Custom printing. Where to start? Here at The Inside we love creating totally unique pieces for our customers. But - you have to be brave. Custom printing isn't like buying 'off the rack'. It doesn't come with glossy photos or perfectly styled room shots like normal wallpaper does. You won't know 100% what it looks like until it is up. And that is brave. Because lets be honest, anything custom printed is bespoke and not as cheap (often) as off the rack.
Here our Nelson customer said she liked bears. We headed to shutterstock (a gem of a place for millions of images) rounded up a few bears and individualised them (changed the colour, size) and based the background colour on a paint colour chosen by her. Disclaimer here - even though we can try to match paint colours we can never guarantee it due paint varying between batches.
Winter Bear
We just love shutterstock for having a base load of images. Some of them are adaptable, some we can alter, some we can't. We never really know until we pay for them and download. So when custom printing you also have to be resilient - sometimes these images wont work. In that case we need to go to plan B and engage our artist. In which case there are art fees. We have a few artists we use so we try to keep those fees really low. But art fees can be anywhere from $50 - $200 depending on the amount of work required.
Many customers want to use their own photos. And generally this does not work. Images have to be a really high resolution of around at least 5000 pixels (depending on final print size). We are always happy to have a look but 9 times of out of 10 they just don't fit, are blurry or pixelated when blown up to such a big size. The photographs need to be taken with a really good camera and not taken from facebook or your phone. Here is a mural of penguins that we printed below for a customer using her own sourced photograph.
Sometimes we get people who initially come in wanting a wallpaper but they want a really large scale. In this case it is sometimes better to print it as a mural.
In the end, once its up, the average person wouldn't understand the difference between a mural or a wallpaper - but our team do. We are always analysing the best way to print things to save our customers money and have less waste.
Below is a fantastic entranceway that started off s a wallpaper and ended up being printed as a mural due to the scale.
Below is our custom Kingfisher mural where we have moved the birds around to fit the narrow width of this wall. Mural printing is good like that as if you hold the graphics you can often move the parts around to fit. We can do this for some of our murals but not all.
Sometimes it takes a while to get the graphics right - it can take weeks to get the final mock up approved by the customer. Please don't forget print queue is generally six weeks from the time you approve graphics to delivery.
If you have something you want custom printed let us know. We will ask a bunch of questions. We aren't being nosy, we are just planning and plotting, the best way to make your project work for the best price.
Custom Wave Wallpaper.
This mural got held up a bit as we resized the waves to fit the desired scale. Then the customer wanted different colours. If you can - let us know at start point colours and size. Sometimes working with complicated graphics are not as easy as you might expect. Multiple changes in sizing and colour can sometimes cause confusion. We have had jobs where the customer takes six weeks to decide on a change. When you are working on multiple jobs at a time it can cause delays and confusion for our art department.
This one is from the toilets at the Rai Valley Pub. The pub wanted deer, so they selected from over 1000 different deer images on shutterstock. No graphic changes required so this one was very simple for us and looks amazing.
And this is me - Rebekah with my outrageous Manuka Flower Mural. I don't usually get photographed for the website but they wanted the artist with the artwork. This was originally an artwork that we photographed and uploaded and pumped up the colours so the image became shocking pink. This little bright beauty has been sent all over the world now. I will also include a picture below of Manuka printed at a different scale and framed for a customer. As we boutique print (or print on demand to fit your dimensions) you can see how no two murals are ever the same (unless of course we printed them all the same size at the same time).
Here is our Jacinda Mural that we can alter per client brief. We have added mountains, cows and telephones according to customers requests over the years.
Hewson Bee Wallpaper.
We can print this as a wallpaper or a mural depending on the scale required.
And here is our Kowhai wallpaper turned into a mural.
The customer wanted much larger flowers than normal and colours altered too.
We also get asked to reproduce wallpapers from the 60s and 70s. While technically we can do this - some of them will have copyright applied to them. So we can only reproduce up to 80% similar. And as with most modern printing we print digitally so while we can do a 60s or 70s pattern it does like more modern (which is quite a nice mix I think) as the printing technology has changed so much.
Here is a 70s pattern we reproduced and printed in Vinyl. We call it Retro Boogie 
So really with patience and an open mind the world really is your oyster when it comes to custom printing wallpapers and murals. Drop our team a line at hi@theinside.co.nz to get some idea for your next project.
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