Best 25 Catholic Paintings/ Prints of All Time

Immaculate Heart of Mary by American artist Charles Bosseron CB Chambers.

For a limited time only, we have made these 25 religious-art images available as archival prints. These Catholic-art pictures of Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and other inspirational scenes have been voted the best images over again for the past three years by you, our customers. We hope that these religious-art paintings, reproduced as fine-art prints, will inspire and kindle devotion in your prayer life for years to come. The following explains why our Catholic-art prints are worth their salt.

Our prints eat their vegetables

A good print starts with a strong bone structure: paper.

The paper is heavy, thick and rigid like an index card. But healthy bones come from a strong calcium source,which is where cotton comes in. Instead of paper made from wood pulp, our art paper is made of cotton, which makes it stronger, acid free, healthier, and gives it a much longer life than most papers.

The next step is the genetically enhanced, vegetable-fed and vitamin-infused pigmented inks that 'paint' the image.

While inks used on the average poster, print, or picture usually get cancer at a very early age and begin to fade,wither,discolor and die,our archival inks ensure the survival of the image's color for 50-100 years .... that's right, these work-of-art prints are going to see advanced ages of maturity.

But what's a strong body without a smart mind?
The final rights-of-passage for our art prints is the 'painting' process. Up to 2,800 micro-droplets of weapons-grade ink (museum quality ink, if you will) are sprayed onto 1 squareinch of each print. Every droplet comes from one of eight individual tankards of healthy ink ranging the RGB spectrum. As any artist knows:more colors = more tonal variety, shades and hues. And this is really the crown jewel of our art prints – advanced IQ that renders superb, photographic detail giving
the viewer a deeper and more metaphysical experience of the art.

What to do with Digital Art

What am I supposed to do with digital artwork?

Print it yourself:

Let's not kid ourselves, more and more of us are getting home printers that can pump out some amazing quality images. Granted, quality printers are relatively cheap because most manufacturers get you on the cost of ink. However, if you are trying to save a buck, it's still going to be cheaper for you overall if you print off your own photo quality image at 5x7 or 8x10. Even if you choose to use a more expensive paper, when you combine your ink and paper cost, it's still cheaper to go this route than to buy an art-print from a retailer. When you buy prints from a retailer, the main advantages are that you can get a bigger print than what your printer can do, perhaps better quality papers and inks, and maybe even a quality image that you don't have (of course, there's the convenience of not having to go through the work of printing yourself).

When you print yourself, it can often take a lot of trial and error to configure your computer, printer, and paper choice for optimal quality. However, once you get this potentially costly configuration down pat, it's the most cost effective way to go, assuming you don't want anything too fancy.

Problems you may run into printing yourself are lines appearing on the image, random dots, ink bleeding, and color tonality issues. In many cases, you need to go to your printer software and perform the regular cleaning/ maintenance/ alignment cycles that printers need sometimes to function properly.

Have someone else print it:

This may be the way to go if you want something bigger than what your printer can handle, if you don't want to fuss with printing configurations, or if you want something printed on a variety of papers. If you save the digital file to a flash drive or CD/ DVD, you can take it to about any print shop to get your image customized. Furthermore, if you want multiples of a print (say, for distribution), this is probably going to be more cost effective than trying to do it yourself. Then again, if you appreciate more the satisfaction of having done something from beginning to end totally by yourself, then print yourself.

Digital Downloads

We are now happy to offer all of our Catholic-art paintings as high-resolution, digital downloads. Prices are commesurate with image quality.

Lately...

Madonna & the Shepherd (BW)

Madonna & the Shepherd (Color)

Hello all!

A big thank you to everyone who has continued to make our gallery of traditional Catholic artwork a reality!

Lately, we've been adding new images to our site as well as figuring out a new pricing structure. We still offer the same great prints, but now we have been able to offer a lower-cost print option. Though the new 8x10 size we offer is not a Giclée (ghee-clay) print, it still gives you the option of having your favorite image(s) at a more cost-effective rate – especially in today's interesting economy.

One of our new favorites is an image based off a turn of the cetnury press engraving. We digitally enhanced the black and white version. Also, we took many long hours to digitally restore a color version of the same print entitled "Madonna and the Shepherd." Please see above and, as always, please feel free to send me your feedback.

God Bless,
Patrick
patrick@restoredtraditions.com

Restored Traditions is happy to indroduce a variety of Catholic Artwork to go on special sale for the Christmas Season at www.RestoredTraditions.com .

Above are some examples of the Framed Catholic Art we are putting on special sale for the Christmas Season. Frame Art always makes a great Catholic gift for anyone you need to buy for this year.We hope you have a sanctifying Advent and Blessed Christmas.

Why does this stuff cost so much?

It's true, if you go online and search around at our competitors' websites, you can find some of the same images at a lower price. What makes us different is our printing and mounting methods. I've personally looked at many framed images from others websites and seen their quality. Lets start with printing....

Inks
In many cases, sellers go out with an image and get it printed at a copy shop (assuming they are not getting their product directly from China), tape it inside a frame behind glass and throw it on their site or store for a low price. Looking at these images first off, you will see that they look alright. However, a print shop primarily makes posters and banners etc, which aren't meant to last longer than a few weeks or months. A print shop typically uses dye inks which, yes, have strong color but which aren't made to maintain their vibrancy through the years. We, on the other hand, use pigmented inks which are more expensive because they are designed to maintain their color for years longer in a proper archival environment. Besides using pigmented inks, our printer uses 8 different color cartridges which means that the color of our reproductions is more precise and vivid. A print shop typically uses 4 different color cartridges which means less color accuracy. Remember, print shops make their money in banners and fliers, not Fine Art Printing. Why should they invest the headache and cost into a Fine Art Printing Machine as we have? Please don't take this as "bad mouthing" print shops. There might be a few out there who have the capacity for Fine Art Printing. However, most that I have seen are not equipped to do this for understandable business reasons.
The bottom line on our printing and "theirs"? We print to last, they don't.

Media

Now let's talk about the paper we use. If you go to a print shop, they typically offer 3 different media for you to print on: 1-PhotoGloss Paper 2- PhotoMat Paper 3- Linen (occasionally canvas). Well, for printing photographs, this may not sound so bad. We can easily print on photo paper with, as we have already discussed, even more color permanency and accuracy. When I first started my printing research for Restored Traditions over a year ago, I thought Photo Paper was the way to go. However, after printing on it for some time, it dawned on me that we weren't selling photographs but reproductions of Fine Catholic Art. Thus the search began for the perfect media to print on that would have the color vibrancy of photo paper yet would not have that Photo Paper look. I experimented with linen, classic laid, presentation paper, various "high definition" papers, vellum, rag, transfer papers, canvas, silk and the litany goes on. After a few hundred dollars of ink and paper, a room full of the same image on different media all labeled, I sat down with the other employees here to judge the winner. We decided on picture rag. Not only is this media archival and acid free (with a high price-tag), but it has an excellent balance between ink absorption and vibrancy while still having a clean mat finish.
Bottom line on our Media compared to theirs? It's made to last and look better, theirs isn't.

Mounting

Now mounting is one of my favorites because this is one of the biggest catches on quality. I am not trying to put anyone down, but I have had to let out multiple laughs when studying how many folks mount their images. I have wondered how they can afford to let mounted images out their door for, lets say, fifty bucks. In many cases, these people haven't even mounted the images themselves. They have bought a bunch of them from China or Mexico for 10 bucks a piece and re-listed them at fifty. If they have mounted them themselves, they have often used scotch or duct tape to hold them in to a frame that was made by the lowest bidder. If you're lucky, they even put it behind some poorly cleaned glass. We, on the other hand, start out with solid wood frames that are made in the USA. They are designed to last and not evaporate after being exposed to sunlight for more than five minutes. We then take your image and dry mount it to a piece of acid free foam board. Basically, a piece of heat-activated adhesive paper goes in between the image and foam board, a protective piece of paper goes on top of the image, and the whole thing gets put into this flat metal press that is 250 degrees F for 30-45 seconds. The press squeezes all the air out from between the image and foam board while also adhering the image to the board. This prevents the image from slipping over time and also prevents air bubbles from developing behind the image after a number of years. Sure, scotch tape works well at first, but dry-mounting is the archival method used to make an image last so you can give it to your grandchildren in the same condition we gave it to you. Scotch tape won't make it to your grandchildren. After the image is securely mounted, we cut a piece of Mat board in proportion to the image size. Mat board is good because not only does it put more artistic emphasis on the Art, but it also stops the image from coming into contact with the glass. When restoring old prints, I have had to be extra careful sometimes when extracting them from the frame. What happens is that the image can start bonding with the glass after a long time. This happens because of moisture build up inside the glass. The paper can start sticking to the glass after getting a little moist and re drying over years and years. The ink from the paper can start to bleed in some cases. However, if there had been an acid free mat in place, the image would have never touched the glass and it would have lasted longer in better condition. Another reason we mat everything we sell is because of image size. For example, when Bouguereau painted "Innocence" (the popular one with the woman walking through the forest with the Child and Lamb), he wasn't thinking that he had to paint it in perfect proportions of 8x10, 11x14, or 17x22. He just painted it long and narrow. When I take this image in Photoshop to proportionally re size it to a smaller or larger frame size, I have two choices: 1 - Crop out almost half of the image to make it fit in the frame or 2 - Change its size proportionately and make up for the gaps by cutting a custom mat to its new size. I have seen #1 done and nightmares of butchering Bouguereau's masterpiece have ensued. This is why I decided we would custom mat everything we sell, so you can get the whole image instead of a cropped one. Finally on mounting, we don't use regular glass but Acrylic UV Non-Glare (exception on this would be some of our Antique prints we restore and sell in their original frames and glass or some of the smaller specials we sell). This glass is dramatically more expensive than regular glass but the perks are that it won't break in transit and that you won't see your face in the glass when looking at the image. It also filters out the vast majority of Ultra-Violet radiation which means that those precious pigmented inks won't be fading anytime soon. When all of this is put together, we use a Framer's stapler gun to secure the foam board in the frame, install a black paper dust cover on the back and add on wire hanging system. Now it is all ready to ship out.

Bottom line on our mounting process compared to theirs: we make it to last, they don't.

Conclusion I am not trying to belittle the competition or say that everyone else does a poor job. I am just trying to give you the fruit of what I have seen a lot of other people in this field do. We, at Restored Traditions, refuse to sell poor quality products. There might be some other people out there who do just as good as us if not better. God Bless them.

Bottom line on all of this is that you get what you pay for.