About two or three weeks ago I took two orders for two Arqadia mouldings which turned out to be obsolete. Both customers were in the shop at the same time and one was waiting while the other was being served.
The first customer is a regular and very discerning customer with a real eye for what is gonna look classy and we took ages finding something which would really look the business on her two frames. The second customer had been watching and when the first customer had left immediately chose the same moulding in the other colour option for her frame.
It was only when I tried to order these mouldings that I discovered that they both had been discontinued. In both cases there was no alternative moulding and both customers had set their hearts upon these mouldings. After speaking to the first customer she asked me if I could produce a hand finished copy, (she already has a number of my hand finished frames in her collection), so I set about deciding how this could be done. The second customer also wanted me to do the same.
This is a picture of one of the discontinued mouldings.
- ARQ 331 940 210.jpg (62.81 KiB) Viewed 11971 times
The most obvious way of recreating this was by stacking two Rose and Holis mouldings (A24 and A11).
- Stacked pine.jpg (76.8 KiB) Viewed 11971 times
To create the underlying bronze hints appearing through the top finish I needed to grain the base coat primer like this.
- Groovy paint.jpg (111.08 KiB) Viewed 11971 times
This meant devising a way of doing this. This is how I decided to do this.
- Groovy thingy.jpg (44.43 KiB) Viewed 11971 times
And here is the part finished frame, unfortunately I varnished part of the finished surface without thinking that this would make it hard to get a good photograph, because the flash on the camera does strange things with the varnish. The gold sight edge has not yet been added. In reality the finished result looks really expensive and very designer, unfortunately the camera does not do it justice! I don't know why the finish looks so uneven on the photo, where as in reality the graining is much more uniform. I've deliberately exposed a bit more of the bronze than on the original, because it looks so good like that! The blue tones in the picture don't exist - This is due to problems with how the camera reproduces it! The same is true of the strange reflections on the image!
- Faking discontinued moulding 1.jpg (115.39 KiB) Viewed 11971 times
Here is an out of focus picture of the outside edge of the finished moulding. Sorry, but camera does not do manual focus and no matter how I tried it would only focus on the background not the frame, but I think it still gives an impression of what it looks like.
- Outside edge.jpg (27.04 KiB) Viewed 11971 times
There is a certain amount of paint chemistry tricks involved in the way I have done this and parts of the top coat were removed by chemical distressing with a solvent which does not affect the paint below. The paints used are the Crown top coat and Liquid Metal Bronze underneath, (both are shown in the pictures). Again the blue tones in the picture don't exist - This is due to problems with how the camera reproduces it!
