Wow. Shazaam. I love the graphic quality -- I thought this was an illustration. Thanks for the tip!!

That looks sweet! I'll have to try that.

Great idea! I still have a HUGE frankenstein portrait i had at staples for a halloween party years ago, cost me $5. Found the image online, edited it in photoshop to fit a beefy 3'x5' thrift store frame I had. It hangs in the living room above the sofa and I get tons of compliments!

It's so funny that this post should pop up... I am in the process of researching striking photographs of antique cameras for our home decor. I'm doing a less kitschy version of "his" and "hers" art on either side of our bed; me, the photographer, will have a vintagey camera, and BF, the fil-uhm director, will have an old movie camera.

I did the same with greeting cards that I wanted to hang. They both hang about 11x16 and I really like how they came out. Had them framed with matting. I did keep the orignal cards as well.

I love this idea. Thanks!!

Maybe a dumb question, but do you take a digital file to Staples and have it printed? or do you just take a printed image and have it enlarged and printed?
The alleged DIY referred to in the link does not show you how to DIY. The person is just displaying the work and offering free copies, but I'd like to know exactly what it is you take into the Staples store.
Thanks for any assistance.

As far as I know you can take in a digital copy on a thumb drive. I had business cards printed at staples and that's what I did.

This is an amazing idea! I'm totally going to try it!

I'm personally not a fan of prints (unless they are hand printed by the artist). Luckily, there are other options for thrifty art-lovers. Cureeo.com, for example, has a nice selection of artworks in a range of prices. The website caters to individuals with limited budgets who are looking to buy art and to people who are new to collecting.

cureeo.com doesn't seem to have much under $300

@Sarah are you kidding me? This is a DIY post on getting art for around five bucks. Cureeo's prices are in the hundreds and up.

tottally gonna be able to have the room i have always dreamed of now. THANKS

Or you could just ask your architect or engineer friend to print it for you on the office plotter :)

I'm with 51desks ... I need a little more info on the DIY part. Especially if one does not have Photoshop. Are there alternative / less expensive softwares that can help with the size/pixel adjustments? Sorry for the simplistic questions, but I SO want to do something like this myself!

@ lrcp
http://pixlr.com/editor/ is a free online tool, a simplified photoshop. It manipulates photos, really all images. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks o.k. at first glance..and HEY! Its for free :D

I sent my stuff to Staples over the internet, they did the necessary, and then picked up the next day. Cheap and cheerful and easy.

@Wengi

My point was: If you have a genuine appreciation for art and having a unique piece in your home is important enough, then with a little budgeting and saving, you don't have to print some random image at Staples. You can actually afford an ORIGINAL work of art and support the artist directly. Obviously, if you're just looking for a cheap, quick fix and don't mind ripping an image from the internet, you can go this route. But I was simply suggesting that if you're at all interested in having an authentic work, it's possible to find relatively affordable works by talented young artists.

@ Sarah, what's inauthentic about making a print of your own photograph?

Well Sarah, sometimes some of us get tired of looking at empty walls while we save for the perfect, original pieces we'd eventually like to fill our walls with.

This is a great cheap and ORIGINAL, alternative to empty walls that the photographer (who took the photo herself) can certainly replace with a more expensive piece down the road if she chooses too, without feeling like she threw away money on cheap filler art. But I think it looks great, and I don't know why she would ever want to replace it.

Hi all, I just wanted to thank Sarah for introducing Cureeo.com to the Apartment Therapy community. Buying original artwork done by professional artists is definitely more expensive than DIY projects, but we don't think the two ways to find and display art are mutually exclusive. Any way you choose to beautify your home is wonderful! We are always on the hunt for more affordable pieces, but Cureeo also tries to uphold high quality standards, which translates to pricier works of art. If you filter on our site, the $ and $$ artworks are always under $1,000. We hope to have even more approachable prices (<$500) in the near future! -Katie from Cureeo.com

Love it!

I love this idea. As a graphic designer and modest art collector, this approach really resonates with me.

Next month, I'm helping my mom redo her living room/library. I've been thinking doing a series of low-cost prints of my mother's favorite authors and this post has been really helpful.

I get what Sarah is saying. Both are great ideas, and best of all can be tailored to suit your own tastes and budgets. Fantastic!.

I really like this idea. Like so many people, I have gigabyte upon gigabyte of photos, and they just sit on my harddrive. This seems like a great way to put up a few good ones, but I'm always thwarted by how expensive it is to frame things!

Do you guys have any suggestions for cheap frames that don't look cheap? There are some pretty bad ones out there...

Amazing tip! Thanks so much!

Is cureeo.com trolling?

Thanks for this tip. I will definitely give it a try. In the past I've used a great site, artforikeaframes.com which offers a kind of half way house.

They have quality works of art by professional photographers who submit their work to the site. As a customer you can order these prints in sizes to specifically fit IKEA frames.

They look great and, especially the RIBA range you'd never tell how cheap the beautiful framed artwork cost! ( I've been told RIBA frames with the mattes included are based on traditional gallery frame designs).

I bookmarked this posting when I saw it in August and I just got around to completing a project based on it. I went to Kinkos instead of Staples and got my digital image printed on the large format printer at the max size of 36" inches for a little under $5. To my untutored eye, the print out was basically the same as a regular laser print out on a really big sheet of normal copy type paper. Instead of traditional framing, I mounted the image on two joined-together pieces of double-thick foamcore I got at Michael's for a total cost of about $12. The edges were kind of raw because I suck at trimming foamcore so I did a wrap effect using black and white cheapo acrylic paint mixed into shades of gray with my fingers as I applied it and then put on a bunch of layers of satin mod podge over the whole thing. I think it looks pretty damn good for something that cost about $25 all told.

If you are looking for sources of images, I got the picture I used from the Library of Congress (LOC.gov) website. They are dedicated to digitizing their entire (huge!) photographic collection. Not everything is copyright free, but anyone looking for nice pictures should find plenty to satisfy themselves. Best of all, the pictures that are copyright free can be downloaded by anyone as uncompressed .tif files. That means even if the original print or negative is small, the digital image can be scaled up several hundred times and still look fabulous.