Since getting my new Canon ImagePROGRAFF-1000 printer up and running, I have started printing my own note cards and man, do the shops I sell them in love them. In one small shop, they've been selling 5-6 cards a day! That may not sound like a lot but when the shops are now ordering a couple hundred cards at a time, it's quite the boost in printing and sales. I love it!!

     I offer them in galleries and shops as single, blank inside cards with a white envelope. My card stock and envelopes come from Red River Paper and the clear sleeves come from either Amazon or ClearBags. The note cards measure 5.5" x 4.25" and can be printed in either landscape or portrait orientation, depending on the image. Have I said that I love this paper? Well, I do. It is such a great quality card stock that prints beautifully.

Here at TraysonArt.com, I offer any of my images as a 10-pack of note cards and envelopes. They will come to you in a nice clear acrylic pack. To order, just find your favorite image in the shop, then make your selection under the "Finish" drop down box. Now you'll be able to send some of your favorite art to friends and family.

I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases through links on this blog.

     For years, I refused to print my prints. I dreaded the idea of fighting a printer, wasting a ton of ink and paper just trying to figure out how to get the prints to look right. My thought was, I'm a professional photographer, not a professional printer and that I should just let the pro labs do the printing. I also thought that as long as I sent them a good file, they should produce a high quality print. I did a lot of test prints with different labs to make sure that the final product was truly what I had envisioned and ended up with a very high quality final print. But then my favorite paper that I had been printing on for more then 10 years was discontinued by Kodak, not the print labs fault. So I switched to a different paper by Kodak that was similar in color reproduction. I went from Kodak Endura Metallic to Regular Endura, still Kodak's best paper photographic ever. I used this new, to me,  paper for about a year, when Kodak discontinued it as well. I tried a few other papers from the lab but nothing had the color of the Kodak Endura papers. 

     I was really at a loss for what I was going to do until I met up with a friend of mine that had been doing some printing of his photography with a new Canon printer and using Red River Paper's Polar Gloss Metallic. I was amazed at the color and quality of the print. It looked as good as anything I had seen from the labs, however, it was a pearlescent metallic which tends to zap some of the color out and also tends to be on the cooler side of the temperature scale. However, the quality was there. I went to Red River Paper's website and started doing homework on their papers and found that they have sample kits of all their papers. But first I needed a printer. I hated this part. After weeks, no months of agonizing research and and just waiting, I decided that the Canon Pro printers are where I wanted to end up. The problem for me was, the current model was over 12 years old and was due for an upgrade. I didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a printer that would just be replaced in a year and soon not even be serviceable, so I waited. I wanted whatever the new version of the Canon imagePROGRAFF Pro-1000 was going to be or at least a discount on the sometime-to-be discontinued model. It never came, still hasn't come. Then the time came that I had to do something. I ran out of prints of my number one selling image, "Aspens".  So I made the decision and bought the Pro-1000 and one full set of authentic replacement ink. In doing more research, I found that Red River Paper has color profiles that match the Pro-1000 and other popular printers to their individual papers with instructions to load them based on your printer and operating system. Within 10 minutes, I had color settings matched to the different papers in the sample packs! Red River Paper made it sooo easy.

     I had been dreading the set-up and learn process for nothing. I now make all of my own prints and really have grown to love it. I am amazed at what I am creating now more than ever!

     Hey everyone! For those of you that may be unfamiliar with my artwork, all of it comes from my photography. I take a photo and then edit it to a completely new style. I use a couple of different programs to get there, Adobe Lightroom and BeFunky. With BeFunky, I use filters to get the desired effect and then go into Lightroom and work on my colors. Well, BeFunky just introduce a whole new series of GFX filters. These are truly remarkable. The watercolor one especially looks like a watercolor painting. In fact, after I printed one of my new pieces on Red River Paper's Aurora Art 250 White paper, I got real watercolor paints and added some of my own painted strokes directly on the print. Once it dried, you could not tell the areas that I painted from the printed artwork. Truly amazing! I am now introducing my Watercolor Collection available in the shop. Currently they are available as a 7"x9" print on an 8"x10" sheet of Red River Paper's Aurora Art White 300. Made in the USA using 100% cotton, Aurora Art White 300 is an acid-free paper made from cotton linters. These linters are considered "recovered fibers" by the EPA. By using linters, Aurora production is putting to use what would have become waste. I love this paper! (I am not affiliated with Red River Paper and I do not get anything from them for saying these things, I just really love their papers)

      The image below is of a tree located not far from my house. This was shot during a thunderstorm that had just passed us and there was constant cloud to cloud lightning going on behind the tree. There was a blanket of fog covering the ground too. It was quite the show.