How a custom gift message works

The mechanics are simple. At checkout there is a gift message field. Type your note there, keep it under about 200 characters, and it is printed on a plain card and placed inside the package. There is no charge for the card and no delay added to the order. The note is never written by hand, so do not expect calligraphy. Expect clean printed text on a neutral card, which suits most recipients and most frames.

A few limits are worth knowing before you order. The message field cannot carry emojis or special characters, because the printing system drops them. Prices are removed from the packing slip when a gift message is present, so the recipient will not see what you paid. If you want the note to arrive on a specific date, order with the standard shipping window in mind rather than hoping for a timed delivery, since carriers do not guarantee arrival days. Details on dispatch windows sit in the Auvrique Shipping Policy.

Sending it straight to the recipient

You can ship a gift directly to someone else. Enter their address as the delivery address and yours as the billing address, and the order proceeds normally. The packing slip omits pricing whenever a gift message is attached, which is the main reason to attach one even if the note itself is short. A framed poster arrives boxed and protected, and the unboxing experience for a framed piece is described in detail elsewhere on this site.

On the artist himself, a word of honesty. Jock Macdonald was a Scottish-born Canadian painter, active from the 1920s through the 1950s, best known for moving from landscape into abstraction and for his role in the Toronto group Painters Eleven. His work is held in Canadian public collections. Auvrique does not currently offer editions of his paintings, so a Macdonald gift would have to come from another seller. If you are choosing within Auvrique's catalogue instead, a framed landscape such as Iona Landscape. Rocks, Framed Poster or the maritime Parade of the Navy framed poster carries a similar quiet register and accepts the same gift message at checkout.

What a Macdonald gift costs elsewhere

If the recipient has their heart set on Macdonald specifically, budget for the secondary market rather than a print shop. Reproduction prints of his abstract works from sellers specializing in Canadian art typically run anywhere from about 30 to 150 dollars depending on size and framing, while original works on paper have sold at auction for several thousand. Auvrique does not sell originals and does not appraise them, so treat those figures as orientation only.

For a gift in the same abstract spirit at a lower price point, the catalogue has options. Art Forms in Nature 51 on canvas offers organic natural forms that sit comfortably beside mid-century abstraction, and it takes a gift message like any other edition. Whichever route you take, the personalization itself is free, quick, and limited only by the character count. The thought in the note costs nothing. Choosing the right image is where the effort belongs.