The paper

Every print on this site is made the same way, on the same paper, when you order it. Here is exactly what that means, including the parts that are less impressive than they sound.

The paper

200gsm enhanced matte art paper. Three numbers and two words that most shops print without explaining, so:

200gsm is the weight — 200 grams per square metre. Ordinary office paper is 80gsm. A postcard is around 250gsm. At 200 the sheet has enough body to stay flat in a frame and enough stiffness to handle by the edges without buckling, and it is still light enough to roll for shipping without cracking the surface.

Enhanced matte is the surface. It has no gloss and no sheen, which matters more than it sounds: a glossy print under a lamp shows you the lamp. A matte surface scatters that light instead of bouncing it back, so you see the image from any angle in a normally lit room. The trade is a very slight reduction in the deepest blacks compared to a gloss or lustre paper. We think that is the right trade for something that will hang on a wall in a house rather than sit in a portfolio.

Art paper here means the coating is designed to hold pigment ink sharply rather than let it spread into the fibres. It is not cotton rag, and we are not going to call it that.

Giclée, and what the word is worth

Giclée is a term for fine-art inkjet printing. It was coined in 1991, essentially as a better-sounding name for the same process, and it has been applied to everything from museum-grade reproduction to a poster run off in a garage. On its own the word guarantees nothing at all.

What actually matters is the ink. These are printed with pigment inks rather than dye. Dye inks sit in the coating and shift noticeably over a few years in daylight; pigment inks are solid particles suspended in a carrier, and they hold their colour far longer. That is the difference that decides whether a print looks the same in ten years, and it is the reason we specify it.

We are not going to quote you a number of years. Fade resistance depends on your wall, your light and your glass, and any shop quoting a single figure without those is quoting a lab test you cannot reproduce at home. Keep it out of direct sunlight and it will outlast your interest in it.

Why it is printed when you order it

Nothing here is printed in advance and stored. Each order is produced by a print house in the United States and shipped from there, usually within two to four business days.

The honest version of why: it means no capital tied up in a stack of prints nobody has bought, no minimum order deciding which images exist, and no warehouse quietly discounting the ones that did not sell. It is why an eighteen-image archive can exist at all at this size of business.

The cost of it is time. A print made to order takes longer to reach you than one already sitting on a shelf. That is a real trade and it is the one we chose.

What arrives

A single sheet, rolled, unframed and unmounted. No frame, no mount board, no hanging hardware. The dimensions listed on each product page are the sheet size — the whole piece of paper, edge to edge.

We do not sell frames, so we have no reason to talk you into a particular one. If you want a starting point, see hanging a print.