You’ve bought a beautiful canvas print on holiday, ordered artwork online, or inherited a painting — and it arrived rolled in a tube. Now what?
Rolled canvas can’t be hung as-is, and every month it stays rolled increases the risk of cracking and creasing. The answer is canvas stretching: the process that turns loose canvas into a taut, ready-to-hang artwork. Here’s how it works, what it costs in Australia, and how to decide between gallery wrap and a floating frame.
Canvas stretching is the process of pulling a canvas taut over a timber frame (called stretcher bars) and securing it, so the artwork sits flat, tight and ready to hang.
The stretcher frame does two jobs: it gives the canvas its rigid shape, and it keeps the fabric under even tension so the surface stays drum-tight for decades. Done well, stretching is invisible — all you see is the artwork. Done badly, you get ripples, sagging corners, and distorted images.
Professional stretching matters most for:
A professional stretch involves custom-built stretcher bars, even tensioning from the centre outward, and neatly folded corners — with the image aligned square to the edges.
The steps:
Larger canvases get braced bars to prevent bowing, and quality stretcher bars include a raised lip so the canvas only touches the frame at the edge — preventing the “ghost lines” that appear when canvas rests flat on timber.
Canvas stretching in Australia typically costs $80–$250 depending on size, with large or oversized canvases and re-stretches costing more.
As a rough guide: small canvases (up to ~50 × 70 cm) sit at the lower end, statement pieces around a metre wide sit mid-range, and oversized works with bracing sit at the top. Adding a floating frame is an additional cost on top of stretching — the same size-and-materials logic covered in how much does custom framing cost.
Worth knowing: stretching a holiday-purchase canvas usually costs far less than what you paid for the art — and it’s the difference between a souvenir in a tube and a finished artwork on your wall.
A gallery wrap suits modern art and clean interiors, while a floating frame adds definition and a premium, finished look — especially for originals.
Gallery wrap means the stretched canvas hangs unframed, with the image (or a plain colour) wrapping around the sides. It’s contemporary, minimal and the most affordable finish.
A floating frame surrounds the canvas with a slim frame set slightly apart, creating a shadow gap that makes the artwork appear to “float.” It adds visual weight, protects vulnerable canvas edges and corners, and elevates how the piece presents — we’ve rounded up the best floating picture frames if you want to see the effect.
Quick decision guide:
You can stretch a small, low-value canvas yourself with a kit, but originals, large pieces and anything sentimental should be professionally stretched.
DIY stretching is a genuine craft skill: without even tension the image warps, and without square bars the piece won’t hang straight. Cotton and linen also behave differently under tension, and Queensland humidity loosens amateur stretches quickly. If the canvas matters to you, the cost of professional canvas stretching and framing is cheap insurance.
If your canvas has been rolled for years, is cracked, or was rolled paint-side-in (a common problem), mention it — it may need conditioning before stretching, and it’s a job for experienced hands.
Rolled canvas is art on pause. Bring your tube into our Ashgrove or Capalaba workshops and we’ll measure it, walk you through wrap and floating frame options against real samples, and hand back a finished, ready-to-hang piece. You can order online through our stretch and frame canvas service — we ship Australia-wide — or book our mobile showroom and we’ll bring the samples to your wall.
After 50 years of stretching Brisbane’s canvases, we’ve opened a lot of holiday tubes. The before-and-after never gets old.
