A happy day of art experiments. For years, so far, I've made and decorated frames as I needed for each painting, learning finishes as I went, comparing new ideas with past ones, but this is a slow process. Now I've decided to systematically analyse each component of the different surfaces, and experiment wildly to generate new and spectacular effects. So I started today by cutting lots of 200mm sections from 10x36mm pine and trying different combinations. For the first time I'm making my own gesso designed for wood which I can colour.
Sometimes, the grain is pretty and useful. The most basic design is simply staining the wood, but I haven't made samples of those simple things. I know that, for stain, solvent based is best as water based stains raise the grain and are generally very weak. The new Ronseal Colron stains are awful compared to their old ones. I use Morrells solvent based stain now, though generally I use Golden Fluid Acrylics (GFA) for decoration. GFA Carbon Black and water is the best black stain, better than any solvent based black I've used.
The layers of a frame: wood, filler (for big gaps), 3D decorations or applied mouldings, gesso (which can be viscous or thin, most commercial acrylic gessos are thin), paint layers, gold leaf (which can be over paint or over gesso, generally it's better to have a coloured base behind gold), then some spattering, (many frame designs I see have cracking or spotting), physical distressing (sanding, wire brush, wire wool rubbing, bashing), powder or dust, varnish. Any of these are optional and the colour of any layer can vary, and most of these steps can be repeated to make an infinity of choices.
So today I've started some systematic experiments which I can keep and refer to. This is already useful. I've never used green gesso for example, or any sort of green chalk base, but I can already see how nicely it works.
In other news, I announced a Flatspace sale, the first of several game sales this month.
