The Art of Framing Pictures

Five Gold Rings, part of 12 Days of Christmas

I have been framing my own pictures since the nineties, so I thought I’d go through my

process in this blog, in case you have ever fancied having a go yourself. As I have just painted Five Gold Rings as part of my Twelve Days of Christmas series, I will frame that one, with plenty of illustrations along the way.

What you will Need for Framing Pictures

For cutting the frame wood you will need:

• A fine-toothed circular saw capable of doing 45-degree cuts

• OR a 45-degree sawing jig plus a sharp handsaw

You will also need your framing-wood lengths, a pencil, a Band Strap, PVA wood glue, old newspaper, eyelets or D-Rings and nylon cord, a tape measure, a damp cloth, Z Clips or Triangle Points, and masking tape. Oh, and a picture!

Have a read through and you'll see how all these things come together.

Selecting the Framing Wood

Let’s assume that you have painted your picture and it is dry and ready to frame. If it is oil and you want to varnish it, you may need to wait up to six months to be sure that it’s dry, but unless the paint is thick it will generally be dry in a few days, though some colours can take a while longer.

If you are framing it yourself and have several different frame woods available, try holding a few choices up against the edge of the painting to see how it looks. Try matching colours in the picture to the frame wood. For example, with my recent Five Gold Rings picture, I tried a few different frame samples but it was a no-brainer once I held up a wide gold wood frame sample to the painting – it looked good and the distressed red pattern echoed the gold and red in the painting.

Before you start cutting, make sure you’ve got enough wood. You’ll have a fair bit of wastage as the next section will show, so have a care!

Measuring the frame to the right length

When you examine your framing wood you’ll see the recessed channel that the painting will go into, together with glass if applicable. This is called the rabbet (see below). Be careful to make sure the rabbet is on the inside of the frame when you make your cuts! I once made a perfect frame with the rabbet on the outside…as you can see, ‘experience’ is another way of saying that I cocked it up and had to start again, and it was ever afterwards engraved upon my soul to check and recheck!

Now you must work out the lengths of your frame pieces. This picture shows the chosen frame wood from the back.

Frame wood seen from the back

Don’t panic, but here is a little formula we are going to use:

F = L + 2 x (P+W)

Where:

• F = the length of your cut frame piece from longest point to longest point

• L = the length of the picture side you are going to make

• P = ‘play’ so the picture has a bit of space as it sits in the rabbet channel, e.g. 1mm

• W = the Width of the picture frame without the rabbet, shown as 58mm in the picture above.

 In case your head just exploded at this point, we will do a worked example, so panic not!

First we measure the picture sides to the nearest millimetre. It’s wise to measure each end in case there is a bit of variation, and pick the largest or your fit might be too tight. Write it down and then check it again. It’s awfully easy to be wrong and to make a lovely frame that doesn’t fit. I have that ‘experience’ too! For Five Gold Rings, it was supposed to be exactly A3 size (420 x 297mm), but I measured the picture and it was 422 x 297mm.

Fair enough: now let's apply our formula. We are using Width W = 58mm as measured, and we'll allow for Play P = 1mm gap between the picture edge and the frame rabbet channel.

• For the longer side, F = L+2x(P+W) = 422+2x(1+58) = 422+(2x59) = 422+118 = 540mm

• For the shorter side, F = L+2x(P+W) = 297+118 = 415mm

Make sure the rabbet channel is on the inside, not pointy side!

Just as a reminder, this is from longest point to longest point, and the rabbet channel must be on the inside, not on the pointy side! Here is a picture to help:

You can now work out how much frame wood you need, and it’s more than you might think. You need the four sides, so roughly 540 + 540 + 415 + 415mm which is 1.91m. However, every time you start cutting a new side, your pointy end is angled the wrong way, so you have to set the correct direction for the cut and then cut off a chunk. For this thick frame in the example, you will lose about 140mm of waste each time. So you probably want to aim for 1.91m + (4 x 0.14) = 2.47m for this size of frame.

Wow, that’s a long bit of framing wood! You might need two lengths; measure now to ensure you’ve got enough, and allow plenty of spare. Sometimes you have to cut more off because of a flaw in the frame wood.

At this point you have your measurements completed. My advice now is to check them very carefully! It is easy to get it wrong and waste a whole length of frame by cutting it to the wrong size.

Cutting the Frame to Length

You are now going to cut a 45-degree angle across the frame. I use a circular saw with a fine-tooth blade for making my cuts. At the cheaper end you can use a 45-degree cutting jig and a sharp handsaw, but the accuracy of the cut will suffer. If you are using a circular saw, The fine-toothed blade makes a big difference to the smoothness of the cut, so if your saw has wide teeth suitable for log cutting, consider fitting a fine-toothed blade.

Remember to treat the saw with huge respect and wait until it stops before going near the workpiece, keep your fingers well clear while cutting, avoid loose clothing, and so on. I cannot emphasize this enough. The removal of any body parts is undesirable. If you are not confident, do not use a power saw.

I find it useful always to put the workpiece against the same edge of your saw (e.g., the left machined edge) when being cut, because the slightest variation in the saw’s alignment will otherwise introduce an angle error, which only becomes evident when you try to assemble your four frame joints and find they won't fit perfectly together.

 Remember to ensure your rabbet channel will be on the inside, and make your first cut, with the blade slowly cutting down from top to bottom. When turned over, it should look like the above Pointy End picture! (anyone thinking of Arya Stark in Game of Thrones right now? “Stick ‘em with the pointy end!”)

Now measure from the point of the 45-degree angle along your frame, and make a pencil mark, in this case at 540mm. You do the longer sides first, because if you mess them up, you can cut them down to be the shorter sides! Your second cut is going to have its pointy end at that mark. If using a circular saw, you now need to change the 45-degree angle to slant the other way. If using a sawing jig, use the other 45-degree slot. With a circular saw, cut it a bit larger and then take off tiny shavings until you get to your line. It should look like this:

Making the Second Cut on your Frame Side

Measure point to point and congratulate yourself if it is exactly the 540mm that you intended. It should look like this:

Measure from Pointy End to Pointy End

Checking the Identical Sides are indeed Identical

Once you have cut your first side, mark it as REF (for reference) across the cut face, and then cut your second identical long side. The REF mark is so that you don’t make ‘final tweaks’ to the wrong piece! When tweaking the length of your second side, it’s helpful to put it against the first side on a flat surface (e.g., the saw bed), for a check and comparison. Then cut the workpiece until they match exactly. With the other ends perfectly aligned, your new ends should align too.

Follow through with your other two sides, and then try holding all four frame pieces together to see if they fit nicely. Make sure that the rabbet channel is on the inside, where your picture is going to go!

Remember to turn off and disconnect your circular saw, and park the blade. This is especially important if any children might be around.

Gluing the Frame together

You probably just discovered that it’s hard to hold your frame pieces together all at once, to see if they fit. It’s worth trying at least a side at a time to make sure it looks the right length against your picture. Just hold it in place with the side pieces in position, and any glaring error will make itself evident now.

Does it look okay? Phew, if so!

Lay out some newspaper so as not to glue the frame to your table! Gluing is hard to do if the frame is not a beautiful fit, but relatively straightforward otherwise. The best way I have found is to use a nylon Band Clamp. This is a long black strap with four plastic corners and a tightening jig on one corner. Use the band clamp to hold your frame pieces roughly in position, loosen off the jig fully and tighten the strap so it’s snug but you can get a frame piece out.

Apply Glue to just one Face of the Joint

Now remove each frame piece and apply good-quality PVA wood glue to the face of one end. Do the same for each frame piece around the square, until all four joints have glue on one face of the joint. A prepared end will look like the picture.

Work round all four pieces like this, slotting them back into position, and then tighten the band clamp, first with the strap-adjuster cam and then tightening with the screw jig. As you tighten, check and adjust your four corners so that they are perfectly aligned with each other. The wood glue will permit sliding for a while. Get the band clamp tight but not so much that it pings off into the stratosphere.

If your frame won’t tighten without pinging off because it has insufficient height, try tightening it all with the frame upside down.

Tightened Corner Joint

Experiment without glue first if you are doing this for the first time. A tightened and perfectly aligned corner joint should look something like this.

If you trust that the band clamp is stable and the joints are well clamped, wipe off any excess wood glue with a damp cloth. If it seems very stable, and at your peril, lift the clamped frame up a little and remove any excess glue that has oozed out onto the newspaper underneath.

Now let it dry for 24 hours.

Remove the band clamp and carefully wipe away any bits of glue that have been lurking under the corner clamps. Clean the back. Your glued frame should look something like this:

Glued Frame once Removed from Band Clamp

Mounting the Picture

Woo-hoo, you have a frame! Turn it over while muttering a prayer to see if the picture fits neatly inside the rabbet channel. There should be a tiny bit of play so you don’t have to force it in, but not too much. Now you’ve got to fix the picture in securely. I will only describe mounting an oil painting here, but if this is a watercolour, put in the glass first. Oil or acrylic paintings don’t usually have glass.

I usually paint on stretched canvas and for this the best thing to use is Z Clips. I have a box containing about five zillion of these which has so far lasted 30 years! However, Five Gold Rings is on canvas panel so we are going to use Triangle Points. You can get a power or manual tool to insert them, or just push them in carefully with a screwdriver blade. I use a screwdriver blade and, if necessary, you can tap them in very gently with a small hammer. Make sure your panel is pushed down firmly before inserting each triangle point. It should look something like this. I like to cover the Triangle Points with masking tape so it all looks tidy.

Making the Hanging Cord

The last thing to do is to put on the hanging cord. For a small picture like this you can use screw-in eyelets. For a large picture, use Double D-Rings. I usually aim to put the eyelets or D-Rings one third of the way down the sides. For Five Gold Rings, with sides of 415mm, I therefore measured 14cm down from the top. The finished article should have nylon cord between your eyelets or D-Rings, and it should be a little tight but with some play. It will look something like this:

Notice that the cord ends look untidy and may stick out of the side of the picture if left loose. Use a small length of masking tape to bind them to the hanging cord, and then cut off any excess ends. It will look like this:

The Big Reveal

Everything is done and you just finished your first frame; congratulations! You can turn the picture over and hang it on a convenient picture hook so that you can stand back and admire it. Here is Five Gold Rings in its finished frame on our red dining-room wall.

Five Gold Rings, Framed

This took a lot longer to explain than it does to do, but I hope that you have followed along the way, if you want to start making your own frames, and that it will of some use. There are many things I have not covered, such as glass for mounted watercolours, and frame-strengthening for large frames, but this should get you started.

Stay safe, have fun, and I hope you are delighted with your new frames as you get the hang of this!