The Framers Forum

This is a handfinished frame intended to look in keeping with an old and damaged original pencil drawing.

The frame moulding is Simons HW/3, which is the largest of their shaped pine mouldings. It is a little bit too large to easily cut on a morso, but as they say there are ways and means to still cut it on a morso, it just takes longer to do.

This particular moulding always has quite a few knots, but you can always cut the moulding in such a way as to exclude the worst of these. The external frame size is about 19" x 26" and all came out of one length of moulding. This has been done for a member of the family, so it was done at mates rates and did not make a proper profit.

The drawing had various open and closed tears and needed some repair work just to get it into a state where it could be framed. There was a open hole in the middle of the painting where the paper was missing, but I was able to find some paper which was a perfect match, so that was O.K. There are some brown marks left by ancient sellotape residue, but the customer did not want to pay to have these removed.

The handfinishing consists of a medium grey base coat, a beige colour (IMHO wrongly called warm grey). This was then chemically distressed and then coated with some watered down Polyvine teak coloured acrylic wax finish varnish. It's an easy finish to do and most people could do it without needed too much skill.

In reality the colour of the frame matches the colour of the drawing, but to the camera this is not so. BTW, for those who can't tell the curved part of the moulding curves inwards, not outwards.

That'a superb Mark.

I use that profile often, but R&H A168 which is obeche.

Thats a lovely frame.

I have just made some battered frames for a Thai restaurant, bright gaudy gold mouldings usually found adorning the walls of a local far curry house, but then sand papered and bashed to give the damaged in transit look. I may point out that these restaurants are themed to look like a Bangkok street market with authentic Thai junk

That was my last length of this particular moulding. It's a nice moulding and the price is good, but I'm switching to the Rose & Hollis A168 after this.

If I used it all the time, I would stick with the Simons version and get 100 ft for the discount and the carriage paid order value. However for the rare occasions that I use it the A168 will save time and off setting that against the cost it's worth paying the extra.

Brilliant work. Love the way he says just do this and a bit of that - easy. All the best artists will say the same.

Thanks for all the kind comments. I did mean it when I said that this is an easy finish to do. All it is, is two different colours of paint, one over the other and distress.

The top coat does not need to be too thick, so that it's easier to distress and to reveal the base coat. The base coat needs to be thicker, so that is is less easy to go right through to the wood underneath, I used two coats for the base coat colour. It looks good on a larger, more detailed moulding.

This is an ideal finish for a new comer to handfinishing to try, because there is so little to go wrong. The base coat is just using up some left over Crown emulsion and the top colour is a good quality, but cheap acrylic artist paint.

I like to distress my paint finishes with meths mixed with just a dash of acetone. Don't be tempted to use acetone by it's self, because it's far to strong and needs something less strong to tone it down a little bit. I use solvents to distress finishes because it's so quick and easy to do. The time saved is quite considerable.

Yeah - but that's not the point. You know what you want to happen when you rub them two sticks together and you know when the effect looks just right. As it does.
My point is that no matter how detailed or concise the instructions, 99 p'cent of the effect is obtained from learning the "look" and relentless trial and error.
So, respect!

I guess I'd better shut up then and just say thank you for your kind words.

Hi Mark, I'll echo the above comments. That's a great looking frame & I know if I tried this I doubt the result would look anywhere as good.

Ditto, lovely looking frame and sympathetic to the artwork.