A Sneak Peek Into the Art Framing Process

Has anyone ever gone through the art framing process?  It's a wild world that I hadn't ventured through until just recently.

A few weeks ago, I purchased the beautiful limited edition print of the below painting by artist Lisa Golightly (see below) from her Etsy store, Kiki and Polly.

 Girl In the Yellow Suit, 16"x16" Limited Edition

When the print arrived in the mail, I opened it up like a giddy school girl.  This was my first true art purchase, and I feel like an art addict already.  It was more beautiful in person than I had imaged.  And, the quality of the print - crazy good.  Love it!!

I zoomed on over to my local A.C. Moore craft store because they were having a 60% off custom framing sale.  Let me just say that it's a necessity to wait for one of these sales to come around, because the price of custom framing is astronomical!  I nearly gawked when they told me the total (discounted!) price. (Thanks Mom & Dad for gifting my frame for my 30th birthday gift.  You're the best!!)

Here is my print laid out with the fillet (small inner frame), matting, and frame moulding.  I knew I wanted a large white matte and simple black frame, but it took me a while to decide which accent matte color I wanted to add to the mix.  I tried light gray, darker gray, yellow, gold, and then a greenish gray.  They all looked great, but brought out different highlights of the painting.  I finally settled on the darker gray shown below because it added such depth and dimension to the print, and made the girl's yellow suit pop just so.

You may wonder...how did I settle on gray for the accent matte?  Well, they had this super cool ceiling-mount camera and computer software that took a picture of the different matte color combinations, and then presented an almost true-to-life representation of what my final framed picture would look like. This totally allowed us to visualize the finished product!

How cool is that?  Of course, my framed print will have much more depth and dimension.  Knowing it will look even better than the above rendering makes me super excited to have it in a couple weeks.  Did I mention it takes 4-6 weeks to get art framed?!?  Another punch to the gut, but it's one I'm willing to take because it's going to look simply beautiful!

I'll share it with you as soon as it gets hung in our house.  Can't wait!!