The Framers Forum

Back in the olden days you could buy bundles of Illustrated London News from the likes of Key's for a pittance. Break them down and mount "shoe horn" them in a frame for resale in the next suitable auction. The best etchings were framed and sold in my shop, Although I made a small fortune that way I never realised that technique had a technical term (thanks prospero). Waiting for the cheque to arrive allowed time for other work

After that along came HK oils and fortune number two

Thank you Mal for the video. As always it was informative, helpful and very interesting.

Peter

poliopete wrote:The best etchings

Engravings, actually, if you want to be pedantic, not etchings.

To make a wood engraving, take a block of wood and a sharp tool. Make lines in the wood where you want black on the print. Ink the block and make your print.

To make an etching, take a block of metal and cover it with wax. Scratch through the wax where you want the black on the print. Then etch the metal using acid; where you have scratched the wax off, the metal will be eroded/etched. Clean up the block and ink it and make your print.

As the resolution of a cut in a block of wood is lower than an etched line in metal you can get much more refinement into an etching than a wood engraving. As the Illustrated London News was published weekly they needed to be able to turn the pictures round quickly and cheaply; moreover with a (relatively) low print quality the wood engraving was perfectly fine.

Thanks James

As soon as hit submit I realised it should have been engravings

I don't mind you being pedantic I am used to being kept on the straight and narrow.

I was once told that prints from the likes of Illustrated London News were etched on wood or stone thanks for putting me right about the process.

How ever they were done I know there was a limited run. Very clever though when you consider the reporter sketched whatever on site and then returned to the news room to turn it in to the printed page.

The best one I ever sold was a scene of the river Nene channel being dug. All by hand using hundreds of men (migrant workers from Europe) nothing new there,and countless teams of horses. I framed it in 1" Hogarth with a washline mount and sold it for £100 (a lot of money then). A local land owner came across a site where some of these workers must have had their lunch. He found dozens of small coins in differing dominations and even more broken clay pipes. I did get to frame the broken clay pipes (herring bone pattern) but not the coins

Peter

I've still got quite a large amount of pages from the Illustrated London News, but my experience is that there is not much of a market for them now. I used to sit in my secondhand books and prints shop in Newton Abbot, hand tinting the woodcuts and mounting them. It was not a huge amount of money, but they ticked over quite nicely.

I also mounted and sold old magazine adverts, particularly Guinness adverts and Coca Cola adverts (from the back of old national geographic magazines), and other stuff like that. To some extent this had some bearing on my later becoming a framer. There were a number of different reasons why I became a framer and if it were not for different circumstances and needs at the time, I could easily have ended up doing something else.

Test Pilot in a mattress factory?

Life guard in a car wash

Boiler-Maker's Nut Polisher's Mate.

Been a bit busy this week, so late in replying

Jamesnkr wrote
" Isn't the whole point of this video that it is nothing about custom-made frames but instead is about how to shoe-horn a picture into an off-the-shelf frame?

Ever gone to an art gallery? They have standard-sized frames that they use from one exhibition to the next and so works on paper are mounted in standard-sized bookmounts, and OP's method tells you how best to do this."

We must be watching different videos then, in the one I watched regarding the Golden Ratio at 2.14 minutes it give you the formula to work out the over all size of the mount required for a piece of artwork of 300x400mm would be 486x648, it show and you can hear that the sizes are side borders of 93mm top border 112mm and bottom border 136, this is what I was referring to as it look like you have shoe horned the artwork into a frame you already had lying around.

I confess I didn't particularly focus on that part, but as the video is no longer available...

I didn’t think that this video would generate such interest from the differing types of print to custom/shoe horning prints into frames. In making and publishing the video my intention was twofold; first, to offer an alternative to the normal bottom weighting and second, to introduce some of the methods used bu some UK Institutions.

My interest in the method used by the British museum came about when I was asked to provide mounted and framed prints for an exhibition on Joseph Banks in the Collection, Lincoln. On a visit to view a collection of prints by celebrated artists I noted the differing border dimensions and realised that if I used the my standard border widths my framed prints would look out of place. I need to find out the system used and this was answered in Joanna Kosek’s book on Conservation Mounting for Prints and Drawings. As a framer the book I consider as my bible. I used the half-royal sizes along with the method described in Joanna’s book and the framed prints looked well and complimented the exhibition.

Since then when a customer brings in work and I will consider and discuss the various options available. As far as the ratios are concerned whilst I will use ratios in everyday calculations (and either round up or down the nearest 5mm) this mainly applies to my work with Arabic/Islamic artwork and geometric patterns, the Golden Ratio but also square root 2 of which designs are found in some mosques and palaces such as the Alhambra near Seville.

I am presently working on further video that covers the Mount Package and hinging and perhaps this will generate the same amount of interest and discussion. The easiest way to access these videos is to subscribe to my YouTube channel and you will automatically be informed when a new video is published. Many thanks to those who have already done so.

SteveN's 'shoehorning' is Mal's 'carefully calculating it' on a completely different basis. Who is to say, Steve, that 70mm all round with an extra 15mm on the bottom is the only way?

don't get 15mm with me unless they ask

An excellent video Mal. Well produced. I have learned a lot from it. For anybody interested in a more in depth (though not all art related) study of The Golden Ratio, I recommend Mario Livio's book I look forward to your future video's Mal. Thanks, Colin.