First week in the new shop and a wonderful new client enters my life! He carried with him a small old-looking black book. He explained that he had worked with an elderly woman who had no next of kin. When she passed, he could not bear to see her scrapbook of vintage photos thrown away. They looked to be mostly family photos, so out of respect to her he saved them. Sometime later, he perused the album and found this photo affixed to the last page.
This is a formal headshot of great cinema auteur, Charlie Chaplin. Signed. So handsome. And the photo is in terrific condition. The client had the signature authenticated, and indeed, it is the real deal.
I LOVE vintage photographs. And I have a strong design aesthetic when it comes to framing them. This new client of mine listened to my years of experience and made decisions right along with me. Here is the completed project.
We chose a dark, ornate Victorian frame, a muted silk mat (note how the grain runs vertically--key in this sort of design) which is deliberately cut wider on the bottom. This is called a "weighted bottom" and there are several reasons why this was the right thing to do here, among them is that this is how photos were framed during Chaplin's era And we selected a dark ornate fillet, this is the thin strip of moulding inside the mat and is like a frame-within-a-frame around the photo. Almost every moulding I sell has a fillet made to match. Here, we purposely selected one that is not the exact match to the moulding, but is dark, ornate and Victorian, so it is more unique and less by the numbers.
The end result is grand yet proportionate, pleasing both framer and client!
blog law: images used only by permission of client. no client names or pricing.
love! great work Elaine.
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