A Masterpiece In Canvas

I was approached recently by Easy Canvas Prints to try out their product and give my opinion of it. I jumped at the opportunity since we really haven’t done anything with the wall space in this new house in the almost two years that we’ve been here. I discussed things with my wife as far as the image selection and we both immediately agreed that it had to be a picture from Walt Disney World.

Disney has been a magical place for me all of my life. I was lucky enough to go twice as a child. It became an even more magical place in 2001 when a simple, post-birthday trip became as therapeutical as it was fun. That year, my birthday became synonymous with the biggest terror attack ever on US soil. I had to fly out of Rhode Island to get to Florida, but it was worth it and it led to an amazing week of fun. Now, I try to get to Disney in September whenever I can. I went there with my wife for our honeymoon and I’ve been lucky enough to treat my daughter to the magic twice already. So, printing up a picture from Disney was a no-brainer.

The first image that popped into my head was a picture of my daughter and Marie from Aristocats walking hand-in-hand from her first trip to The World when she was two, but the image that won out was a family image from Epcot that was taken on our last trip by one of the amazing PhotoPass photographers that Disney employs.

This picture of the print isn’t the best quality, but it gives you the best idea of the picture that was used. This is an 8” x 10” print. Once you choose the size of your print, you get to choose the thickness of the wrap depending on whether or not you plan on framing the print. The next step is uploading your image. The website will let you know if you have uploaded a high enough resolution picture. The next step is choosing what kind of borders you will have. You can choose from a mirror image border, image wrap or a colored border. Again, this decision will be dictated by what you plan on doing with the print once you receive it. The final step involves adding optional effects and image retouching. There’s a live preview of what your canvas print is going to look like to aid you in the design process.

The image quality of this print is amazing. For those of you who are card collectors, the canvas that this is printed on makes this look a lot like Masterpieces cards and that’s definitely a good thing. It definitely has the appearance of a painted picture and looks really sharp.

With all of the health stuff, natural disasters and life in general going on lately, we haven’t had a chance to hang the picture yet, but it still looks great sitting on our mantle.

I’m very happy that I was given this opportunity. This piece is going to look amazing in our living room. When the time comes to give the extra special treatment to another picture, I definitely think that this is the way to go.

 

Technorati Tags: Easy Canvas Prints,Walt Disney World,easycanvasprints.com

State of the Blog

I've got some free time on my lunch break here at work so I thought that I'd throw some thoughts and updates up here.

Things have been ridiculously busy for the past couple of months. Once I was recovered from my kidney surgery, things started to get hectic at work. Paternity leave and illness reduced my team of four to a team of two for three weeks. That led to a lot of late nights and then crashing on the couch right after eating dinner.

My wife recently underwent spinal surgery and is recovering form that so I've been spending a lot of time with her. When I have had some time to sit at the computer, some recent knee problems have made me limit the time sitting at the desk to retreat back to the comfort of the sofa recliners and elevated legs.

Did you know that Google Reader stops counting how many unread posts you have when it reaches 1,000? I do. From that point on it just displays 1,000+. Boy will I be happy when Gint-A-Cuffs is over. So, I'm behind on reading a lot of blog postings.

Then there's my current indifference towards the hobby especially when it comes to new releases. Ginter's great, but I've yet to finish a set and the meaningless short prints always end up frustrating me. I stopped buying basketball boxes when they made the rookies short prints. Sure, it was great if you hit the right one, but more times than not you didn't. Now you were chasing the regular hits plus the rookie cards as well and sets were almost out of the question. No fun to me.

I love the Lineage inserts, but loathe the base cards. The boxes are ridiculously overpriced at the moment. So, I went in on a Community Gum case break for a little more than the third of the cost of a box. Even though I only got one "hit," I couldn't be happier. I've got 3D cards, cloth stickers, stand-ups, chrome cards, a box topper, Venezuelan backs and lots of minis. Awesome. I'll probably pick up the rest of the Red Sox minis at some point.

It's not all bad though. I do have a box of cards on the way from Blowout. It's a little treat to myself for busting ass for a month. I can't say that I've been the biggest fan of Panini's releases since they took over basketball, but Totally Certified caught my attention. It's not full out Dufex (or Nufex as Panini is calling it now), but it's a close relative so I had to check it out. It's one of those hit-per-pack 6-pack-box releases that I normally stay away from, but this time I made an exception. Hopefully I have more luck with this than I had with Basketball Hall of Fame and well, every single Panini product that I've opened. Wait, this was supposed to be the positive part of the post.

I got an awesome canvas print in the mail from EasyCanvasPrints.com that I need to wrote about. This thing looks beautiful and I can't wait to show it off.

So, what's been keeping me busy hobby-wise if trading cards haven't been doing the trick? I've really been enjoying the ObsessiveRec blog that Guy and TJ started up. Great stuff going on over there. I'm a huge comic book fan as well. I devoured two trades of Locke & Key while I was waiting during my wife's surgery. Superhero stuff is always fun, but it's the non-tradational stuff like The Maxx, Strangers in Paradise, Echo, Rachel Rising, Fables, Alias, Powers, Y the Last Man, and Ex Machina that I really get into.

So, I think that's about everything. There aren't many cards in the Totally Certified box so I may try and do a box break of that. If I pull an HRX card then I'll even video myself immediately posting the redemption card on eBay. There you go, sorry for the silence, but sometimes life just gets in the way of stuff like this.