by hundreds of canvas rolls, miles of protective wrap and a never-ending stream of new, freshly stretched canvses. The loud, punchy sound of a pneumatic staple gun bursts out in frequent, somewhat consistent blasts, punctuating the time and mixing with the sound of the machines to give the place a rhythm. Workers of many types perfectly executing their respective tasks, each different from the next and all important. You’re in our warehouse, a place of sounds, sights and smells, and you’re about to see how a canvas takes its journey from a simple wish in your mind to a package at your door.
Of course, before anything is stretched, we have to receive an order! While we do keep a large amount of canvases in stock in the most popular sizes, as well as those we use for our sister company’s prints, many of our customers order very specific sizes that we actually produce as they’re needed. Our quick and accurate production process is capable of a turnaround time that’s remarkably efficient and fast (so fast we often surprise our clients!). When you order, either online or over the phone, it’s processed by our professional customer service and processing agents in our offices, where we have a powerful computing system that keeps track of all the orders.
These orders are then sent to the warehouse, where the requested canvases are either pulled from our backstock or crafted almost immediately. To stretch your canvas, we first take one of our hundreds of rolls of pre-primed canvas, and use specialized machines to cut it to exact, perfect specifications for your canvas, which is somewhat larger than the final piece in order to leave room for stretching.
We then produce a wooden frame of the correct size for the canvas. We cut our own stretcher bars in shop, using highly-accurate saws that are worked by trained professionals. Each frame requires that we cut four stretchers with corners specially designed to fit together to create the rectangular frame. As we mentioned in our previous post, we use a machine called an underpinner to efficiently put the corners of the frame together, creating a gorgeous frame for the canvas.
From there, the cut canvas and frame are taken by our expert canvas stretchers, who use pneumatic staple guns, staples and stretching pliers to ever so carefully and exactly stretch the canvas over the frame and then staple it in place. This is the heart of the whole process, and it requires an especially professional touch and years of practice to get right. That’s why we hire only the best stretchers around, and also why you can be sure that you’re getting the best possible canvas when you order from us.
After the canvas is stretched, it goes into an almost equally important and exact process of being prepared for shipping. This involves wrapping it in a very specific manner with protective materials, which are taped so that they will ensure protection through the entire shipping process. We then put the canvas in a perfectly sized box, which makes certain that the canvas can’t rattle around in the box during shipping. Since we create so very many custom sized canvases, this requires having quite a few different sizes of boxes on hand, as you can imagine.
Once the order is created and packaged, we process the shipping info, and it arrives on your door in a matter of days! It might interest our readers to know that canvases we stretch for our sister company, Art Warehouses, go through the exact same process as our custom stretched blank canvases, with the added step of the cut canvas being printed on with our amazingly high-tech and beautifully precise giclee printing machines. These machines print line by line in wonderfully high-resolution special ink, creating unbelievable reproductions of paintings that are identical to the original painting.
Our process might sound precise and complicated, but our team of experts has streamlined the whole thing to be so efficient that it takes only days to complete. That’s why we’re able to produce and ship stunning, unsurpassably excellent canvases in almost no time for less than you’d typically spend on the materials to stretch your own canvas.
We’ve made it our mission to bring you the very best canvases anywhere, and save you both time and money doing so. We think we’ve succeeded, but put us to the test! When you’re ready to get the best canvases around, our warehouse, with all its sensory delights and years of expert knowledge pooled in one place, will be ready to go into action and show you what levels of excellence canvas can achieve.