The three formats
A hand-painted canvas can leave the studio in three ways. The choice affects freight cost more than anything else, often more than the difference in painting price.
- Rolled. The painted canvas is taken off the work board with a spare border of 5 to 8 cm on each side for stretching, then rolled paint-side out around a wide core and packed in a rigid tube. A local framer stretches it on arrival.
- Stretched. The canvas is mounted on wooden stretcher bars at the studio, edges painted, hanging hardware fitted. It ships in a carton with corner protection.
- Framed. A stretched painting fitted with a floater or moulding frame, boxed the same way but larger.
Why volume, not weight, sets the price
International express couriers bill whichever is larger: the actual weight or the volumetric weight. The usual volumetric formula is:
volumetric weight (kg) = length × width × height (cm) ÷ 5000
Paintings are light and bulky, so volume almost always wins. Two examples for a 120 × 80 cm painting:
Stretched, boxed 128 × 88 × 10 cm → 112,640 ÷ 5000 = 22.5 kg billed
Rolled, tube 95 × 12 × 12 cm → 13,680 ÷ 5000 = 2.7 kg billed
The same painting is billed at roughly eight times the weight when it ships stretched. Frames add more again, because the box grows on every side.
Which format to choose
Rolled suits
- large pieces where freight would otherwise exceed the painting price,
- projects with a local framer who will stretch and frame on site,
- low and medium texture: knife-painted abstracts, metallic leaf, minimal pieces, landscapes.
Stretched suits
- high-relief work: heavy plaster, modeling paste, sand and crystal grit, palette-knife florals, which can crack if rolled,
- orders that must hang straight out of the box.
Framed suits
- a few key pieces where the frame finish matters and must match exactly,
- clients without access to a framer.
Volume orders: sea freight and FOB
For production runs, express stops making sense. Stretched paintings are packed in cartons, palletised, and shipped by sea, either as part of a shared container (LCL, billed per cubic metre) or a full container. Most importers buy FOB Shenzhen: the studio delivers the goods, cleared for export, onto the vessel booked by the buyer's forwarder, and the buyer pays ocean freight and import costs from there.
Rolled canvases can also go by sea and pack far more densely, which lowers the freight cost per piece. The trade-off is that stretching and framing then happen at the destination.
Packing that arrives intact
- Rolled canvas: paint side out, interleaved with silicone or glassine paper, around a core of at least 10 cm diameter.
- Stretched: plastic film, foam corner guards, double-wall carton.
- Any wooden crate or pallet: heat-treated and marked under the IPPC standard so it clears plant-health inspection.