I salvage frames, glass, and hanging supplies. You should too.

Go to garage sales, Habitat for Humanity, Goodwill and if in Austin, TX visit Austin Creative Reuse. There is an abundance of high quality framing materials available, real wooden frames, not pressboard junk, that with a small amount of love can be repurposed. There is also a ton of bad artwork on perfectly good canvas that needs to be painted over with your artwork, like in my Little Red Riding Hoodie piece. You have a duty to make the world a little better by removing an eyesore like this thing:

It reads:

Dance like there’s no one is watching
Love like you’ll never get hurt
Sing like there’s no one listening
Live like it’s heaven on Earth

Find some awful art.

Separate the materials to see what is worth keeping or putting in a recycling bin. The glass and frame were in great condition. The backings and cliche artwork has to go. I have an idea to take a lifedrawing and dump a bunch of paper flowers on it. These will need magnets to be suspend over the art. This frame is deep so can be used to box in my artwork, a steel sheet and the paper flower magnets.

First step: clean the materials to see what your working with.

For Glass use Windex and newsprint. Frame, use dish soap, sponge and water. This exposed a few nicks in the sides of the frame. Wood putty is an option, but I want to paint the frames black anyway. So hand sanding down the wood with a coarse sandpaper made all sides even and smooth. Make sure to use a respirator and gloves when doing this, because you don’t know if there is lead in any of the original paint. Think about it, if someone is going to manufacture awful artwork, they may take shortcuts in the materials.

Soak the sanded wood for a few minutes and let it dry. This raises the grain of the wood to hit with a finer grade sandpaper and get a smooth finish. Use a hair dryer to blow off all the sawdust and then wipe down with a damp sponge, especially the corners where it tends gather. You don’t want sawdust particles to get into the stain or paint you going to put on the frame. Set aside to dry.

What about the artwork?

I purchased this full rotation of OliviaP from Posespace.com and sketched a number of them with the concept of having these line a hallway all at eye-level. If you quickly walked by them, there would be an illusion OliviaP would turn to smile at you, but other projects conflicted.

I get the importance of greyscale. It’s to work on values and contrast, but it gets boring. For me the exciting stuff is working in color. Here is the art work titled ‘Shake Your Bum-Bum‘

OliviaP in watercolor pencils by StudioJCG

The story behind the Title:

My 4 year old daughter learned this song at school:

‘Wash your hands-hands, wash your hands-hands, every single day,

wash your hands-hands, wash your hands-hands, every single day,

Now the hands are squeaky clean,

but there’s no towel to be seen,

shake your hands-hands

shake your hands-hands until their dry…’

but changed the words,

Because four year olds seek to amuse themselves and shock others. ‘Hands-hands‘ was replaced by ‘Bum-bum‘ and that’s the origin of this artwork’s title.

Quick clamps hold the shims while wood glue takes hold.

I spray painted the frame with a glossy black combo primer and paint. This frame has a deep well so made wooden shims to line the sides to keep the glass & artwork to the edge of the back. These are painted before using Gorilla wood glue & quick clamps until dry.

The StudioJCG great secret to magnet lifedrawing artwork: retired baking sheets. They are steel, thick enough to hold the magnets, but light enough so the art doesn’t pull out a nail in the wall its hung on.

Mark the baking sheet to the edge of the glass they will be under.

Cut thru the edges of the cookie sheet with a Dremel tool disc then precise cut these with metal shears. Save excess to use on other pieces.

The weight of an art piece affects the customer in both shipping costs and how they can hang it on their wall. I struggle all the time to keep the weight down without disturbing the concept or structural integrity of a piece. For SYBB, I want to use a lot of floating orange and pink paper flowers, the under painting has these colors in them, so tried out these small round magnets and Gorilla Glue glue sticks. On other magnets/art pieces I used industrial strength Gorilla Glue, but that needs the materials wetted to ensure a bond. In this case, doing that would disintegrate the cutout paper flowers, so glue gun solution.

Live Oak HefenWeizen is a great beer to assemble artwork to in the summer, but for all transplants to Texas, welcome, glad you are here, remember to also drink a lot of water.

Combine in this order: glass, artwork, metal plate. Set glass against the shims and use framer nails to hold in place. You don’t need to use any foamcore, cardboard or mattboard behind this. No one looks at the back of the art. It will add to both artwork weight and carbon footprint.

SYBB hung on the back porch after assembly.

Test, test and test the magnets.

Not all magnets are created or manufactured equally. Do the piece and hang it up for a week to see if any drop off. Really handle them. Your future patron will. People around them will. Grimy fingers will touch these flowers, but will they hold up? Figure out if the materials you used will last and correct them. Have empathy for your audience. Otherwise, paint it on, lock it down and don’t invite others to touch it.

Hang it in several places. I know you want to get it out on Instagram or Facebook or in a group show, but really take the time to look at the assembled artwork. How does the light in one place affect or not affect it. I always find mistakes when I put it in other areas and can then open it back up to fix. When I see it when making coffee in the kitchen verse when it’s in a hall verse when it’s in a bathroom verse when it’s in a living room, they all present different problems and solutions.

You can’t mandate where it will be hung, you can only seek to find a conclusion in the story of a piece and hope it will find a home with loving audience, but you can feel better about removing awful cliches artwork from sitting in a landfill, leaching into a water supply and causing severe learning disabilities in your population.

Another way to reduce your carbon footprint is to omit the towel after a washing, removing the waste from manufacturing a towel, a car to drive to purchase towel, then a washer/dryer doesn’t need water or electricity, decrease demand for detergent and fabric softener, simply by shaking your bum-bum to dry.