You could always sell unstretched canvases – I have done this after painting them taped to a board (that sounds like I was taped to a board but I meant the canvases!) They are easy to post and people can either frame them like watercolours with a mount/mat or have them stretched and then framed without glass.

I couldn’t find any archival canvas boards here in the UK and have seen paintings on boards which don’t claim to be acid-free go yellow quite quickly.

A friend of mine who does plein air work swears by these:

Blick Archival Canvas Panels[/URL]

They aren’t super cheap but they’re less bulky than stretched canvas and archival. Way back when I first started experimenting with acrylic I painted a stack of the cheap canvas panels. Fortunately I didn’t try to sell any of them. They ate themselves, it wasn’t overnight but within 10 years they were all in a dumpster.

I’d either go with what yarddawg suggested, or stretch the canvas while you work on it, then pull it off to ship it rather than send the customer a painting on a cheap canvas board. But that’s just my own opinion. It’s just unprofessional to use those for selling. Perhaps if you could get an archival one and have it framed, that would be okay.

Canvas panels are fine. They just have to be “archival.” (Usually they’ll claim this in the ad or description for the panels.) Canvas boards (the kind you find in chain craft stores and so forth) are sometimes just canvas glued to cardboard, which will yellow or fall apart in time. (Though I’ve never seen any of my old paintings do that—I think it depends on the brand!)

However, there are a lot of cheaper “canvas boards” (made by big art stores like Blick, Utrecht, Cheap Joes) which say they’re made of “acid free” materials. Not sure what that means, I wouldn’t tout them as archival, but it does sound like they wouldn’t yellow quite as quickly. I’m going to guess that many of them would last 50-70 years (just a guess) or maybe more. Though I would never put on anything worth something on one of these types of boards; would never do a commission on one of these boards. (If I did a study on one of them and then sold it for cheap, explaining that it was on a “generic” or “student” board, I wouldn’t think that was bad.)

Fredrix sells canvas panels which are considered “archival.” I get them from Jerry’s Artarama when there’s a big sale. These are VERY nice panels. Same with the aforementioned Sourcetek and RayMar. These are used by plein air artists who go paint on location and need thin, portable, durable surfaces. As far as I’m concerned I’m going to paint on panels from now on, with the exception of something REALLY huge, where a panel might get too heavy.

Anyway, canvas panels (aka archival) are very mainstreamed, and in fact I sometimes wonder why more artists aren’t using them. They are so much easier to ship, easier to store, and have advantages that stretched canvas does not.

Yes, I buy shipping boxes.