Help me matt my meat boy!

July 30, 2009 10:42 PM

How to matt/frame a large piece of paper with a small graphic on it (Mark Ryden's Meat Boy) on a budget?

My boyfriend loves Mark Ryden's picture of a little boy coyly clutching a raw steak in a field...and I finally found a copy of it for him! Unfortunately, the image is about 3" square on a white page that is approximately 12" by 10".

I've been having difficulty figuring out how to most attractively frame it without cutting it down, or if I should just cut it down (It is torn out of a book, but still a pretty rare copy- it took me a year to track one down on ebay.)

Any suggestions on what I should matt it with? I'm on a budget. Thanks!

posted by arnicae to Home & Garden (4 answers total)

Go to Aaron Brothers. Purchase a stock 11 x 14 frame. They come with glass. Then look for the stock 11 x 14 pre-cut mats. The mats fit to an 8 x 10 image, but the picture will still look great.

Use heavy, solid wooden frame - the metal frames tend to look cheap, and a substantial frame really gives the image weight. I'd go with a darker wood frame that matches his shorts, and a pre-cut mat on top that matches his hair or sweater, and a pre-cut inner mat that matches the meat. You might need to shop around from Aaron Bros to Aaron Bros to find good matching mats.

When you put it together start by centering the paper behind the mats. Adhere the paper to the matboard with a single piece of preferably acid-free painter's tape at the top of the paper.

Clean the glass with Windex on both sides, and brush away any dust. Sandwich the image and matboard between the glass and the cardboard backing the comes with the stock frame. Then, put it all together - the frame should come with metal tabs to keep it all in place, and hardware that you have to hammer together so you have something to hang it with (be sure to hammer the hardware into the frame before putting the glass back in).

You can do this for about $20 to $30, depending on what's on sale.

You don't have to cut it down, and for goodness sake, don't go to the ripoff custom framing table. Skip Michaels, as their stock frames tend to be really cheap and cheap looking, but they might have good pre-cut mats. If you are around Glendale, Swains may also have some good cheap stock 11 x 14 frames.

Good luck!

(I used to be a picture framer.)
posted by jabberjaw at 12:54 AM on July 31, 2009 [3 favorites]

I got advice last week on framing a paper collage piece from A St. Frames - they do a lot of the gallery work here in the Boston area and some in NYC as well. I went to two other framers for recommendations and didn't like the aesthetics as much. A St. recommended their "gallery look" which would be to mount the piece on top of a white rag acid free mat (not a window cut out of the mat), with a fair amount of space around it, then set the glass somewhat above the piece with small spacers, and finish it with a white lacquer frame with a narrow face (~.5" wide) but tallish profile (~1.5" high). The white for both mat and frame should be one that matches or goes well with any white in the piece. My guess based on my piece is that they'd advise keeping the surrounding page of your piece for both aesthetic and practical reasons.

A quick search for a visual to show you an example turned up this: the second photo down ("Francesco Lagnese for Domino Magazine, Aug 2007") shows a room with artwork framed most like what was recommended to me. Most of those frames look wider than I mean, but the center column, third one down, looks about right. Bonus: the blog entry talks about how to achieve looks like this on a budget.
posted by cocoagirl at 12:58 AM on July 31, 2009

I would use a stock frame and have a custom mat cut at a frame shop... Give the shop the dimensions of the frame and have the window cut slightly larger than the image.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:30 AM on July 31, 2009

One option is to consider using a floating frame (such as this one from Target, though you may not want frosted glass). Since there is no metal or wooden border, this approach would help the white background blend into the wall, or at least not emphasize it so much.
posted by PunkSoTawny at 6:25 AM on July 31, 2009