Matting and framing

... is surprisingly hard work.

I made my first ever attempt and mounting photos in a proper mount today, rather than my more usual cheating and just chucking them in a clip frame. This is something I've wanted to be able to do for a while, but I was forced to get around to it because the photography club I just joined require prints to be framed in order for them to be eligible for competition entry. So, after amassing the necessary (and in a couple of cases unnecessary) bits of equipment, I gave it my first whirl today.

The first thing I'll say is that without a proper mat cutter, just completely and utterly forget it. Not going to happen. I tried to trim a piece of mat board with an xacto knife, and it would barely even cut it, even pressing quite hard and making about 20 or 30 passes. The chances of being able to do that accurately enough and repeatably enough to cut a mat successfully are, well, zero. I made a trip to a local art supply store in Sunnyvale, Aarons, and bought myself a Logan Compact Mat Cutter. It basically looks much like a paper trimmer, but with a few twists. It comes with a 90 degree knife and a 45 degree knife, both of which look a bit like a small woodworking plane, and which run along the rail of the mat cutter itself. Firstly, I must say that it takes a surprising amount of force to cut mat board in a single stroke -- after an afternoon of messing around, resulting in only three matted prints, one of which was basically not really usable, both my arms are hurting, and my wrists and hands are having a bit of a moan in sympathy.

For my first attempt, I picked a nice, smallish print (a bit bigger than 10x8), and decided to mat it for an 11x14 frame I'd had lying around for a while since I picked it up cheap at Walmart. The frame itself was quite nice, but the mat it came with was, er, a bit eye burning, so it wasn't going near any of my photos, thank you very much. The first job was cutting the mat board to size -- it comes in huge sheets that are actually too big to fit in the mat cutter, so I had to cut one of them to size roughly with a pair of hand scissors and quite a bit of brute force and ignorance. This came after an initial (completely unsuccessful) attempt with the xacto knife I mentioned previously. Anyway, I ended up with two bits of somewhat wonky mat board cut to something laughingly vaguely approximating 11x14, so next step was to mount the photo to the backing board. I initially tried to use the photo corners I'd bought on doseybat's advice, but basically found them far too fiddly and not really secure enough for a print of this size. I think it would have been OK for a 6 x 4 or smaller, but anything 10x8 or above is just a bit too weighty. I folded and used acid free artist's tape instead. OK, the conservators out there will probably be pointing an (archival grade, acid free) bone at me and cursing me unto the seventh generation right now, but I just wanted the thing done at that point. Anyway, after a bit of measuring (big mistake), I taped the photo down, and proceeded to measure where the cutout should go. Which I made a total arse of, frankly, but anyway. I then used the 45 degree cutter to cut out the bevelled bit of the front part of the mat -- this turned out to be easy enough, but when I turned it over to look, the knife hadn't cut cleanly so the front surface was jagged. I ditched that attempt, then after a bit of messing about realised that the knife blade was slightly damaged and had a bit of an indentation just where the paper surface should be. I undid the blade cover and flipped the blade over, exposing a fresh edge -- this time, a few tests on offcuts showed it to come up with a nice clean edge. I junked that mat window and cut another one, then glued the mount together. I found that the rubber solution glue didn't work well, or at all, then I read the tin and realised it was supposed to be dry mount contact adhesive, so I then properly painted both halves with glue, waited for it to dry fully, then sandwiched the mount together and pressed down hard. This time, it worked fine, so I left some heavy stuff on it for a while and then put it in the frame. At which point, it became horribly obvious how much of an arse I'd made of the measurement -- the window was clearly not a rectangle, and it wasn't even actually central. Dur.

OK, second attempt. Different print, also 11x14. This time, it worked beautifully. I made a much better attempt at trimming the mat boards to size, so cutting the window was much easier. I used the guide fence on the mat cutter to get the edges exactly the same width this time (after having realised that this was a good idea). With the fixed blade and the non-crap measuring, this time it actually worked. Next step was to loosely sandwich the print between the backing board and the mat. Holding the mat and backing board together, I jiggled the print around until it was in the right place, then put a weight on it in the middle so I could take the mat window away without the print moving. 4 pieces of artist's tape later, the print was in place. A bit of glue on the back of the window and on the corners and edges of the backing board, let them dry, then make the sandwich, jiggle around until in position and press down, hey presto, perfect mounted print. Woohoo! I should embarrassedly admit that this much took me about 5 hours.

After a bit of psyching up, I decided to mount one of the competition prints for week after next. This time, I was going for 16x20, so it took a whole sheet of mat board this time. At $13 per sheet, this isn't cheap -- I reckon with ink, paper, mat board and other materials, a 16x20 matted print has a base cost of at least $20, not counting about an hour of time. I went through the same stages, exactly the same technique as for the smaller print, and I'm proud to report that it also worked fine, so I now have a nicely printed, matted and framed black & white print. :-)

I must say, it's surprising just how much more 'real' a print looks if it is mounted like this. The difference intuitively shouldn't be so great, but it really does make a lot of difference to the overall impact of the print. The down side is, after just three prints, I've burned a whole afternoon, and I'm really quite physically wiped out. OK, I did a bit of IKEA desk assembling immediately beforehand, but even then, it's definitely made my arms, wrists and hands hurt quite a bit. There's no way I'm ever going to be doing this in any kind of quantity, I'm afraid. I can see why people end up using CNC mat cutting machines if they do any kind of volume these days -- I'd be forced to do the same thing, or face significant RSI problems. *pokes arthritis for making me more susceptible to that kind of thing*