How to Frame and Care for Your Fine Art Print

Your print just arrived. Here's how to make sure it outlives you.

First, let it lie flat. It shipped rolled, so it has a curl. Slide it out of the tube gently rather than pulling at the edge. Unroll it face up, lay it flat with a clean sheet of paper over it, and weight it with a few heavy books for a day. It will settle flat on its own. Don't try to reverse-roll it and don't put anything warm near it.

Handle the edges. Wash and dry your hands before touching the paper. The oils on your fingertips transfer, and on a matte cotton surface they don't wipe off. Hold the print by its extreme edges or by the white border, or wear cotton gloves.

Acid-free mat. If you're matting the print, make sure the board is explicitly labelled acid-free. Standard mat board leaches acid into whatever it touches, and over a few years that shows up as a brown halo burned around the edge of the image. It's the most common way a good print gets ruined by a cheap frame.

Ask for UV glazing. Pigment ink on cotton rag is built to last, but nothing survives ultraviolet light indefinitely. Framing behind UV-filtering glass or acrylic is the single largest thing you can do for the life of the print.

Think about where it hangs. Keep it out of direct sunlight. Avoid bathrooms, kitchens, and anywhere above a heating vent, because humidity swings make the paper expand and contract inside a frame, and that's what causes rippling.

Do those five things and the print on your wall will look the same in thirty years as it does this week. That's the entire idea behind how it was made.