Finished Piece! (and Blog thoughts)

I finally got my latest traditional piece finished, cut, framed, and ready to mount on a wall. I’ll tell ya, making your own frame can be quite a challenge (especially if you’re trying to use all materials you find around the house…).

What happened was I couldn’t find one at my arts and crafts store that would fit the wider triptych format nicely, so I decided to save on a custom frame (expensive like woah!) and try to build my own. I dug out some old window/door moulding from our barn that was barely large enough and cut it down the right size. Unfortunately they weren’t all the same thickness, so I had to cut and adjust the pieces I mounted on the back to stabilize the frame. And even now there’s a small gap along the top and bottom between the frame and the glass, but it’s hardly noticeable unless you’re up close and looking for it! Total cost was about $6, which was the cost of the glass I had cut. My current lack-of-job has me rejoicing at that fact.

Some in-progress pics:

Frame in-progress

Finished piece (ink and watercolor on drawing paper)

Triptych mock-up (done in GIMP)

Painted, cut, framed; final piece

Cool sepia version 🙂

I’m really happy with how this one turned out, both the drawing and the frame, although if I was doing the latter again I’d go ahead and spend the few extra bucks to get wood trim that was actually the exact same size. If I do anything else like this this summer, I’d like to try leaving the wood frame finish instead of painting it. Maybe I could do a sepia toned piece that would go with the frame.

Also…you may have noticed that I’ve been playing around with some new themes for my blog. I’m pretty limited by what Blogger gives me as default templates, so I’m thinking I’ll have to bite the bullet and finally get some more web coding knowledge, enough that I can actually know what I’m changing (right now I sort of stumble through the HTML code and get about half the results I want). It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never really got around to. Meh. Now added to my list of to-dos this summer.

Jesse