Frame

Joe went antiquing again to furnish the house that he hasn't built yet, and this time he found an Arts and Crafts Movement picture frame, which is very excellent!

It didn't come with any art in it, but that's not a huge problem. Though maybe a mirror would go in there very nicely?

The frame is oak and has some simple mother-of-pearl inlays; he'll have to rig up something to hang it with in the back, as there's no wire, but you can see the old nail holes from where there used to be some:

It will be a very nice addition to Joe's (theoretical) Craftsman bungalow, I'm sure.

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It's made of mat board, of course, and is based on a real one I came across on an antique dealer's site when googling Arts and Crafts Movement library tables last night. The original one was actually just the frame for a piece of embroidery by Ann MacBeth, one of the artists of the Glasgow School if I'm remembering correctly. Here's a screencap of the original:

The 'mother-of-pearl inlays' on Joe's version are just some paper painted with iridescent white acrylic paint; I actually did cut out the bits from the frame and peeled off the outer layer to make space for the painted paper, so it's an inlay of a sort. It worked pretty well.

The finish is similar to that of the Stickley cube chair I made earlier, and it really is ridiculously easy. It's just layers of thinned down acrylic paint in several layers starting with yellow ochre, then mixing a bit of red in it to make it more orangey, then finishing with a layer or two of burnt umber. (If it's too brassy, tint the umber slightly purple). The key is to keep it pretty thin, and to use a fairly stiff brush so it makes lots of brush strokes, which will look quite remarkably like wood grain. Just make sure you don't follow the contours too much; just let it all be mostly parallel. Seriously, I kind of can't believe how realistic that looks, for so little effort.

Oh, and I didn't make the bevels; the mat board I'm using is left over from when I worked at a frame shop, and are the bits cut out of the center of other mats. So they pretty much all have beveled edges. They came in handy this time!

Anyway, if I had a working printer right now I'd totally print out Rossetti's drawing of Jane and his sainted wombat to go in it, because holy moly that thing is awesome.

Don't believe me? Like I could make that up:

Oh man.