The Framers Forum

Sorry if I have missed to boat on this and if this has been answered before.

The new rules with the OBA’d mean that either mount board colour is now cream rather than white or a white mount board is no longer truly conservation. What are people doing about this when they want a white mount board especially when the customer wants a white frame. I personally think white and cream looks pretty horrible.

Are there any alternatives.

Thanks.

Anthony.

I have to agree I dont like how creamy the conservation boards now are. I use very few colours and 90% of the time I use the same snow white board. I now use an alternative white conservation board, but it's not bright enough and I still find myself and my customers are still going for snow white which is no longer a conservation board.

Everything I do involves printing and I like a close match between the mount and fine art paper when including a print border, now this is not possible. Not quite sure why the mount is not allowed OBA's but the fine art printing paper is allowed them when there are plenty of fine art papers on the market that are OBA free.

Thanks so much I thought i was going mad. I had a batch of mount board deliver to me this week and the same colour that I have been using for ten years has now changed colour it’s called iced white. Have no idea what I’m going to do when customers ask about it I have long term customers that I now can’t replicate what they have had for a long time.

antdan111 wrote:The new rules with the OBA’d mean that either mount board colour is now cream rather than white or a white mount board is no longer truly conservation.

Just to clarify - there are no new rules for Guild Mountboard Standards. The current Guild Standards are exactly as they always have been and OBAs are not permitted in Conservation or Museum standard boards. The recent issue was that a few boards within the scheme, when retested, were discovered not to meet the standard specified and so had to be reclassified to correct this.

Thanks.

Thank you for making this clearer

Do you know of a white mount board that does meet the conservation standard.

Any that are now part of the Guild scheme and classified as Conservation will now meet that standard. It’s always best to check the supplier website rather than rely on chevron samples or catalogues as the website will have the most up to date information.

Do you know of a white mount board that does meet the conservation standard.

From the Arqadia mountboard range I found Glacier was the brightest that was still conservation. I do offer this myself now, but it's just not white enough for my liking when compared to a fine art paper like Hahnemuhle Photo Rag so I do still find I am using mostly Snow White as my main mount colour, which is no longer classed as conservation.

I can't claim to know enough about this to understand what is detremental about OBA's, but if this issue is only affecting the front facing papers, is there not reasonable scope for making a judgement when to still use such boards. Can somebody explain this, so that we can understand why it matters. I'd like to know, what the big deal and how come something that was o.k., now is not!

Not your average framer wrote:I'd like to know, what the big deal and how come something that was o.k., now is not!

Sorry Mark - again, to be clear - nothing about the current Guild Standards has changed. Boards which originally had been tested and passed as Conservation were then retested and found not to comply as they contained OBAs. They therefore had to be reclassified by the suppliers selling them.

For anyone who gets Art + Framing Today magazine there is a CPD Short number 021 produced by the Framers Committee on page 55 that explains about OBAs in detail. For those that don't have access to this essentially the information is as follows:

OBAs are mostly white or colourless compounds that paper and pulp manufacturers add to enhance paper brightness and whiteness. They are also used in laundry detergents and textile manufacture to produce the whiter than white look that consumers love. Wood pulp and textile fibres, which are cellulose based are never naturally a true white but are slightly yellow-white. OBAs can be added to increase the apparent brightness and whiteness of paper and fabric. They do this by absorbing energy in the UV range and emitting (fluorescing) the energy in the blue area of the visible spectrum. Because to the eye blue-white looks whiter than yellow-white OBAs are not really whiteners but actually bluing agents. The problem is that to maintain the whiter than white look you keep having to renew and refresh them (eg by washing clothes in powder with OBAs) and you can't do that with mountboards. They are dyes, not pigments and they can be degraded by oxygen. In other words they stop working. When used in paper or board this can take months or years depending on conditions and once they stop working the paper/board will look yellow-white again. So while OBAs arguably have no effect on artwork, there will be a noticeable colour shift over time which is a similar effect to fading. Also, best practice conservation framing techniques aim to filter out UV radiation by using UV glass. OBAs need UV to "work", without it they are useless and make no difference to the colour we see - so become an unnecessary addition in a conservation framing environment. The current Guild Mountboard Standards are clear that OBAs have NEVER had a place in Conservation or Museum boards but they are acceptable at Standard level.

I hope that is now clears up any confusion. The boards were not changed from Conservation to Standard because we moved the goalposts - they were changed because they did not meet the standard when tested.The Guild Standards were written after a lengthy consultant process and by a Committee of industry professionals and experts from mountboard manufacture as well as qualified conservators.

Tudor Rose wrote: For anyone who gets Art + Framing Today magazine there is a CPD Short number 021 produced by the Framers Committee on page 55 that explains about OBAs in detail.

Ooops forgot to tell you which issue of A+FT! It is the October 2018 issue.

Last year I had a problem with Arqadia Solidcore conservation board. It is a solid board using the same material throughout i.e. face, backing and core all being the same, and the batch I received had a slightly different colour face paper to that of the backing when they should be exactly the same. I confirmed this with a UV light. Once I pointed this out to Arqadia they confirmed it was a faulty batch and one side did in fact contain OBAs which was obviously a mistake

It was also at this time that I questioned Arqadia about their Snow White board and how much it was fluorescing under my UV light and they confirmed that it did contain OBAs and would now be listed as standard board only.

You may find this thread an interesting read viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16294

Out of interest, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag does contain OBAs, although only a small amount.

Thanks Jo,

Superb clear explanation. Fortunately I don't get too much call for ultra white mount board, so this won't affect me too much.

Mark