Paintings as corporate gifts

Purchase orders and invoicing

Tell us your procurement process early, because the paperwork has its own lead time longer than the mock-up. A quote on letterhead with the canvas size, subject count and delivery date can reference your PO number; payment is by card or PayPal in US dollars, split 50/50 across the approval and dispatch stages where your finance rules allow staged payment.

One caution nobody in procurement will tell you: the approval step needs a named human. A commission whose mock-up circulates a marketing team for two weeks arrives late every time. Nominate one approver with authority, and let everyone else comment informally.

On confidentiality, which procurement asks about more often than likeness: the subject photograph travels with the commission and is used for that commission. The mock-up and progress photographs go to the named approver's email address, not to a shared inbox, and the finished canvas ships in plain packaging. If the gift is a surprise for an employee or a client, that point is worth stating in the order rather than assuming — the correspondence follows whoever holds the email thread. Procurement rarely needs more than that in writing; it needs to know it was considered.

Sets, multiples and brand colour

Sets of canvases — five years of service, five paintings — are painted in sequence, not in parallel, and the $90 rush fee buys three weeks on one canvas, not ten at once. Order a set earlier than the sum of its parts suggests, or stagger the delivery dates deliberately across the year.

Brand colour in a background is straightforward if you supply the reference — a swatch, the hex values, a photograph of the office wall it must sit near. What brand colour cannot do is rescue a weak reference photograph; the same rules as any portrait apply, and a supplied logo file is not a substitute for a sharp photo of the subject.

A word on what brand colour should and should not carry: it works as a setting — a wall, a uniform accent, a background field — and fails when asked to carry the likeness itself. A face painted in brand tones is a marketing asset, not a portrait, and no recipient has ever hung one at home. Keep the brand in the room the painting sits in, and let the person be painted in the light the photograph actually had.

Delivery, framing and the hand-over

Canvases ship free worldwide, rolled in rigid tubes, tracked and insured — which means multi-canvas sets arrive as tubes, and a local framer stretches each for $60–$120 or frames for $80–$250. Budget framing into the gift cost from the start; a rolled canvas presented at a ceremony is a moment half-lived.

If the event is fixed and the calendar has gone, the workable version is the printed mock-up and numbered certificate presented on the day with a delivery date. Several companies do this deliberately for the photograph opportunity and let the canvas follow to the recipient's office.

Finally, the arithmetic of scale that procurement should model before choosing a size: sets multiply the framing line as well as the painting line. Ten canvases at 16 × 20 in are $3,890 before the $60–$120 stretching each, and the frames are chosen by ten different recipients unless the company supplies them. Either budget that honestly or choose the smaller size and frame properly — a set of small canvases well framed outperforms a set of large ones in tubes, every time.