Commission print delivery: sizes, paper, and framing that's worth the wall

Tomasz emailed me a year after his commission shipped and asked, very politely, why his Costco print of a paladin I'd painted for him looked like someone had filtered it through a bowl of milk. The file I'd sent him was correct. The print he was holding was not. We spent forty minutes on a video call working out where the painting had gotten lost between my hard drive and his living room wall, and most of that conversation is what this article is.

Most commission clients arrive at delivery day knowing exactly what they want the painting to look like and almost nothing about what they want the print to be. That gap is where good art goes to die. Below is the buyer's guide I wish I could send every client a week before final delivery: what you actually receive as a digital file, when to print yourself versus when to let the studio handle it, which paper suits which kind of character, and the framing decisions that turn a print into something you don't apologize for hanging.

What's in this guide

• The file you actually receive
• DIY print shop vs studio archival print
• Paper types and the characters they suit
• Sizing a print to your composition
• Framing: mat, float, or full-bleed
• Shipping: rolled, flat, and what dies in transit
• Why a print sometimes looks wrong
• Print + digital combos and what most clients pick

The file you actually receive

Every commission ships with three files at minimum. A high-resolution PNG at 300 DPI sized to the longest edge the painting can support without resampling, usually between 4500 and 7200 pixels. A 16-bit TIFF, which is the file your print shop actually wants if it knows what to do with one. And a flattened JPEG at sRGB for screen use, Discord, character sheets, the casual sharing you'll do twenty times a week.

Painterly-tier orders also include a layered PSD on request. That file is mostly useful if you ever want a variant later, an alternate hair color for a campaign skip, a background swap, a token crop. It's an insurance policy, not a working file for you to repaint in.

The most common misuse I see is clients uploading the JPEG to a print service. The JPEG is the screen file. It's 8-bit, sRGB, and has roughly half the tonal range of the TIFF. For any size larger than a postcard, send the TIFF. If your print shop refuses TIFFs or doesn't know what color profile to embed, that's the print shop telling you it can't do this job.

DIY print shop vs studio archival print

The honest version: ninety percent of clients should let the studio handle the first print. The other ten percent already have a relationship with a local pro lab and know what they're doing. There's no shame in either path. There is real shame in printing a six-week painting at a drugstore kiosk and being quietly disappointed in your wall for the next two years.

Studio archival service uses a single lab in Yorkshire I've worked with since the second year of the studio. They run an eleven-pigment Epson on Hahnemühle paper, calibrated to a profile I personally signed off on, and they ship flat-packed for sizes up to A2 and rolled in archival tubes beyond that. The reason I push clients toward it is not margin. It's that I've seen too many beautiful files turned into mediocre prints by labs that meant well.

If you do want to print locally, the questions to ask are short. Do you have ICC profiles for your paper? Can I see a soft-proof? Will you print a 5×7 test strip before committing to the full size? If they say yes to all three, you've found a real lab. If they look at you blankly, take the file back.

Paper types and the characters they suit

This is where most clients tune out, and it's also where the print actually lives or dies. Paper is half the painting once it leaves the file. The studio offers four substrates, and I have strong opinions about which character ends up on which one.

• Matte fine-art rag. Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 308 gsm, 100% cotton. Soft warm white, no surface sheen, deep blacks. My default for painterly work. Brushwork sits inside the paper rather than on top, the way a textured paint surface does. Paladins, melancholic rangers, anything with grime or candlelight.
• Satin / lustre. Slight surface gloss, cooler base. Best for anime and sharper lineart where you want the colors to snap. A cyberpunk netrunner or a bright bard reads better on satin than on rag.
• Smooth cotton hot-press. Almost no texture, ivory base. Best for semi-realistic portraits where you want the surface to disappear and the face to dominate. Heirloom pieces, gifts, tribute portraits.
• Canvas. Stretched or rolled, slightly textured weave, the most "object-like" of the four. Reserved for full-bleed display pieces above 16×20, and almost never for tokens or anime work. The weave fights tight linework.

Paper is the second half of the painting. If you've spent six weeks on a portrait and then printed it on the wrong substrate, you have given the work a voice you did not intend.

If you're undecided, the studio sends a small sample pack of all four substrates on request, each printed with the same calibrated test image. Five minutes holding the samples in the lighting of the room the print will live in tells you more than five hours of reading reviews online.

Sizing a print to your composition

Print size is mostly a composition question, not a wall question. A tight head-and-shoulders portrait can scale to almost any size because there's no fine detail to lose. A full-body action piece with environment behind the character has a maximum beyond which it starts to feel cropped, and a minimum below which the background goes to mud.

The studio's standard sizes:

• 8×10 or A4. Token-and-character-sheet size. Best for VTT-derived art, purpose-painted tokens, and anyone testing whether they like the print before going larger. Never my recommendation for a full painterly portrait.
• 11×14. Desk-and-shelf size. Sits on a credenza, fits a standard mat. Where most first-time print buyers should start, especially for a three-quarter portrait.
• 16×20 or A3. Above-the-desk size. The painting starts to feel like a painting at this scale. Full-body portraits work here. Party portraits work here. This is the size I'd hang first if it were my own work.
• 18×24 or A2. Hallway size. A real wall piece. Reserve this for compositions with environmental detail that earns the scale, or for portraits you want to anchor a room.
• Larger. Custom only. We talk it through. I've shipped one 24×36 in the studio's history and we discussed it for a month before printing.

A rule I quietly follow: if you can read the character's eyes from across the room, the size is right. Eyes-to-mud at viewing distance, you've gone too big for the file. Walking up to see the face, too small for the wall.

Framing: mat, float, or full-bleed

The frame conversation is the one most clients underestimate. A great print in a bad frame will be quietly sad on your wall forever. A good print in a thoughtful frame can carry a piece I'm less proud of than I'd like to admit.

Three families of framing matter.

Museum mat with a traditional frame. A wide white or cream mat surrounds the print and lifts it away from the glass. Best for painterly and semi-realistic portraits in the 11×14 and 16×20 range. The mat is what makes a print feel like art rather than a poster. I recommend an off-white mat (Crescent Ivory or similar) over pure white, because warm paper sits better against warm mat.

Float mount. The print sits on a backing board with a small gap around all four edges, showing the deckle or trimmed edge of the paper. The frame is deeper than usual so the print floats below the glass. Best for fine-art rag prints with a deckled edge. This is the framing I use for my own work.

Full-bleed in a slim frame. The print extends to the inner edge of the frame with no mat. Best for canvas, anime pieces, and any work where you want the color to dominate without negotiation. Avoid for painterly work with deep shadows in the corners; without a mat to breathe, those corners feel claustrophobic.

Whatever you pick, use museum glass or anti-glare acrylic. Standard glass reflects every lamp in the room and visually flattens the print. The upgrade costs about thirty percent more and is worth every cent.

Shipping: rolled, flat, and what dies in transit

Anything 16×20 or smaller ships flat-packed in rigid corrugated mailers with corner protectors. A2 or larger ships rolled in a 4-inch archival tube with acid-free tissue between the print and the tube wall. International shipping adds paranoia. Two prints arrived in continental Europe with creased corners despite flat packing, which is why anything traveling outside the UK now ships rolled by default.

The thing that kills more prints than transit damage is post-arrival storage. A rolled print left in its tube for six weeks while you "get around to framing it" will develop a curl that fights every frame afterward. Open the tube within forty-eight hours. Lay the print flat under a clean board with a small weight for two days before bringing it to the framer.

A delivery that nearly went wrong

Helene ordered an A2 print of a Viking shieldmaiden portrait in January, addressed to a flat in Stockholm. The tube arrived on time, intact, sitting outside her door in minus eight degrees for about six hours before she got home from work. The paper was fine. But the tissue had frozen to the print at one corner, and when she peeled it back at room temperature the next morning, she pulled a tiny crescent of pigment off the surface.

It was the first time it had happened in two years and I reprinted the piece at no charge. The studio now ships any print headed to a sub-zero climate with a separate note: signature required, do not leave outside, and let the tube acclimate for two hours before opening. None of that is on the lab. All of it is on me, and on the client knowing.

Why a print sometimes looks wrong

This is the conversation I had with Tomasz on that video call. When a print looks wrong, there are usually three culprits.

The first is color profile mismatch. The file is in Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, the print shop assumed sRGB, and the saturated colors come out flat. Ask your shop which profile they want and convert the file before sending. Studio prints handle this internally; DIY prints often don't.

The second is monitor calibration. Your screen is brighter, more saturated, and cooler than any print will ever be. The print is not "too dark." The screen is too bright. Move the print under a 3000K incandescent or warm LED bulb, the way it would be lit on a wall, and look at it for sixty seconds. Most "wrong" prints are correct prints viewed under cold-white office lighting.

The third is gamma mismatch, rarer but the most frustrating. Some print services apply a default contrast curve that crushes shadows. If your candlelit-study painting has deep blacks and the print loses all the detail in those blacks, the shop is silently applying a contrast bump. Ask for a no-correction proof.

The simplest preventive: order an 8×10 test print of any large piece before committing to the A2. Five-pound investment. Saves a lot of grief.

Print and digital combos and what most clients pick

About seventy percent of the studio's commission orders include a print add-on, and the most common configuration is one 11×14 fine-art rag print, the full digital package, and framing handled by the client locally. It covers both use cases at once: the wall version and the screen version.

The next most popular combo is the print-pair: one 16×20 framed by the studio, one 8×10 unframed for a desk or shelf. This works well for party portraits, where the framed piece lives in the GM's home and the smaller print travels to whoever hosts the session. I also see this for long-campaign character work; the small print follows the player to sessions and the framed one stays home.

Digital-only is the right call for VTT-heavy players who won't print, and for clients commissioning custom IP work destined for a book or a card game. Print-only is rare but happens, usually for gift commissions where the recipient doesn't need the file.

If you want to see how prints have shown up in the wild, the first art fair booth post has photos of eleven framed originals on easels, and the Lyra walkthrough ends with a note on how that painting eventually got framed in a hallway in Manchester.

Where to go next

If you're about to order and the print decision is what's holding you up, the order form has a print add-on section that walks you through size, paper, and framing one question at a time. You don't have to decide everything upfront. We lock it in once the painting is in its final stretch, when you can see what the composition wants.

If budget is what's keeping you on the fence, the commission pricing overview breaks down what each tier includes, including the print and framing add-ons. If you're commissioning work you plan to use commercially or print at scale, the commercial licensing guide is the better starting point.

For visual reference, the portfolio has installation shots for pieces that shipped framed. Pick the genre closest to your character — fantasy or historical being the two where wall-printing is most common — and you'll see how the paper and frame decisions play out in practice. A six-week painting deserves a print that earns its space. Most of the work to get there happens in the conversations before the printer ever starts.