The Framers Forum

Hi all,

As a newcomer to framing i have a little question that i'm hoping someone on here might be able to help me with...
Apologies in advance for the stupid questions r.e distressing, but to date i've only really used acrylic sizes which have never seemed to dry properly enough to allow for any sort of 'scratchy' work to be done.

I've had a couple of large oil? gilt frames made by a retired local framer for a few years now and am very much wanting to learn more about gilding in an attempt to ultimately make up some frames and mounts to approximately match the ones i already have (albeit after much ...much practice and trial and error)

I've attached some pictures of what i'm trying to match...

To my novice eye it looks like the frame is finished with somewhat distressed oil gilding over black bole and gesso and the mount likewise oil gilt with aluminium leaf on top of some sort of black painted undercoat. Though i'm not sure if its even possible to oil gild mattboard so that you can distress it like that later?

The small bits of gold/imitation gold on the mat also have me somewhat stumped - Is it just scrap leaf applied with oil gilding over the top of the already oil gilt aluminium ground or is there another way to do it?

Hi and Welcome Damien.

That's a quite interesting finish. Nothing much out of the ordinary but it's hard to know exactly how it was done
as everybody has their own little tricks and it's a bit like trying to copy handwriting.

The outer gold moulding looks like a factory moulding that's been somewhere a bit damp.
I've seen frames go like that after a few years. You can get odd patches of tarnishing or at least some strange
reaction that produces that look.

1.
Water based sizes (acrylic) never really dry, they stay plastic. Oil size is the way to go for distressing.

2.
The smooth reflection of the silver colored gilded surface looks smooth, as in full sheets of leaf with faults. Possibly a tamping brush was used with a combination of gold and silver skewings to form that effect.

As mentioned above acrylic size will stay tacky and soft indefinitely... so you will never be able to distress it like oil based size.

Outer frame looks to me as you observe, gesso, black bole, oil size - hand made and not a factory finish.

I think the small gold areas is the easiest thing to match, just apply randomly some small pieces of leaf which have been brushed off other gilding jobs (called skewings, or break up a leaf to create some), on to the gold size first and then just put the white metal on top. Then when you brush over the whole mount after laying all the leaf, you will be left with small gold areas which blend in with the white metal.