Picture a Day - Day 183

We may or may not have found a house that we think is the one and we may or may not be hoping to make an offer soon.

We may or may not be planning to move to Mars soon and have Dodo eggs for breakfast. I may or may not be a big stinker for all the suspense.

But all this talk about moving and houses and started to trigger some long dormant neurons in my brain. For the first time in just about my whole life I can decorate a place up however I like. The power is almost maddening.

I could, if pressed, put nothing but white doilies all over the place and wallpaper boarders in every room (I wish I were joking but we really did find a house like that. The teddy bears were by far the creepiest).

Or paint the whole house black except for a door that's red, but I was never a big Doors far.

But I'm getting far too ahead of myself. Got to take some baby steps. How about just finally framing some of your paintings?

Yeah, let's do that (hides can of black paint).

Some of you may remember many moons ago when I painted these two characters from a beloved book series. Instead of doing it on canvas I attempted it on a fancy paper for a multitude of reasons (though the main was probably because I'm cheap).

Well ever since that cold February day they've been sitting on the floor getting dirty and crumpled as I shift piles of papers from one corner to the next (it's a fun game). I finally realized that if I was serious about hanging those up some day today was the day.

A quick trip to Target and I scored some very nice stark frames to match our black bookcase and other black frames (because, you know, it's black). The hard choice was in the matte.

We could have gone with plain old white but I wanted some color to offset the characters (and I never bothered painting the background). Realizing that we have a wild love of blue and green there is a very good chance that whatever house we do get will have blue and green somewhere too.

Meet Mr. DEATH. He likes long walks in a wheat field, talking to a rat skeleton, and owns a horse named Binky.

To provide constant stress and annoyance for Mr. DEATH is the most unlikely wizzard ever - Rincewind. I actually did paint his shoes and the end of his legs but they got cut off by the matte. Seems rather fitting for Rincewind actually.I was really getting into the framing zone so I quickly threw another one together. Really it was just about no work at all.Okay I lie with a fly in my eye. This is a painting I've done of my sister-in-law's wedding dress (which is an interesting aspect as this will be the first time I'll see a dress in person that I painted. I also had to hunt the thing down on-line so I could actually find large enough pictures to paint the thing so now I know how much it cost. You don't want to know, trust me).

Her brother, of course, has just about no idea what her taste is (and if you don't get it perfect it will wind up in the trash). But nothing seems more classy than a silver frame. The trick was with the matte.

Black made sense to me, but the only okay one we found had more of an ivory liner and it just looked weird next to the bright white dress. So I pulled out my paints and added another silver layer.

I figure even if she hates the painting and doesn't want it, she can at least use the frame right?

It's kinda weird seeing my paintings framed like that. It gives them a bit of gravitas. Heaven help me but they almost look like real art instead of the doodlings of an orangutan who stole a paint set.

Does anyone else have some good framing advice? I've got a few more paintings that I'm starting to think I'll just keep back but as you can tell I am very rudimentary when it comes to putting things behind glass. What's your favorite place for frames?