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Photo Mounting Demo Part 2

So I know my images ten by seven I wrote that down right so one of things I need to do next is cut my mat lord correct okay this is cut teo I believe sixteen by twenty only double check here twenty by sixteen okay and my image is ten by seven correct so if you do a little math good grief you just do this photo when I have to think about oh so so what I typically do is I kind of make a little drawing for myself so I go oh sixteen twenty okay, so that's twenty that's sixteen I have a ten by seven image in here I want an inch between the mat so this right here is one inch just making sounds I'm not a very good drawer so this distance here is one inch and my print is ten by seven so technically my matt needs to be twelve by nine doesn't it? I want an inch space just like doing campuses so I have to add an inch on this side at niche on this side which makes it twelve at an inch on this side at an inch on this side which makes it nine right so my hole is going to be twelve nine by twelve tha...

t's the hole I need to cut in my mat does that make sense? Okay, so in order to do that I need to subtract from here this is nice and clear so everybody can see what I'm doing here I'm probably drawing this way too small but that's ok okay so if this is going to be nine here and this is sixteen nine minus sixteen is what seven inches so I need three and a half inches on each side top and bottom right and then left to right I have a twelve inch hole against twenty inches which is a difference of eight inches correct so I have four inches on this side and four inches on this side so in other words this long side here used to be four inches four inches this side here needs to be oh my goodness wrong yes three half thank you. Well three day long period three point five then this has to be four inches correct make sense that's kind of how I do my math just do it however you can do it it's always like on fur vest, right? Brain people it's like okay so I could put my duckling edge ruler away now it's time to measure and cut my mat so this logan matt colored cutter that I use it's the compact matt cutter from logan okay, this thing is just fantastic because it has a make sure that's sitting on this matt ward goes in here and then you use your blade to cut okay, so this sets your mat distance so what I know is I need a four inch ej and I need three and a half in check so I'm gonna do my three and a half inch edge first so I just go to three and a half inches which is right here okay lock it down I put my matte board in upside down this is the pretty side this is the nasty side okay I put that in there like that and I nasty sauce and I make a nice big hard line on just draw okay I'm gonna do the same thing on the other side looks like my map board a little crooked right that's ok and I make a line there then I go out to four inches cut this to here I think that to there and then you always want to double check it so that's technically going to be my hole right there so what I do is I just bring the print over and go who is not gonna be pretty no I miscalculated okay badly will you that better check now oh ok so clearly this needed to be four right and this need to be three and a half I screwed up that's ok julia and her right brain all right so let's go back and do it this way this time what I'm going to dio is use a different color pen so I don't mess up my lines so four inches four inches back to three and a half on this side but I've learned to always double check because you know how many matt boards I've gotten screwed up it's all because of the math tell you makes you crazy you studying now in school compound core math or whatever it is this kid's common core yeah like what okay does that look good much better see the difference I fixed it there so just double checking that we find okay so now we can start cutting our nice little angled blade remember this one ok you want to put the blade down see this little line right here this has a track and it goes in on the track right here make sure it slides nice okay you want to put the line where you're cut the corner of your cut is going to start okay then you just push down and finish to this line there okay I met my three and a half inch marks but I need to go to the other side do same thing there so I'm ending right here at this line too okay then I go back to four inches sansing on the short side and voila there's your men okay now I have a white edge in there this is what I do if I did I not bring my good pen I didn't hey belinda will you look inside that white been over there and see it's a kind of an all belong shape pen I believe it's brown it's my favorite it's more of a grey brown when you were talking about also using chalk killer wondering, would the chalk come off and mess up the prints now? Well, you have to be a little careful that thanks, but you have to be a little careful with it. Uh, but for competition that's it I have no problem with it. I've sent that I've sent a competition print with chalk on it over the course of a year through different competitions, and it was just fine. So I think once the chalk rubs into because the deck old age is rough and like, absorbs so it'll kind of absorb, you have to be careful when you apply it for sure, but just kind of blow on it, but without spinning, you know, but I've done that as you can tell, I've done that and screwed up my print or take on a really, really soft paintbrush that's brand new that doesn't paint on it and brush it away, and that should help you out a lot. Okay, so especially for competition prince I will just take a marker like that and it works just fine. You have to and this is also an archival pen, okay, you confined these kinds of archival pens at any craft store and I like this one because it has a long nib to it and I just wanted along the edge there and it tones down that bright hot white edge that's in most matt now some mat core is black which is nice because when you cut it but that just got rid of my dark it's okay, so um I fortunately got some during my matt but you have to be careful about that kind of thing. I'm I'm not working obviously in a totally clean environment like I would normally do at home. Okay, so you can see where we're going with this it's gonna be pretty ok? This is the back, okay? I don't care what color it is because just to show you the mat board's going to go over the top of this ok, so I could essentially use this as my background color if I wanted I mean, it might look pretty, but I didn't do it with that intention. What I am going to do is take a piece of silk fabric and glue that down the match will go on top of that and then the image will go on top of that okay that's really pretty now keep in mind fabric will age over time so keep meal so will the paper I highly recommend using natural fabrics, silks, cotton's things that are organic in nature now they will break down over time so you have to keep that in mind and ask yourself how truly archival you want something to be okay, but this is super easy that's just okay so that's ready there and take your pieces now we need to do the foam core that's gonna lift everything off right? So this is my foam core board looks like I'll see how I cut crooked there if I was at home I'd be so peeled it myself and I'd be re cutting this map. Um okay, so this is my foam core which is gonna lift everything off the page and make it that three d sculptural look right? So I'm going to use this I need to cut a hole out of the map out of the foam core toe lift the matte board and then I'm going to use the inter piece of it toe lift that okay, so I know we have certain inches around here is we have three and a half year and four inches here. So if I do a two inch all the way around I should be good. Okay? So I'm gonna use my little trusty dusty matt cutter again make some lines at two inches and this time instead of using the angle blade I'm going to use the straight edge blade to cut my whole this's my straight edge blade sometimes it doesn't always cut all the way through on this really thick foam core so you sometimes have to help it a little bit so we'll see what happens here but again it has that track right along the edge here the track like locks into the mat cutter and that's what makes it slide easily so here's your this is your mark point right here on the mat cutter that's where you line up your lines okay that's where you start cutting sometimes it takes a little effort now with this I don't care if my lines my cuts are perfect because it's all gonna be hidden okay, so I can really just kind of laid down wherever I want have at it. Yeah it's hard to make it all the way through matt cutter was like the best find ever I love this thing for eighty nine bucks and won a lot of fun yeah and sometimes you'll see that it doesn't cut all the way so I just take my little razor blade help it along a little bit since this's part is never going to be seen. I don't really worry about making straight cut way got him a nice hole cut out over which I'm gonna need so I'm gonna need that in a minute so now I take this and I'm done with my mat cutter not quite done with clothes okay, so now there is a sticky side to this but I'm not going to use a stick inside right now and you just now here's where your archival blue comes in and I take my little palette knife and I just start glop ing you could use a paint brush if you want I don't know I just started using a pallet nice and it worked and I always forget to wash my paintbrushes and this is the surefire way to ruin a paintbrush you're basically gluing the bristles together if you don't wash him off, you have ruined many a brush, so I started switching over to the palette knife because I could just wipe it clean and I don't have to like have a bunch of water around the around my workstation, so I just kind of apply this around the edge not super thick but enough that it'll glue down this stuff takes a little while to dry, so keep that in mind so sometimes what I'll do is clean up so you could just wipe it clean and you're done you know, um so what I will often do is have a line that up press it down is I will have a lot I have a bunch of like, I'm a book junkies you guys all know, so I have a bunch of, um text books and reference books and dictionaries and like it's the source's heir my favorite so I'll just pop him down let him hold down here so it stays really tight for a few minutes, okay? But in the interest of time I'm gonna keep going. Okay, so then what I do is peel off the siggy layer and I don't think the sticky layer is good enough. Okay that's why I say it's not really that important want to get the sticky kind of map of mountain of foam for um you can get the non sticky kind and be okay, but I always add a little bit of additional glue just so I know it's going to stay put, especially on my competition prints because on competition prince I'm not allowed to frame them so I don't have the support of the frame for the image so I really want to make sure that they stay stuck any questions woman working away here I love craft projects is it fun? It's just like so I mean you have some little questions coming in future one twenty eight says do you always centre the image inside the mat? No now that's a great question not all the time I will do a museum mountain occasionally, like, um I've compete I just started competing on the w p p ay circuit and I will dio set this really quick my this is off over here so you just bear with me with my little miss cut you can see I've got little fuzzies around the edge of my map so I will often take a full on blade and just like get rid of those by gently crushing my razor blade along the edge because when you cut it doesn't always depends on the mat board some mat boards are really respond well to the cutter and other colors tend to do that little fray thing on the edge so if you do that a razor blade is always I found works very very well tio fix it and I just brush it with the grain and then kind of scrape it off and it tends to take most of it off you have to be real careful I probably should have done this before lost a reasonably um I probably should have done this before I I think it's great to see you do it melting so it's looking like crap out their eye okay like um okay so now you know all this is going to get framed so this would be obvious I would fix that just so you know but this is all going to be set inside of a frame so it's gonna look really pretty when it's all said and done the fabric behind it gives a little protection you think how much fun you can have I'd happily ever after print that's part of the course that's the course page image I set that against burlap on campus so the images print on campus and then it was set against burlap so her and was titled her happily ever after I mean the burlap has so much symbolism in it just didn't see it unfortunately that's okay but that burlap was supposed to because it's behind the image is supposed to signify the rough routes that she came from burlap and now she has a child in the burden is this cinderella story is what it's about and the burlap was supposed to commentate the way it was mounted and printed was even symbolic. Okay, so think about these things guys you can have so much intention being an artist and what you want to say it's the coolest thing ever I'm just so excited that I hope this is dry so then I set this aside for a little bit this is almost dry not quite so I have a ten by seven print correct we'll turn this around so the viewers at home can see it right side up now I have a piece of board that I need to cut to fit behind it I usually only leave about that much space behind it so maybe about a half inch okay so it's ten by seven so that means I need to cut an inch off decide nine by six ok he's got that? You know why I did that? Trust me, I probably wouldn't have been asking so basic nine no, I'm ok this way first and I could do this on the mat cutter but I usually just do it with a nice sharp razor believe way go nine and then I need six six inches so funny and so you speaking tv news where you have to fill every minute with silent we have silence with words so I stopped talking and it gets island and like talk no, we don't julia shut up you'll feel it released okay, so now yeah, I'm glad I did that just happen eliminate so now what I do is I use the sticky side for this, okay? And I do add a little spray him out just for poops and giggles wait print glues not setting yeah, you definitely need something toe wait stuff down with that and then we take our handy dandy paste the stuff sticks to anything it really does. I do it kind of think what I'm doing it on fabric aim fire and I said something on top of it and that is amount of britain okay takes a little time but it's well worth it so bugging me right here uh uh away don't anyway I'm look, I'm getting glue everywhere, so yeah so obviously, you can see for my mishaps here that you really have to work in the clean space and make sure everything's clean when you put it down, you're gonna want him put weight on here for a couple hours because this glue does take a little while to dry. Okay, but that's a finished image, I usually signed the bottom right here. Let's. Go ahead and do that. Well, signature and voila! Finished print goes a frame with museum last and the framing is half the fun too. You can put whatever frame you want on there, which really add stood I mean, if you pull out these copper tones in the frame, all of a sudden you have a piece that looks really like it was custom made for your client and that's. Why these cost seven hundred dollars a piece of the studio we'll use before you put it away, teo for waits for how you sex books I'd hide his books have, like I said, I want a reference books around my studio and I just file like they're usually people like loan collection books everywhere long collection book is it is a, um book of all the top winning competition prints that they they published every year, and I have, like, a stack of ten of them, so I just like those put something yes, I have like tracing paper clear translucent archival paper and I just take a piece of that put it on top and then put the books on top of it to keep everything really calling and meat and not about how many hours or overnight or overnight is best but three I've I've been in a hurry sometimes and a good two to three hours is probably sufficient to make it stick but really overnight is what you want for hard core it's not going to go anywhere but this glue is magnificent I mean it's it's archival number one so it's not kind of degrade over time and number two is just sticky as khun b like I said, if you put a paintbrush in here and don't wash it goodbye paintbrush it's gonna be a glued up glossy clear mess um once it dries so that's kind of why I use this palette knife because it's easy to wipe down okay, so with canvas so if I'm gonna do the same thing with campus it's actually a lot simpler, okay a lot less involved so you may want to start that direction should you desire first so with a canvas print yeah, where do you get your frames from larson? Jule is what I use my my framing company and the reason is is because they sell wholesale to photographers um costs basically where is like some of the other framing companies or your laugh up charges and then you have to up charge from there as well um this small said in here is a pair of scissors and just whack it down a little bit um so with canvas is actually a lot easier because you can just cut the edge of it I mean I just use this nice dollar well cutter and make a nice clean edge and this is how this is exactly how this gets mounted just with a clean edge nothing else but when you add fabric behind it because canvases technically fabric it adding another fabric behind it really elevates it and I've just been recently starting to do the fabrics and it's so much fun I'm sorry but in seattle they have amazing fabric stores I spent like three hours on one the other night and all you need is like a little corner of it you don't need a buck so you mean like in los angeles has the garment district I mean they've got amazing silks and I mean we're talking linens handmade gorgeous just and you know we use so many fabrics in newborn photography with our blankets in our backdrops imagine adding that layer to your printed work on campus it just it's just like takes it to a new level on gives it a feel and this is a treasured heirloom I mean your clients we'll keep this for decades it will be there one of the most valued possessions because so much hand made love has gone into it hilario was given the questions and we go hear yeah absolutely I wasn't sure how much what we were going what I was going teo I would mount this the same exact way as I just did I just wouldn't paint the edges you know you can order a gn mounted campus like this from your from your labs and they'll coat it for you and everything it'll be archival and you can mount this the same way you would sticky side of the of the foam core with a little spray mount okay archival spray mount that will make this stick nice and with campus you have to go a little bit closer to the edge because the edge will curl and don't use the glue don't use this stuff on the canvas it'll make it look lumpy on top you want to use a spray mount of some kind to mount this to the actual print to your foam core? Okay, but I would do the exact same thing that I just did with the water color print with this one float mounted above the above the page with the fabric behind it clients go crazy over the stuff guys they see it your chute and they're like that's so beautiful because they don't see it anywhere else other photographers are not doing this, and you can totally do this. It's so easy to order this from your lab. I mean, it's cheaper and then matt board amount war is not expensive. You have to make the initial investment with your ruler and your equipment and supplies, but then talk about amazing christmas gifts for your family. I mean, and the other thing that I've really discovered, that this lends itself well to is the concept that small is the new big. So my clients aren't really after huge wall portrait anymore. They don't have space in their home, you know, or my clients are getting to the point where they're like, well, we have everything else appears on the wall were having more wall space, and we don't want to take that stuff down because it's beautiful, but we're having where else to put it? So we've started doing these small and you could do him tiny, and mick put it on a huge matte board so that it gives it the significance like this and then and then your client's look out and they see the handmade value in that, and they go, wow, that is stunning and all of a sudden you taking something tiny and made it very with an extremely high, perceived value. Okay, so you can charge a ton for it and I mean it's like the mean hello, the tiffany's box people, the little box everything good things come in small packages. Yeah, so same thing with the print. You do a small print on a nice size. You know, if I had done a print like even a four by six or something on a beautiful mat like this all hand done with a gorgeous framing and gold edges and, you know, beautiful attention to detail. You can charge several hundred dollars for something like that and that's the same as a wall portrait sail right a little more time invested. Of course you have to accommodate for that in your cost of goods sold and things like that. But photographers are not doing this it's a different product, but you could offer your clients that no one else is doing very, very cool. I would love to see you come back for much local I'm not afraid. What do you think? Are you ladies? Are you interested in doing this type of this everywhere? People at home, I think frames? Yeah framing it is not hard, you can, I don't I don't get like frame shops get big, huge sticks of molding and they cut it all and they join it I can't do that I don't have the equipment for it it's way too expensive and investment but what I do do is I order a joined frame because they will make it joined for you they send that to me and then I do all the rest I put in the manning I put in the image I staple it in I put the paper backing on and there's some neat tricks using water you spray the heck out of that paper backing and stick it on it'll dry you could bounce a penny off the back of it and it's amazing these little tricks that you would never think oh spray water on the paper yeah you spray water on the paper stick it down the back and let it dry it will dry tight you could bounce a penny off stuff off the back of it and that's what these families do to get that clean beautiful look then you put a certificate of authenticity on the back and your branding and sign it and all of a sudden you have an art piece a single one of one addition that your client has for their home so I love it created by dot com slash suggest ways I love you all right um do you want can you do want to take just a few more questions about that happen? No question is unanswerable no question is stupid no question is silly grass, please. Great. Okay, frozen proton again. Can you tell us again? What did you use as a guide to select the matte color color from within the print there. Another technique? Very question. Yes. I took the image and went okay, I have a lot of dark browns in here. I actually I had this brown matt at at the studio and I even what I did is I darkened down the browns in here in the image to match the mad because this is the only map board I had. So I actually adjusted the image to fit the map back at home when I was planning for this course. So yes, I look at the tones of the mat. I look att the tones and the skin I know just totally spent on brett that's. What happens? Don't talk over your images. I know what I love the metallic paint. I want some kind of pop. I don't want that metallic paint to be a distraction to the image, so I pick things that tend to match the image, but not quite. And you saw me initially bring out these different colors and ask myself what I liked the best this one would have been beautiful to it would have matched maur, the brown in the blanket that I was going for but the copper edge just spoke to me because I knew I was putting this silk to peony silk behind it and it has a little copper luminescence to it so that's why I pulled out the copper paint this gold it's ah it's called an antique gold this would have worked just fine too it's just a matter of what look you want and then the mat I always make the mat compliment the art not compete with it so I want the baby to be the thing that pops out at you so when I turn this upside down to you you see the baby first not the matte board okay that's really important to recognize always turn your pieces upside down it helps you so if I go like this and then go like this you go baby and the same thing happens when we turn it right side up oh baby you don't see the mat you see the face and the portrait which is the most important part always make that face the focus and your eyes naturally trained to go to the point of the highest contrast in the image and that highest contrast point ain't the baby's face combined that with boca and out of focus backgrounds and that leads your eye into the face as well always about the face the chin could could have been tilted up just a little bit more for absolutely perfect posing but other than that this your client will be extremely happy with this image. Okay, question. I have two questions. The first one is do you normally sign with a pencil? Or do you have a special pen? No, I well, it depends on these matt boards I signed with a pencil and I usually put the date I put the year two thousand fourteen and then on my canvas prints I signed with a silver security pen. I don't have one here it's like these, but it's archival sharpie makes these gold and silver and they have the brown ones as well. They have tons of different colors, but michael's air hobby lobby any the craft stores it's a secure e s a kur ai archival pen and it's a silver pen and you, khun draw on your photos and sign your photos and I only sign things that are larger than sixteen by twenty. So I signed prints and canvas wall portrait ce and put the same thing put the date on them in the lower right corner. Okay, my second question is with the frames, is there a certain thickness because the mat is floating in the picture is floating to the image stick up against the glass or is there space between the glass when you have them finally mounted in the very, very good question you can inside your frame, you can put something called a spacer, which sits, um can you belinda, can you hand me that empty frame over there? So this is just this is an antique frame I found antique shop. I'm obsessed with antique frame, so anytime I go and take shopping and I see a frame by it, which is really silly because I have no place to put them anymore, but I love them. So inside this frame you can see this is not a great frame for this purpose because there's really only about a quarter of an inch, maybe half an inch each in there, okay? My phone corps alone is quarter of an inch thick, but what you can do, so you have to be cognizant of that. If you're going to frame, you need to stick with one company, get their frame corners like and that's. Another reason I love larson tools because they send you other frame corners for free and they want you to sell him so you don't have to buy the frame corners, which to me is huge. So I've got like, a thousand out of frame corner sitting on my wall in my studio, and so I tell my clients there are only certain frames and some frames have a thicker gutter than others. And so you want to make sure and use a frame that has a decent gutter but then you can also buy from larson jule these little clear like eight inch spacer and it has a sticky side so you put the glass in and then you put the spacer in and let it stick to the glass and then the prince goes on top of the spacer so it creates a little eighth inch space between the glass and the print that will keep the glass from touching the print. Excellent question and I should have addressed it. Thank you for asking. Okay any other kristen would you use these used antique frames for your clients? It depends if they'll fit you betcha. Good idea actually I should probably dig through my friends and find the ones that would work but yes, for if they have the right gutter if they have the right space for the image to go than most definitely of course then it would be really unique some of the antique frames though they can be a little falling apart. I mean some of them are put in pretty rough shape they've been outside or so I like that look but just keep in mind it might not be the highest quality product in the world, so be careful of that fantastic well, people really really loved this segment, julia we've got let's see I missed those comments because they jumped away way world way. Now people really, really enjoyed you were so that it's, so fun, but you can see how you lose drying it's, startinto lift a little bit in bubble on dh kind of lift up. So I strongly suggests waiting this down. Honestly, I should get some of those frame and larson, jules tells them they have frame waits you can, like actually it's meant to hold artwork down that they come in different sizes and specifications. So I would put a piece of like, tracing paper over this it's. So what? It's kind of it's? Not really. Well, tracing paper has that kind of glossy coded feel to it, so it slips easily over your image and that's. Why I use it, but then put your weight on top of that, so just make sure you you let it settle and dry, because if I had this weight it down, it would dry absolutely perfect.