Sunday Framing Workshop – with David Sawyer

Sundays 14th & 21st April 2024
10.00am to 4.00pm

No matter how great your painting is there are few occasions where it is not improved by a beautiful frame. High street framers will usually glue something together for you from off the shelf mouldings, good enough perhaps but rarely outstanding. You may have seen that successful artists like David Sawyer often use gessoed frames which are painted up to suit the specific image.

Gessoed frames require time and skill to put together so they are quite expensive (think hundreds of pounds each) and yet the materials they are made from are readily available, you pay for the time and the skill. As artists we have skills in abundance and time can be made available if we choose, so making our own frames is a no brainer.

David Sawyer, along with being one of Britain’s leading landscape painters, often frames his own work. As you would expect his frames are sensitive and beautiful. He will be running a framing workshop over two Sundays which will get you going with the basics of producing hand made and painted picture frames.

Week 1

• Typical types of mouldings, what types of wood and profiles are available
• The use of slips, liners and fillets
• How to decide on your moulding
• Measuring the artwork
• Setting up and calibration of the Morso (guillotine)
• Cutting the moulding
• Getting to know the types of glues available
• Setting up the underpinner and joining
• Clamping and reinforcing the frame

Week 2 

• Decorating and finishing
• Choosing colours and textures
• Mixing gesso
• Gold and metal leaf finishes
• Masking and painting
• Finally assembling and fitting the artwork

Working with professional framing equipment you’ll choose, measure up and cut your mouldings, join and glue and then gesso your frames to your own specification. If you have any works on paper you’d like to frame instead drop us an email so we can bring the necessary equipment for it.

Expect to pay a little more for materials – £10-£15 for an average frame. You don’t need to bring anything to this workshop other than a picture you’d like to frame and a notebook.

We plan to eat together, we’ll optionally provide an indulgent but healthy lunch with vegetarian options for our usual modest charge.