Notes from the studio.

A rolled print has a memory. Wind it into a tube and, weeks later, it still wants to be a tube — it curls at the corners, resists the frame, and needs a night under a stack of books before it lies flat. We shipped that way for exactly one month.

Flat is more work and more expensive. The sheet goes between two boards, into a rigid envelope wide enough that nothing bends, and it costs us more to post than a slim cardboard tube ever would. The trade is simple: the print arrives ready to frame, the way it left the studio.

It also changes how the print is handled at the other end. Nobody has to fight a curl or weigh down the edges. You lift it out, hold it by the margins, and it is already the shape it is meant to be.

So far, in the life of this small studio, not one flat parcel has come back creased. That is the whole argument.

People agonise over which print to buy and then hang it in the first empty rectangle they find. It is the wrong order. A modest print on the right wall will always beat a bold one fighting its surroundings.

Start with light. A print wants soft, indirect daylight or a warm lamp — not a window that throws sun across it every afternoon. If you can read a book comfortably where the print will hang, the print will be happy there too.

Then give it room. A single sheet with clear wall around it reads as deliberate; the same sheet crowded between a clock and a switchboard reads as clutter. When in doubt, hang one thing and leave the space.

Height is the last thing, and the easiest to get wrong. The centre of the image should sit at roughly eye level — about 145 cm from the floor for most rooms. Hang it for the person standing, not the wall.

The original is a small acrylic, painted fast, with a yellow in the upper third that does something a photograph struggles to hold. On screen it glows. On the first proof, it went dull — a flat, greenish ochre that lost the whole painting.

That yellow took a week. The problem was not the printer; it was the paper drinking one ink slightly faster than the next. We warmed the file by a few points, dropped the green channel, pulled a proof, walked away, came back in daylight and looked again. Eight proofs before the sheet and the painting finally agreed.

Then it had to hold for a hundred and fifty sheets. Pigment is stable, but paper is a natural thing — a humid afternoon shifts it. We printed the run across two mornings, checked every tenth sheet against the master proof, and set aside the four that drifted.

It is the most stubborn print we have made, and the one I am most sure of. If you own a copy, that yellow is the reason it exists.

See how the paper and inks are chosen, or find Monsoon Terrace on the floor.