The Framers Forum

I'm fairly convinced that this should not be a difficult finish to produce. I fancy that I've read how to do this effect somewhere and have been racking my brains to remember where I may have read it. If I can remember, I may be able to look it up.

It's relatively straight forward to produce spots that produce an emphasised outer ring, which unfortunately is quite different from the effect required, but I'll mention it just in case anyone does not realise how this is done.

It's basically the same technique as producing the tram line effect. The mount lines are highly diluted when applied and have enough water colour, gouache, or ink applied for the medium to more or less stand up in a heap on the line. As the water content in the medium evaporates fastest at the edges of the line, capillary action draws more dilute medium to the edges and in doing so transfers more pigment to the edges also.

The same effect holds true for dilute droplets of pigmented medium, where the concentration of pigment is weak enough to barely be visible in the centre of these droplets, but as evaporation and capillary action strengthens the amount of pigment around the edges the out circle appears much more strongly. This takes a bit of practice to get the concetration of pigment weak enough and enough fluid in the droplet for the effect to appear.

I was sure that I knew how to do this effect. I did some sample chevrons of the effect a few years ago and need to find out what I did with them. It works well with paricular colours, but not so well with colours containing opaque pigments.

I lifted out random spots of wet colour by spinkling on various type of granular absorbent materials. I have quite a range of different sizes of such materials, some are easier to use than others. Rock salt will absorb small random spots to create fairly small spots, but I prefer to use ground up vermiculite.

Even in it's finest available grade, I find that vermiculite is a little to big for my liking, but fortunately I have a machine that will grind it down to whatever size that I want. I have a huge sack of this stuff, it's measured by volume not weight, because it weighs almost nothing and is very hard to supply by weight. They sell it in quantities measured in litres.

You can get some spectacular paint effects when using vibrant transparent colours. I originally planned to come back to these, but I can't remember where the sample chevrons went and the idea just got forgotten. I think all this may have happened about the time I had my stroke, quite a lot of things around then became a blur after my stroke.

Those who came on my hand finishing course will probably remember my using ground up vermiculite to make textured paint, which is one thing that ground up vermiculite does very well. I need to go looking for what happened to my samples, or make some new ones in the next few days.

I remember creating an antique gold slip, which I sealed with acrylic varnish and then coated with a transparent wash of zinc white and then poured some vermiculite over the wet wash. The effect was really good and I waxed it with some tinted wax, which only stuck to the mat finish of the zinc white.

It's time that I got back into some of this stuff, I've let too much slip since I had my stroke and my business has probably suffered as a result. Thinking about it, I was really struggling after my stroke to focus on anything and looking back, this explains a lot. I'm a lot better now, that just after my stroke, but it was some of my really special hand finishes that used to bring in so many of my best customers.

I think I need to get back to where I was before my stroke and raise my game again.

Today has been like someone has just switched a light on! I really amazed at what has been coming back to me, it like so many things just got lost when I had my stroke and I've suddenly found them all again.

I used to do a really stunning finish, which is a mix of antique gold bronzing powder in a solution of sodium silicate, a wetting agent to stop the bronzing powder from floating on the top of the solution and a small amount of paines grey, which has an amazing effect upon the appearance of the gold. I had forgotten all about that completely, until just now.

Not long after I opened my shop, I bought a large box of fabulous samples from Renaisance Mouldings, I thought that my customers wold really go for some of these lovely Italian style mouldings, but it never happened. I just could not understand why they did not sell, it certainly was not that they did not look stunning.

In time my stacked mouldings really took off and much of the inspiration for hand finishing my stacked mouldings was influenced by wanting them to look like Italian hand finished mouldings. I never specifically copied any of the Ranaisance mouldings, but they did help me to know what the Italian feel was like. Once I had got that instinctive Italian feel, I never looked back. The customers would suggest what they were looking for and it just came out right.

Surprisingly, I never found out about Rose and Hollis until I had been trading for a number of years and only got to hear about them when I first joined this forum, but once I started combining different moulding profiles in stacked mouldings, I gradually moved over to more than 90% of my moulding stock being bare wood profiles. It's been a really long time since I got into this hand finishing niche and I've no idea about the prices charged by my loacal competitors. I've been ploughing my own furrow for so long that the mainstream stuff seams like another world.

Given my own health problems, I think it's just as well that I doing my own thing as I'm would find it hard trying to compete directly with other people who have got more get up and go than I have and businesses in busier locations with much higher overheads, etc.

Mark, interesting. I'd have thought that rock salt would dissolve (a bit, anyway) which runs the risk of adding something potentially unwanted to the mix? What about silica gel, which everybody has the odd packet of somewhere.

That's an interesting bit of lateral thinking! I wonder how much fluid would be absorbed by individual grains of silica gel. I don't have any silica gel to be able to try it, but it does sound worth giving it a try.

Here's another one. How did they make it crack? Pretty sure it's a new frame; in any event it's far too young to have gone like that naturally.

Yes, you're right. It's not an antique frame. Whoever made this is well used to working the cracked effect. Cracking for it's own sake is often a bit false looking but these people have used it in a more convincing method. How to do it? Well have a look at this from Titebond and try it out.
http://www.titebond.com/news_article/11 ... ocess.aspx

Those cracks look to 'square' to be done with the usual cracking methods.

It almost looks like a piece of fabric has been gesso'd and then stretched one way and then again at 90º.
Applied to the frame and painted over. Or somefink like that. It's a nice effect however they did it.

Anyway, as it happens I have a bottle of Titbond hide glue in the shed untouched. I got it by accident.
I feel a dabble coming on...

I've a bottle of Liquid Hide Glue sitting somewhere too. Not sure it's that method though; the main cracks run perpendicular to the direction of the moulding, and the cracks running parallel are much smaller. The Titebond method seems to produce non-directional uniform cracking.

And yes, it's a very good frame. The picture's the price of a small house too...

Prospero is probably right here. You can reproduce that cracking by applying a single coat of gesso ( natural or acrylic) to some fine fabric, then rolling it up when dry to cause it to crack. Then you have to glue it down onto the moulding and take it all from there.