After the bank holiday weekend we’re looking forward to another four episodes of 60 Minute Makeover each of which includes a wide variety of Gallery canvas pictures.

--- Huddersfield makeover:
Back in May of last year John Amabile chose a selection of 8 prints on canvas to hang in the four rooms being redecorated. A soft chocolate colour pallet had already been chosen for the lounge which meant Choc Buds, Cocoa Bloom1, Cocoa Bloom4 and Mocha Flora2 would flatter it well. The two young daughters have a soft feminine feel to the design of their bedrooms using Pink Butterflies, Blow and Butterflies Aqua all in 20x20” canvases. The main bedroom’s artwork although relatively small in size makes up for it in brightness of colour – Tiger Bloom.

--- Portsmouth makeover:
Wednesday’s show is by interior designer Sophie Robinson who’s chosen 9 of our colourful canvas prints. The rooms being redecorated in this makeover have quite a vibrant feel to them. For the conservatory Sophie’s chosen Orange Gerbera and Hawaii Spice both in large 30x30” canvases. The living room and master bedroom have a calmer feel with Choc Buds, Cocoa Bloom3 and Mystical Islands1 also in 30x30”. The artwork chosen for the daughter’s bedroom has a fun 50’s feel to it. Sophie’s chosen Wing, Mirror, Handle and Marilyn in Pink in 12x12” canvases.

--- Biggleswade makeover:
Thursday’s 60 Minute Makeover entails more fun and mayhem. Interior designer Kathryn Rayward has designed the four rooms with her trade mark stylish and quirky approach to decoration. Meadow, Daisy Field, White Orchids and White Orchids2 have all been donated to the show in 20x20” canvas prints. Keep an eye out to see if you can spot the third Flying Duck canvas, from the Wild Gallery, which the team seem to have mislaid!

--- Ashton under Lyne makeover:
Friday’s show is designed by the lovely John Amabile again. This makeover uses 3 of our canvas prints. The kitchen is decorated with Cocoa Bloom1 from the Floral Gallery and Red Polka from the Contemporary Gallery. The master bedroom has a wonderfully large Mocha Flora2 canvas print in 30x30”.

This is sadly the end of series 5 repeats. As soon as we hear when the new series 6 is being aired we’ll let you know!

This week four of the five episodes of 60 Minute Makeover (at 12.30pm) contain our canvas prints ranging from Gallery canvas pictures through to photo canvases.

Monday’s makeover designer John Amabile used four CanvasRus Gallery images hung in the kitchen, main bedroom and children’s bedroom. Details about the show, its artwork and a location photo are shown below in Monday’s Blog.

Today’s makeover is designed by Julia Kendall and includes a beautiful close up, baby photo, of the family’s daughter Lily. This 3MB jpeg image (at 72 dpi, dots per inch) was made up into a 40x40” canvas print. Julia frequently likes to incorporate a personal photo canvas into her designs as it adds a sentimental touch to the room’s scheme.

Friday’s home makeover is designed by a relatively new member to the 60 Minute design team – Scott Waldron. Fresh from winning Anna Maurice’s Interior Rivalry TV show in 2006 Scott’s natural flare with interior design is a big step away from his previous career as a successful dancer with The Royal Ballet School. This particular episode, based in Ashford Kent, includes four family photos to canvas made up in black and white. Scott has also chosen four online Floral Gallery images - Cocoa Bloom 2, Cocoa Bloom 4, Choc Spike and Choc Buds.

Watch the shows and see if you can spot all the pieces of CanvasRus artwork.

For the next three weeks ITV is repeating fifteen episodes of 60 Minute Makeover series 5. CanvasRus is featured in twelve of these shows supplying canvas photos, gallery prints on canvas and their trademark large scale canvas pictures.

Today’s repeat was filmed back in May 2007 in Partridge Green, West Sussex. I was lucky enough to be invited down to the location to watch them filming and luckier still to be offered the chance to have a look round the makeover whilst the team had their break half way through filming.

The kitchen was almost finished when the 30 minute whistle blew. They’d already hung the artwork, Saffron Glow chosen from the Abstract Gallery, which worked amazingly well with the warm pink painted wall colour. Please see left for the photo I took just into the second half of filming.

At half time the upstairs main bedroom and children’s bedroom were still waiting for their artwork. John Amabile, the designer, had chosen a beautifully large 40x40” Pastel Blossom canvas for the little girl’s bedroom and White Orchids and White Orchids 2 to hang next to each other in the main bedroom. What the edited scenes don’t show you are the large number of lists and general paperwork stuck to the door frames of each room being decorated. Everything’s amazingly well organised for all the fun and laughter that goes on.

And in case you’re wondering – the show really is filmed in an hour but with a long (lunch) break half way through to co-ordinate the decoration needed for the second half.

When selecting your favourite photo have you ever thought that its subject is either too far in the distance or the wrong proportions for your chosen shape of canvas? Well, CanvasRus now has a free and easy to use Edit Crop facility as part of their ordering process. This shows your uploaded photo on screen so that you can crop it to create your perfect canvas print.

Edit Crop is a tool available on the canvasRus purchasing page. When clicked on your photograph appears on screen with movable crop lines. These lines are there to clearly define your chosen area of photo that you wish to be printed. It also cleverly replicates your chosen canvas proportions whether square or rectangular.

Tips & Ideas:
1. Simple photos are usually the best but a fussy background can be distracting. Try rotating the crop marks from portrait to landscape and see if this helps focus the subject.
2. You can keep the depth of a landscape photograph by including foreground objects and using them as a frame – for example trees, water or even architecture.
3. If you want to create a stronger impact with a portrait photo - try zooming in. Please be aware that the quality of the printed photo canvas will decrease the smaller your cropped area becomes. Our designers will advise you if the quality decreases too far.
4. If you want to create some added interest to a portrait photo try copping it off-centre. Then if the background content becomes distracting try clicking back a few pages and putting your photo into either sepia or black and white.

Note: you don’t have to worry about cropping out date stamps or red-eye removal as the team of in-house designers can amend these for free.

Edit Crop is an exciting new facility available as part of the Canvas Prints ordering process. It gives you the opportunity to upload your favourite photo and reprioritise its focal point and impact.

Have fun!

This the fourth series of Hotel Inspector opens with a 43 bedroom hotel called The Castle of Brecon bought on a whim by Natasha and Leon Ricci. The award winning hotelier Alex Polizzi is on a mission to help salvage this rapidly declining business. In doing so she decides to refurbish one of the bedrooms (hanging CanvasRus digital prints) as a stark comparison to “Natasha’s shambolic approach to interior design.”

Grubby and a tired looking bedroom 18 is the chosen room to be given a sophisticated facelift. This simple makeover completely transforms the room from dark and dingy to open and inviting. An eye catching deep red feature wall is off set with dark woods, cream walls and fresh white bed linen. Hung above the stunning black lacquered desk is the artwork supplied from CanvasRus’s Floral Gallery.

The 20x20” floral canvas prints, Blossom A and Blossom B, compliment the room’s feel and elegance. Hung side by side they create strong visual impact compared to the three widely spaced tiny picture frames Natasha had decorated room 53 with. As Alex explains about hanging these three tiny frames “in my opinion you never put anything like this [wide apart]. You put up something big or lots of little things together. It’s a rule.”

The sample bedroom 18, Alex creates, is to be used as a template for Natasha to decorate and comparatively cost the remaining hotel bedrooms against. The over all effect of the makeover is of quality and luxury yet it only totalled to between three and four thousand pounds, half of what Natasha had previously spent on another room’s refurbishment. The two canvases used are £45 each and finish off the room perfectly.

If you’d like to see the canvas pictures in situ or the room’s amazing transformation visit Demand Five and click on Hotel Inspector episode 1.

Transform your happy memories from favourite photo into canvas print. Hanging one of these beautiful canvases in your home not only creates an interesting talking point when friends and family visit but it can also make a great keepsake for years to come.

Whether you’re looking for artwork to decorate your hallway, home office, living room or bedroom CanvasRus has the solution. Click on Canvas Prints to transform your treasured personal photos to canvas adding that stylish touch to any room’s décor.

Have you thought about your friends and family’s favourite photos? Ordering a surprise photo canvas as a birthday, wedding or maybe even Christmas present can be a great way to put a smile on your recipient’s face. There are also Gift Vouchers starting from £20 if you’re not sure which photo they’d like.

Most of us have hundreds of digital photos saved on computer that never see the light of day. These could be from celebrations, holidays, birthdays or just spontaneous activities caught on camera. Remember, the Canvas Prints service isn’t just about putting your photo onto canvas it’s so much more than that. CanvasRus offers you a simple ordering process with a great range of free options. Once your photo is uploaded you can click through visual examples of your own photo canvas in a range of fun graphic effects and five different colour changes - how about black and white or maybe a sepia photo on canvas? Also free is the red eye and date stamp removal.

So whether you have a collection of fantastic family photographs or you simply aspire to decorate like the magazines Living etc or BBC Good Homes upload your pics to CanvasRus who reassuringly will make the very best of your special photos.

It’s not all doom and gloom in today’s business world. CanvasRus’ trusted products and services are still going strong. And with high volumes of printing, around 250 to 300 canvases a day, these growing numbers of production mean savings that can be passed onto customers.

Putting your personal treasured photos onto canvas is now so reassuringly affordable there’s no reason why not to. Just as a couple of examples the 16x12” canvas has dropped from £45 to £25 and the 36x36” canvas has dropped from £125 to £90.
Photo print canvases are ideal for almost any home décor. They also make perfect birthday or wedding presents. They’re not only a thoughtful gift but a great way to put a smile on the recipient’s face.

Most of us have hundreds of digital photos of friends and family on computer that rarely see the light of day. Photos to canvas is simple and now even more affordable. Just click on Canvas Prints if you’d like to see more information.

CanvasRus has always worked hard to supply the very best quality artwork whether it’s to a budding interior designer, Wembley stadium, a working Mum or a TV show. Feel free to read some of our customer comments on our Feedback page.

Enjoy the savings!

This last year has been an exciting one for TV appearances. Just a few shows you may have seen us in or some to watch out for!

We’ve supplied canvas prints to six different shows ranging from the BBC’s Prodigy through to the forth series of Hotel Inspector on Channel FIVE starting in a couple of weeks. We’re also proud of the fact that this is the fifth consecutive year we’ve helped ITV’s 60 Minute Makeover team. Series five had such enviable audience figures it has lead to a staggering 80 makeovers which are planned to be aired this winter.

Kyle’s Academy was a ten part series on ITV which gave five members of the public, who all lived in one house over two weeks, expert advice to resolve their personal problems. The house was decorated with 17 of our canvas pictures that were later raffled off by ITV for charity.

August of last year saw CanvasRus supply a range of canvas artwork, from their Scapes Gallery, to the show Living with Kimberly Stewart. This highly entertaining ten part series followed Kimberly’s move from LA to London and her search for two ideal flat mates.

CanvasRus were approached by Living TV for the second year running to supply prints on canvas to Britain’s Next Top Model. This year's glamorous and aspirational series 4 has successfully been screened in parts of the US and Australia too. Perfect timing as the CanvasRus.com.au (Oz) and CanvasRus.com (US) websites had both launched in 2007.

The CanvasRus team is delighted to have been awarded the full 5 star rating by The Good Web Guide. Since CanvasRus, the online art gallery, started up five years ago the team have worked tirelessly to create the optimum online shopping service.

“We've always encouraged customer feedback about our website, the service offered and especially our canvas prints. We're proud of our 99.5% customer satisfaction level” Richard Lewis MD. Feel free to read some of the customers comments yourself.

The Good Web Guide is an independent company offering consumers helpful and constructive information about "what's best about life online." Their specific review standards are measured through a wide range of criteria. These cover the site's ease of usability and clear visual communication through to the website's effectiveness (including contact telephone numbers as well as email).

Click on The Good Web Guide to read their comments.

Overcast and threatening to rain I arrive in Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, to meet the crew and see the show being made. It’s 2 pm and the 60mm team are taking a well deserved lunch break before launching into their second half hour. The four large canvas prints being used for this episode are still in the back of the removal’s van.

Pleased with how the first half has gone some of the crew happily chat about the makeover’s progress. Without giving too much away I watch as the team organise the last of the wallpaper and pieces of furniture outside ready for the second half. What appears to be a very relaxed atmosphere, with Terri Dwyer’s 2 year old son Cadon entertaining the crew, is actually highly organised and efficient.

2.30pm and the call goes out to gather the makeover team together. Within 5 minutes they’re all at the bottom of the removal’s van ramp being given their chat through from Sophie Robinson, this makeover’s designer, about plans for the second half. Two minutes earlier she was seen applying her lipstick in the wing mirror of the show’s camper van….oh, the glamour of TV!

Cigarettes and water bottles removed from view - the filming starts. Within two takes, and much hilarity, the team of black t-shirts and white dungarees are raring to get into the house. The stop watch is started. The two daughters, who approached ITV for the 60mm, are busily swept into the house with all of the excitement but in actual fact looked incredibly nervous.

Standing outside there’s a subtle backdrop of accompanying rock music from the team’s catering van up the road. The production coordinator standing next to me shouts the time check “24 minutes” through the intercom system to the ear pieces of the team. Shouts and woops of excitement come through the open windows of the house as the team chivvy themselves on.

Twelve minutes left to go and finally the canvases - Breakers, Pebbles and Daisy Field get taken into the house. Sophie Robinson had chosen all four images about two weeks earlier from the online galleries. No-one other than the team is allowed into the house now so I have no idea which rooms the canvases are being hung. A few minutes later the Red Sea canvas is unwrapped and taken in.

With five minutes to go everything seems calm with the last of the furniture, plants and flower arrangements going in. “One minute to go” is called out to the team in the house and the shouts start up again. Outside there’s frantic chasing for two dining chairs and odd accessories as I keep well out of the way. Then the count down in seconds starts. All the team join in as they chant from 10, 9, 8, 7….. then the whistle blows and that’s it. Slowly and wearily the team pour out of the house, well, they have been on location since 7.30am.

Now the camera crew have an empty house in which to set their lighting equipment up before the big surprise. During this time Terri stands on the drive interviewing the two girls about their reason for the asking the 60mm team to transform their Dad’s home. A shout goes out as the Dad’s car is spotted driving down the road towards them. The body language of the girls and the colour that has drained from their faces says it all really. The Dad really has no clue about this makeover.

The rest can be seen on ITV this winter. Just keep an eye out for the Hurstpierpoint makeover and the four large canvas pictures.