How to Safely Pack Paintings for Shipping

hi this is Peter with Agoura gallery and today I'm just going to go over how to pack a painting and a framed photograph for shipping first of all there's going to be some supplies you're going to need to do this number one you're going to need some packing tape I also have a tape gun just makes it easier you're going to need some artists tape artists tape is basically like a masking tape but it's acid-free and it's easily removable you're going to need an x-acto knife or a pair of scissors for packing framed work you will need some cardboard corners a measuring tape some glassine and some brown paper packing anything that is a mounted photograph or anything that's high glossy you can either use nitrile gloves or some art handling cloth gloves and you want to make sure your hands are clean just begin with so first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to put down some foam on top of my table so that I have a soft surface to put my artwork on too if you don't have any foam you can use a blanket or something like that if you have larger artwork you probably be wrapping it on the floor today I'm going to be wrapping a piece that will fit nicely on this table so I'm just going to put this foam down just so when I put the piece face down it's not going to damage it at all so to start I'm going to use my glassine the glassine is basically a paper that is water and grease resistant and it's not going to stick to the surface of your painting you're going to put my painting facedown on the glassine leaving enough room to wrap around the edges and this is where you want to use your artists tape as I mentioned before it's an acid-free tape so it's not going to damage or yellow any of your canvas if you accidentally get it on the side of the painting it's going to be easily removable and won't leave a mark masking tape over time we'll leave adhesive on there you definitely do not want to use packing tape when putting your glossy locks a little trick you can do when you're using your artists tape to put your glass Aeons fold over the end a little bit and that leaves us a little nub to grab the tape with to easily remove it when it comes time to unpack so I've got my piece going to start with my longest edge I'm going to tape it over onto the canvas you can see where I left that little folded over bit it'll be easy spot to grab it to remove it so again doing all my longest sides first the ends is just like wrapping a present and make a fold here or just like a present again its crease and fold it over hold your end up I like to try to tape everything onto the glassine again the less tape I can put onto a piece the better so now I've got my piece glass seems so glassy is going to protect anything from sticking to the surface of the painting we want to make sure when you're packing your piece with the bubble wrap that you use the flat or the smooth side of the bubble wrap against the surface of your painting if you put the raised or the bubble side against your piece there is a chance that it can leave the impression of the bubbles on the surface of your painting so I've pulled out my bubble wrap and I have it so the smooth side is facing up I'm going to place my piece face down on the smooth side of the bubble wrap this piece fits nicely on this size of bubble wrap if you have a different size of pieces you want to make sure that you have at least two inches on either side of that extra bubble wrap so I'm going to take the end wrap it over I'm going to wrap this two times in the small bubble wrap that's one that's two we'll cut along there grab your packing tape it's going to tack that down I'm going to run right across I'd seen the ends I'm going to push them in and then fold them over sometimes if you just fold it straight over it's going to take your excess and bring it around the back so you're not going to have as much padding on the sides but if you push down first and then fold over you're going to leave a good amount of padding there so I've got my painting wrapped in two layers a small bubble wrap now and depending on how if it's going to be a single piece in the box or if it's going to be with multiple other pieces will add more wrapping to it so I've got my large bubble wrap and once again we have a smooth side and a bubbled side and we want to make sure again that we have the smooth side facing the work but we're going to pack this one piece as if it's going to be going in a box on its own in the Box I have is six inches deep so I'm going to want to put padding on that for up to the six inches you may have a different size box depending on what you have but you definitely want to have at least two inches of padding around all sides of the work so I can use my tape measure here I know my box is six inches wide so I'm going to check here and we're about three and three-quarter inches so I'm going to wrap this up until I'm pretty close to six but not everyone is going to have access to huge rolls of bubble wrap like we have here at the gallery so when it comes down to this process of just filling space within the box if you have sheets of styrofoam or something like that you can use those as padding around there but you do want to ensure that there is a good amount of padding around your painting so it's going to check my depth for my six inch box I'm at about five and a quarter so I'll just do this a couple more times so now we're pretty close to six inches so as you can see here I've got a nice lot of padding on the sides so again I'm going to I'm going to push one side up and one side over just to ensure that that padding stays on the side and doesn't move over to the front so now my piece is practicode to go in a box by itself you can see there's plenty of bubble wrap around it so it's going to protect the corners the sides and the face now as I mentioned before you want to make sure you have at least two inches of padding around all your sides when your box so it's going to check my measurements on this right about 44 by 31 and I've got a good amount of padding there I know my box is 48 and I can adjust the depth very easily so because it's at 31 I'm going to put a little bit extra padding in probably an inch on either side so I'll make my box 33 so I've got my nice new box and I know it's 48 I'm going to keep that but I'm going to want to adjust the height of it so I'm going to start by unfolding it and getting it ready I don't want to put at least three pieces of tape across and one thing that'll likely happened as soon as your box leaves your studio and gets onto the delivery truck it's just going to be pushed or slid everywhere so what you want to make sure you do is completely tape up all the sides of your box even if you have a topside tape up all the sides because there's a good chance that it's not going to remain standing that way up so this will be the bottom of the box and I've taped the whole side and we're going to want to do that to the whole box once we get the piece in there so as I mentioned before I'm going to want my box 33 inches high this box it doesn't have a top already built so I'm just going to show you how to adjust the so I'm just going to measure up 33 inches from the bottom and I put my mark there and I'm going to measure down again so it's at 6 inches and I lock my tape measure right at about 6 in at 8 inches just to leave an extra for my pen and I'll just put rest my pen right on that tape measure and rest the tape measure on the top of the box and then I can basically just run it along and draw a line so I'm going to do that all the way around my box so I've got my line at 33 inches which is the size of box I want now to make a crease in there so that it folds over I'm just going to take the dull side of my knife the knife blade is not extended I'm just going to take the dull side of my knife I don't have the blade out the blade is back in and I'm just going to run that along my line on all sides and what's that's going to do is it's going to make a score on there so we can easily fold this so I've scored along my line I've cut down on my edges now what I can do is I'm going to fold this back out as you can see that score line made a nice natural spot for the cardboard to fold so I wanted my box a little bit bigger than my piece so I could add some extra padding on the sides so what I've done is I've just cut some extra pieces of bubble wrap fold those over and lay that into the box and I can slide my piece in there now it's fairly tight in there but there's still some room on the edges so we're just going to take some more pieces of bubble like this and stuff them down in there so we've got the sides all stuffed up with the padding here and we're just going out a little bit more on the top now painting is good and protected so if I'm packing more than one piece into a box again I'm going to have them wrapped in two layers of small bubble and the layer of large bubble and I'm going to put some cardboard between them so that the Front's of the canvases are facing each other in the box now we'll close it up again we'll put at least three pieces of tape across and now we're going to completely tape all the sides of the box like we did with the bottom so once you've taped up all the sides of your box you want to attach the packing labels as well as the exhibition forms that we emailed to you so let's take that and tape it on the large side of your box so just a note about adding packing material to your box I would advise against the use of packing peanuts if the box is damaged the peanuts will spill out of any hole in the box and your work might get damaged as well packing a framed piece of artwork especially one with glass we're going to do things a little bit differently we're going to take some wider artists tape and tape off the glass just in case it breaks during transit it won't damage your artwork after that we'll wrap the whole piece in brown paper add some protective cardboard corners and then wrap it in small bubble and large bubble and then just complete out a star pattern now in the event that the glass does get damaged in shipping it's not going to cut your piece of artwork so we're going to wrap the whole framed piece completely in brown paper and just like wrapping a present we'll fold the ends over and then fold all that in got our pan and completely wrapped in the brown paper and now especially with a framework this is one of the most important elements of packing it is putting on some protective corners about ninety-five percent of the damage as I see coming into the gallery could be avoided by putting a protective cardboard corner on your frame so what I've got here is a pre-made cardboard corner if you don't have access to pre-made cardboard corners you can just take some cardboard and make some of your own once you have all four corners on we're going to go ahead and wrap it in two layers a small bubble like we did with the painting and then more bubble depending on the box that we'll be going into I also highly recommend putting a cardboard face on you can do this either before or after your small bubble wrap so from here on end we'll just continue packing this frame piece in bubble wrap the same as we did with the painting just a couple key points to go over again we want to make sure we put cardboard or protective corners on anything with a frame make sure you leave sufficient room in your box for extra padding I would suggest at least two inches tape all the sides of your box and please attach the labels and exhibition forms that we sent you I hope this was helpful and please feel free to contact us with any questions you

Channel: Agora

Views: 288,012

Keywords: Art Handling, packing artwork, Pack artwork, artwork packing, packing framed artwork, packing and shipping artwork, packing artwork for shipping, how to pack artwork for shipping, How-to (Website Category), Painting, framed artwork, Artist, Fine Art (Industry), packing paintings, packing paintings for shipping, packing framed paintings

Id: GGRkygKnsbs

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 14 2014