AoSA IMAGE PRINT + FABRICATION STUDIO COMMISSIONED DECORATION

AoSA IMAGE / UNIQUE PRINTING SOLUTIONS

Printing on the materials that were never meant to be printed.

Mirror-polished stainless. Aerospace alloy. Acoustic felt. Glass, composite, coated metal — surfaces that repel ink, refuse tooth, absorb what lands on them or change character the moment something is applied. These are the commissions AoSA takes: not a catalog product, but a problem brought to a floor with enough different machines on it that the process can be chosen to fit the material instead of the other way around.

Service Commissioned decoration
Substrate range Mirror stainless to acoustic felt
Pricing Scoped by complexity
Scale Single piece to production

THE FLOOR

The process is chosen after the material, not before.

A shop with one press solves every problem the same way. AoSA runs flatbed UV, roll-to-roll, UVgel, dimensional and texture printing, direct-to-substrate, powder and finishing operations under one roof — which means a commission starts with a question about the material rather than an assumption about the machine.

Most of this work begins the same way: a sample arrives, gets tested for surface energy and adhesion, and comes back with a recommendation and a print on the actual substrate. Nothing is quoted from a photograph.

Substrates we get asked for

  • Mirror-polished stainless
  • Aerospace-grade stainless
  • Anodized aluminum
  • Powder-coated metal
  • Acoustic PET felt
  • Glass and mirror
  • Composite panel
  • Wood and veneer
  • Ceramic and stone
  • Textile and canvas

Processes on the floor

  • Flatbed UV
  • Roll-to-roll UV
  • UVgel
  • Texture and dimensional print
  • High-build ink stacking
  • Direct-to-substrate
  • Powder coating
  • Adhesion promotion
  • UV-inhibited top coat
  • CNC and post-print fabrication

Commissions

Elena MMirror-polished stainless

An image that had to share the surface with its own reflection.

Mirror-polished stainless gives a printer nothing to hold onto. The finish that makes it beautiful — no grain, no tooth, no absorbency — is the same finish that rejects ink, and anything applied to improve adhesion risks hazing the mirror and destroying the reason the artist chose the material.

The work also had to be composed around a moving ground. A mirror is never one color; it carries the room, the light and the viewer. Rather than laying a full white base and turning the panel into an opaque sheet, coverage was planned selectively — some passages fully opaque, others left open so the polish reads through and the reflection becomes part of the image.

The result behaves differently at every angle and in every room it hangs in, which was the point.

Process
Surface preparation and registration on the polished panel.

Application review

Substrate
Mirror-polished stainless sheet
Preparation
Solvent clean, optically clear adhesion promoter — no abrasion
Ink system
UV, selective white underbase to keep the mirror live
Adhesion
Cross-hatch tape test on a matched coupon before production
Finish + handling
No top coat — gloved handling, interlayer protection in transit

Draft entry. Confirm test method, results and artist credit against the project file before publishing.

SpaceXStarship stainless

Fine art printed onto flight-alloy stainless.

The brief specified the material before it specified the artwork: this had to print onto the same stainless used on Starship, with its mill character, rolling texture and low surface energy intact. Abrading the sheet to create tooth was not an option — the surface is the story.

Preparation was therefore additive rather than subtractive: surface-energy testing to establish what the alloy would accept, a cleaning protocol that introduced no residue, and a print strategy built around the substrate's own reflectivity rather than fighting it. Large sheet work brought its own constraints — flatness across the bed, thickness compensation and registration across a tiled image.

What comes off the table is an artwork whose ground is the alloy itself, still reading as the metal it came from.

Application review

Substrate
Starship-grade stainless, mill finish, unaltered
Preparation
Residue-free clean, no abrasion, no coating of the base metal
Ink system
UV, profiled for a reflective low-energy metal ground
Adhesion
Surface-energy verification, then adhesion testing on offcut coupons
Finish + handling
Top coat specified to the display environment

Draft entry. Verify alloy designation, permitted claims and client approval before publishing.

ArkturaZintra acoustic felt

Decorating a surface whose job is to stay open.

Zintra is PET acoustic felt: porous, fibrous, compressible and deliberately open. Every property that makes it work acoustically works against printing it. Ink wicks into the fiber and spreads, a textured surface breaks up fine detail, and a heavy ink film can close the very porosity the panel was specified for — decorating it into silence, so to speak.

The approach was restraint rather than build-up. A custom profile was constructed for the felt with a reduced ink limit, chosen so color lands with enough density to read across a room while the film weight stays low enough to leave the surface open. No lamination, no sealing top coat, no pressed finish that would compress the pile.

Printed panels were assessed against uncoated control panels so the acoustic question was answered with a comparison rather than an assurance.

Application review

Substrate
Zintra PET acoustic felt, printed as received
Preparation
None — no primer, no sealing, no compression of the pile
Ink system
UV, custom profile with a reduced ink limit for fiber wicking
Acoustic impact
Printed panel assessed against an uncoated control panel
Finish + handling
No lamination or top coat — the surface stays porous

Draft entry. Any acoustic performance claim must rest on tested data for the exact panel and installed assembly.

Every one of these started with someone saying the material could not be printed.
AoSA Image — commissioned work

HOW IT IS PRICED

Quoted on complexity, not square footage.

There is no rate card for work like this, because the cost sits in the unknowns: how the substrate behaves, how much preparation it needs, what fixturing has to be built, how tight the tolerance is and what the finished piece has to survive. A commission is scoped in stages so you are never paying for production before the material has proven it will hold.

  1. Stage 1 Sample + adhesion testSend the material. We test surface energy, trial a preparation and print method, and return a physical sample with a written recommendation.
  2. Stage 2 DevelopmentColor profiling for that substrate, fixturing, registration strategy and a first article approved in hand before anything scales.
  3. Stage 3 ProductionThe approved setup is held on file, so repeat runs price against a known process rather than starting the investigation again.

Bring us the material everyone else turned down.

Tell us what the substrate is, what has to go on it and where the finished piece will live. If we can print it, you will have a sample in hand before you commit to anything.