About one year ago we met with a client who had a special request that involved framing a project in a rather special way using windows from childhood homes. I got really excited about doing something that was definitely outside of the box and would require a different approach in finishing images and mounting them for our client.
The request was simple: Capture photos of each childhood home, his own and that of his wife in the winter with snow on the ground and in the summer, and frame them in windows from each house.
I will take you through the process after they got printed. This was new to me and therefor exciting, but also took me on a journey of discovery on how best to make the images stay within the glass.
Please see below:
Arrival of images. the box was pretty battered and I was a wee bit worried, but all was well, as our lab packs everything extremely well. We had 16 images in total, 8 of each house for 4 windows of each house, so 4 per house of each season.
The frames and windows had been dropped off at the studio over the course of a few months and they were slightly different in size. they also required a bit of cleaning and goo removal.
As with any framing job, a photo should never touch the glass of a frame and in this case I also had to extend the size of the photo to fit the window space. The photos would have been matted anyway, but this ensured it.
Once the mat and image were inside the frame, I discovered that I had some space between the image and the frame, bumpers were needed to make up the difference.
Here is a stack of the bumpers to be added to the back of each image to even things out under the back paper.
Here is a stack of the matted images, covered by plastic to protect it while we assembled and took a break. 8 windows took us 2 days to finish.
Stacks of back boards and yet to be filled windows.
The first one was done. This one taught me exactly what I needed to prep for the next 7 and helped create a good workflow. I forgot to take a picture of the back, but it is finished with black, heavy duty paper. The very same paper we wrap big orders in:)
The stack of 4 windows from house number two. This was taken at the end of day two, about 20 minutes before our client came to pick up the finished product.
I loved this project as it stretched not only the artist side, creating artwork from the captured photos, but also the side of me that loves to think outside of the box and live by the motto of never saying no to a client, but rather coming up with a solution to a request, no matter how different it is.
