Blue Silk and Gilded Mount

The inner mount is gilded in 23.5ct gold leaf using an acrylic gold size on dark brown painted base, it is then sealed with shellac. The top mount is blue silk. 

Large Mount

I've posted in the past about large and oversize mounts and how they can be dealt with, links to previous posts below: 

Oversize framing and Spliced mounts and Long mount

The blue mount in these photos is on a movie poster I framed recently, the mount has been made by joining two sheets of mountboard together, to give a mount larger than the standard size of 32" x 44" that this colour is available in. The top photo shows the join is unnoticeable when viewed face on, only really from the side or above can the join be seen, and even then only from a few inches away. I have another of these types of oversize mounts to do next week.

Mount and Frame

A corner photo of a watercolour which is mounted, and framed in a gilded and painted frame.

Watercolour Framing

A watercolour mounted with three layer museum mountboard, frame with paint and gilded finish.

More washline mounts

A selection of washline mounts with antique and newly made frames.

Washline mounts and 19th C frames

These nice examples of washline mounts came into the workshop today, the antique frames with the mounts need some repair and restoration work.

Gilded bevel

                                         

Triple mount

A selection of mounts are being cut in the photo at the top, which were then used to make the triple layered mounts seen above. The inner mount is an extra thick (2000 micron compared to the usual 1500 micron) dull white museum board, in the middle is a dark grey with black core, and the top or outer mount is a solid coloured core museum board with a debossed line.

Large silk board

This large piece of ivory silk material has been mounted onto mountboard, it has been left under a sheet of glass to keep it as flat as possible. Next it will be given an iron to reactivate the adhesive and create a strong bond between silk and board.

Bevel mount slip

The extra thick bevel on the inside of this mount is a wooden slip that is covered in paper, it is then cut to size and joined together in the same way a frame would be joined. The outer or top mount is then cut to size, this is made from 1.5mm thick mountboard. On this slip the paper is plain off white but all sorts of different papers and fabrics can be used.

Green silk

Here are some mounts covered in green silk fabric with a gold slip. The mount aperture is cut and then an adhesive is brushed on the mount board, the adhesive is left to dry. It dries to a slightly tacky surface so the fabric is then positioned and smoothed down firmly. A tacking iron is then used to reactivate the adhesive and create a good bond with the silk.

Washline and swept

A more traditional frame and mount choice for a watercolour, is a reproduction English style swept frame and washline mount.

Damage from poor mountboard

You may have seen some mounts which have a brown bevel cut edge, this would have originally been a cream colour but the core of the mountboard quickly turns brown. This is caused by the lignin (tree sap) in the board fibres. Lignin is the binder which holds wood and paper fibres together. Over time lignin becomes highly acidic. This process is accelerated by heat and light. This acid then causes the board to weaken and discolour, and the acid can soon migrate from the mountboard and cause damage to the artwork. The second photo shows the damage that this acid migration has caused to the paper it surrounded.

Re-using old mounts

Sometimes it is necessary to re-use old or antique mounts. This old mount with lines needs to be used again, so a new mount will be cut using Bainbridge Alphamat Artcare mountboard, the borders will be cut a couple of mm narrower all round and will go under the old mount. I will post more on the Alphamat Artcare boards in the near future, but more details on them can be seen here:
Zeolites and Artcare Technology
These mountboards contain molecular traps which actively absorb and neutralize harmful gasses given off as paper and boards degrade.
I think in this case, where it is the customers wish to keep the old mount, then the use of this type of mountboard is the best solution.

Mount decoration

These mounts are often called washline mounts (or mats), French mounts, or English line and wash mounts. The examples here have both been done by framers in London. I like the deep blue wash used on the one, and the second has two wash colours combined with thin lines and the inner edge of the top mount is the original mountboard colour; giving three subtle colour shades to the mount. I think these types of mounts can look great on more traditional artwork, and even some more contemporary designs can be used to good effect on more modern work.

Bamboo frames and silk mounts

Here are two of the silk mounts from a few posts ago. 

Silk mounts and gold slips

Fabric covered mounts can look great, they seem to be very popular in America but for some reason they are not that big over here.
The mounts above are covered in a pongee silk with a gold mount slip.

First I cut the bevel edged mount as usual although the bevel was reversed which is common practice when you intend to add a mount slip (some people call them fillets). The silk was adhered to the face of the mount and the excess was removed from the aperture with just 3/4" of  overhang which could be folded round and stuck down at the back. I then put some double sided tape, called fillet tape, on the back of the mount close to the aperture edge. The gold mount slip was cut to size and fixed in place with the double sided tape. The bottom photo shows the mount slip has been covered with aluminium foil tape which protects the artwork from any impurities in the wooden slip.

Washline mount

A traditional washline mount on museum mountboard for a limited edition artist's print. It will be framed in an antique looking gilt frame.

Double Double Thick

Mountboard comes in various thicknesses, the standard and most common being between 1.4 and 1.5mm, but there are also boards available at (for example): 2mm, 2.2mm, 3mm, 3.5mm and the thickest at 4.1mm which is only available in white.

As with jumbo (large external) sized boards the colour choice decreases as the thickness increases. I find the metric measurement of mountboard thickness easy to understand, some suppliers use another system where the thickness is measured in 'ply', so 4 ply is the standard (1.5mm?) and 8 ply is double thick (3mm?).

I use a range of museum mountboards which have a solid colour throughout, they come in about 50 colours at 1.5mm, with about 6 colours at 3mm thick. Because the core is a solid colour you can easily laminate two 1.5mm boards together to give a good range of colours at 3mm thick. In the photos above I am laminating two 3mm thick boards together to give a monster 6mm thick piece of mountboard.

I mixed up some wheat starch paste and used a roller to spread over the board, put the boards together (cut at 24" x 32" which was slightly oversize so they could be cut to size after gluing) and weighted down with sheets of glass.
After a day the board was cut to size and then the bevelled aperture was cut on the mount cutter, I guess if you have a CMC (computerised mount cutter) then this thickness of board would be a doddle to cut, but with a manual cutter it takes a little bit of calibrating and fiddling about. You can see the mount cutter blade has had a small section removed to allow it to cut through fully, in this photo you can also see a test mount which was made from two different colours of board. Cutting was done at two depth increments as the blade was flexing too much in one cut. In the last photo you can see the finished result - a double double thick mount with a very big bevel.

Splice as nice

Mountboards are available in many different colours, the standard sized sheet being around 32" x 44", over this size there are 'Jumbo' sheets which are around 40" x 60" although the choice of colours is quite limited.  Over the Jumbo size the choice of colours becomes very limited, although you can get sheets up to 48" x 96" and 64" x 86"

For this mount (external size 54" x 38") there was no colour close in the Jumbo or larger sheet sizes, and this sand yellow was absolutely perfect for the art being framed, so we spliced two smaller sheets of mountboard together. This involves cutting two bevels where the join will be, butting the cuts together and fixing with tape, the join was then reinforced with mountboard. The join is very hard to see, especially as a picture of this size will rarely be viewed close up.