Originaly published in the Northern Echo as 'Nigel focuses on crafty business idea':

A KEEN photographer who was recently made redundant has launched a business which transforms family photos into works of art.

Nigel Dawson, from Ingleby Barwick, near Stockton, has created Crafty Canvas after bouncing back from losing his sales job.

The company turns photos into wall art by printing them onto canvas after customers have cropped them on the Crafty Canvas website.

The business will also act as a gallery for photographers, who can upload their own pictures to the site and sell them to the public as potential canvases or large gloss prints.

Mr Dawson said: “I had always had the dream of being my own boss as I always seemed to be working hard for other people’s gain.

“There is a great sense of freedom that comes with creating your own destiny.

“What differentiates Crafty Canvas from other businesses in the market is that we have given customers the unique ability to crop their own pictures, so they will always get the best possible print for them.”

Mr Dawson, who was born in Blackpool but moved to Teesside after meeting his partner, Jill, on a skiing holiday, is a passionate photographer who honed his skills on an Open University course.

Crafty Canvas prints cost from £19.99 to £129.99, and are produced entirely in-house.

Mr Dawson added: “I would like to say a big thank you to Business Link and Andy Flisher, from Dot UK, for designing the website.”

For more information, visit craftycanvas.co.uk"

Related Links:

• www.craftycanvas.co.uk - Create Canvas Prints online from your Photos
• Nigel focuses on crafty business idea

Crafty Canvas is a bespoke Ecommerce and Canvas printing solution created from scratch according to Nigel's specific requirements. It utilises a robust PHP, Apache, and MySQL framework for the Ecommerce and Image Processing functions, but introduces Ajax and Jquery functionality to improve the user interoperation and introduce functionality such as image cropping within the user interface that would otherwise not be available to the end user.

The site is hosted on our managed hosting platform which uses virtualisation to allow as to scale services according to usage requirements, and to offer high availability options that would not normally be cost effective.