I've been working on framing family photos lately and today I worked on this frame.
Hold that thought a minute. I just had to share that we got about 2 feet of snow here in south central PA. Yes, that's our van under all that snow and it was barricaded by a 4 foot wall of snow made by the plow. Poor hubby spent hours digging us out.
Ok, back to the frame. It actually isn't wood. Did I fool anyone? The title surely gave it away. Anyway, it was a gold resin frame that someone painted this strange blue, which is probably why it ended up in a thrift store for $2.00.
Now, even as a professional decorative artist, I'm not generally into faux. I think it can be hard to do really well. It may look good in pictures or at a distance, but once you get a good look, you can tell it's not the real thing. I'm in the process of framing my old family photos in dark wood frames and this blue one was not going to do at all. So, faux was the way to go.
I started out by painting the frame in Asphaltum, a very dark brown acrylic paint color. It took me one coat and a touch up to get into all of the nooks. You can see some of the blue peaking through in the picture below.
I then brushed a thin coat of burnt umber, which is a little translucent. This is just to add a subtle variance in shade. Once that was dry, I lightly brushed some raw sienna on the "peaks" of the detail, to bring it out. At this point the frame looked good, but it was a little too brown compared to my other frames.
So, I mixed a drop of burgundy with burnt umber and brushed that into the crevices. Now, acrylic paint is very flat, so it did not resemble real wood at this point. It lacked the luster and depth of old wood. I brushed my favorite dark walnut stain into all the nooks and crannies and wiped it off the peaks with a rag. Once that dried, I sprayed it with a glossy polyurethane coat.
