How Hard Is It to Frame Your Own Artwork? Harder Than It Looks.


Framing a piece of art seems simple enough — until you try to do it yourself.

How do you decide which frame style is best? How large should the frame be? Does the art really need any frame at all? And most important, how do you avoid getting stuck second-guessing yourself?

“I have an overarching rule for framing: It has to make the work of art look attractive to whomever is viewing it,” said Thomas Jayne, the founder of Jayne Design Studio, in New York. “But that can be a myriad of combinations of frame, mat and presentation.”

Do it right, and a great frame will enhance the appearance of your artwork; get it wrong, and the art won’t look as good as it should. “Framing can really elevate a piece,” said Ryann Swan Hackett, the founder of Ryann Swan Design, in Greenwich, Conn. “It can also help a piece tie into a room a little better.”

For help navigating a process that isn’t nearly as easy as it seems, we asked these two and other designers for their advice.

One of the simplest ways to approach framing is to use a frame that fits the exact size of the artwork without a mat. This often works for posters, large photographs and other works on paper — especially if they aren’t valuable and can be trimmed to fit the frame.

The downside? This approach offers the least flexibility for enhancing the appearance of the art and the way you want it to look in a room.

“Determining whether you want a mat or not is really about how large or how small you want the work to appear on your wall,” said Alyssa Kapito, an interior designer in New York.

An exception, she said, is a painting on canvas, which usually looks best with just a frame around the edges of the work, and no mat or glass.

Adding a mat provides more opportunity for customizing the way your artwork will look on the wall.

“You can take a work that’s very tiny and make it much more significant,” Ms. Kapito said, by using a wide mat in a large frame. Conversely, you can keep a large piece from overwhelming your room by using a narrow mat.

And the mat doesn’t need to center the work in the frame.

“You can do something like a bottom-weighted mat, where you’re adding more mat width to the bottom margin than you are on the other sides,” said Tessa Wolf, the head of merchandising at Framebridge, a framing company. “It can give you a really nice, classic look.”

If you already have a frame you like — or if you buy stock frames from an art store like Blick, Ikea or Michaels — you can get a custom-size, pre-cut mat from a vendor on Etsy, Ms. Swan Hackett said.

“Budgets don’t always allow for a professional framer, which can sometimes be more expensive than the piece of art,” she said. “So we’ll do that a lot in kids’ rooms, and just pop pieces into purchased frames.”

Your mat doesn’t have to be white — you can customize the look of your artwork by choosing almost any color.

Ms. Kapito likes the softer look of an ivory-colored mat for most artwork. But when she’s going for drama, she sometimes uses dark brown. “Deep brown is surprisingly powerful for a mat,” she said, “and really makes the artwork pop.”

Ms. Swan Hackett sometimes uses other colors. “We’re always looking at the art and pulling colors from it” to repeat in the mat, she said. “It can pull the coloration through the whole piece and really help the art sing.”

For drama, some people use the same bold color — fire-engine red, for instance — for both the frame and mat, Ms. Wolf said.

And solid colors aren’t the only choice. “We’re doing patterned mats and hand-painted mats,” said Sarah Stacey, an interior designer with offices in Nashville and Austin, Texas, who predicts that we’ll be seeing more of this trend in the years to come. “It’s really fun.”

In lieu of a mat, you can create the illusion of one by sandwiching your artwork between two pieces of glass. The leftover space between the work and the frame will be transparent, which can be desirable “if you have cool wallpaper and don’t want to cover it up,” Ms. Wolf said.

This approach is also ideal for double-sided art, she noted, like a postcard from a loved one: You can display the top image most of the time, but take it down from the wall if you want to read the handwritten note on the back.

Mats typically hide the edges of artworks on paper. But what if you like the way the edges look because they’re weathered, ragged or distinctive in some way?

The solution: Float the art above a solid mat in a shadowbox frame, with a material like foam core serving as a spacer behind the piece.

“Getting that edge of the paper gives a sense of texture,” said William Cullum, the senior designer at Jayne Design Studio. “There’s also a contemporary quality to framing something antique where those raw edges are exposed.”

The same kind of frame can be used to display three-dimensional objects, including paper sculptures and keepsakes like matchbooks, seashells and insect specimens.

If you’re displaying objects that can’t be floated with a foam-core spacer, Ms. Wolf, at Framebridge, suggested “sewing it to a mat background or finding another way to suspend it inside the frame” — with glue, for instance.

Don’t assume you have to buy a brand-new frame for every piece of art you want to display. Mr. Cullum and Ms. Kapito both love hunting for antique frames. It takes patience, and careful measurement, but finding frames that will fit your artwork is possible.

For an unframed painting he’d owned for years, Mr. Cullum recently found an ideal fit in a 1930s artist-made frame for sale on eBay. “It fit the painting just perfectly,” he said. “It was uncanny.”

Another time, he found a gilt frame with a gilt mat from the late 19th century at auction, and cropped a contemporary work on paper to fit inside. “I loved the art and I loved the frame, and I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the mat,” he said. “So I kept it.”

Mr. Cullum has also nested one frame inside another, to create custom frames from antique components.

Not every artwork you hang on the wall needs a frame. A painted canvas, for instance, can simply be placed on a picture hanger.

“Sometimes when we buy vintage artwork, the canvas will come and we’ll actually remove the frame and just leave it raw,” Ms. Kapito said.

Hanging works done on paper and fabric can be just as easy — pinned up with thumbtacks or hung from binder clips on nails.

“With things that aren’t valuable, you can clip, pin or staple them to your walls,” Mr. Jayne said. “Sometimes I find interesting things on the street in SoHo and tack them up for a month or two. It’s the most immediate way to present art.”

For a slightly more finished look, do the same thing with wooden tapestry clips or purpose-built poster hangers, Ms. Stacey suggested. “It’s an impactful way to hang something, especially something large,” she said, “for very little money.”

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