Nestled in between two of downtown Toronto's most popular photography shops on Queen Street East, friends of mine recently opened a new gallery space that doubles as a specialty print shop.

The gallery space at Queen Street Qreative (QSQ) opened back in October of 2007 with a collection of stunning landscape images by Toronto photographer Mark Coatsworth , and continues to be adored with the works of local and international photographers, with openings monthly.

In addition to being a gallery space, QSQ offers a variety of print services. They offer high quality small and large format GICLEE printing (as large as 44 inches tall by many feet long) for photographers at competitive prices. They currently offer a relatively small but versatile selection of paper types (Matte, Luster, and Velvet).

But what co-owners Thom Hamilton and Ernesto Medina Jordan are most excited about is a new service and reproduction technique that's geared toward a much wider range of visual artists.

Working from original paintings, art prints, mixed media composites, or digital photo files, Queen Street Qreative acquires high-resolution images, and compiles them in such a way that they can reproduce the original work digitally (often allowing for enlargement). Printing is then done on specialty canvas paper, and stretched onto frames to produce a ready-to-hang, enlarged re-print at a fraction of what it would cost to do so in a conventional frame.

And you get to check out the work of other artists when you bring in your work and come to pick up your finished prints.