Trying my hand at cheap artwork additions

We have been in our house in north lakes almost four years now and we have barely put up a frame or painted a wall. On the off chance of looking through the Officeworks catalogue they had varied since prints on special which sparked my interest in completing a project that had been on my mind for some time. I am not really a big fan of having large mugshots of myself hanging up around the place by this one photograph by our wedding photographer always struck me as a piece that I would like to have mounted somewhere in the house.

So off to Officeworks to have the print done, as suspected there was no one there that knew how to properly rip the image size it was resized so large, so I had to leave the disc there and pick it up on thursday when the one guy who knew how to do it was on. Print turned out perfect and even had 10mm bleed on it, all up I think the print was $22. My initial idea was to mount the print to a piece of MDF with craft spray glue and run the print around the edges and glue it to the back, then to have a small frame behind the MDF so that the print would float on the wall. A problem which we ran into later down the track. Then off to Masters and I sourced the MDF I was after, 6mm with as clean a surface as I could find so that the glue would stick to it. They also had free onsite cutting which made it even easier and all up I think I paid $12. Brought it all home and set it up on the back table ready to rock, I had my dad on hand to help me with the whole thing, two heads being better than one and I wanted to get it as close to right the first time.

We worked out where the rear frame was going to sit and drilled through the board - counter sinking the holes. When we were happy with that we wiped the board down to remove as much dust and debris off it before we started glueing. We decided to line the print up, bull clip one end and glue the print down in sections of four. It proved quite easy and let us get a great alignment of the print to the board. After the print was dried, we tried to curve the print around the board to glue it to the back.. No luck. The GSM of the paper was too thick and caused the paper to pull back from the board. We could of left it over night and bull clipped the whole thing but I doubted that it would actually have worked without bubbles and lifted section that wouldn't of been an acceptable end result.

I decided to slowly and patiently cut the trim off with a stanley knife by running against the edge of the board. While my many years of pre-press had taught me this was not a smart idea, I knew if I did it slowly enough and took my time it would give me the best finish with the options I had left. Slowly but surely the edges came off, and whilst you can see the MDF on the sites of the board as they are exposed I am very happy with the end result and with a total price of a few hours and $60 you couldn't ask for better. I could paint the edges and risk effecting the image, I could find some edging / framing that I was happy with and finish it off like that, but for now I am happy to leave it as is. One day I will get around to finishing it, but thats the joy of having some projects laying around waiting for a rainy day. Return to the Home page
By Steve Bott.