3D Acrylic Box for Hand-Painted Nesting Dolls

Beautiful Hand-Painted Nesting Dolls In A 3D Acrylic Box

In this video, we’ve made our local artist Kelly Frankenberg a custom 3D acrylic box for her hand-painted nesting dolls, which is pretty awesome. All the dolls will be well preserved in this frame. Do you have a unique item you would like framed? Stop by and talk with us about your project! We love opportunities to do unique work. And oh—take a look at kellyfrankenberg.com to see more of Kelly’s excellent work!

Here is the transcript of the Video:

Tami: Hi, it’s Tami, here at Frame Minnesota in Eagan. We just did this great piece for Kelly Frankenberg, a local artist, and I was going to turn it over to Kelly and let her talk a little bit about the art and why she did it.

Kelly: Okay. So this is my piece, 18 by 24 on canvas. And as you can see, these are Russian matryoshka dolls, the nesting dolls. This piece is titled, Nesting No Longer, and I had this idea for quite a while of using these dolls on a canvas to make it more three-dimensional and give it depth and story.

And so it started with the process of finding dolls that were made blank wood dolls. And so I figured out how I was going to do this by cutting them in half.

However, they’re very delicate and I didn’t know how I was going to do that. So I decided to use my wood-burning tools. So I wood-burned them in half. It’s like a metal heat, and I just cut it down the middle as best I could.

I sanded the bottom. I glued them to the canvas. I primed them. And then I painted them and I wanted this depth to happen with the height of them and how they go back into space with the smaller ones, and the canvas was also part of that depth. I wanted to paint something on there as well.

And it just so happened I was looking at butterflies because I love butterflies, but this is a real butterfly, its actual size, the largest butterfly in the world. It’s more like a moth.

They have them in Asia, and it was just so colorful. And I have put a lot of color in my work, and this background is not colorful. It’s just black because I wanted everything to pop. So I painted on top of the dolls and I wanted to show…

This is an original style of how the Russian dolls were traditionally painted, and I wanted to show that these women all over the world are breaking out of their shells. They’re nesting no longer.

They’re coming out, and they’re looking bold and brave and they’re ready to conquer the world. And so I wanted to represent cultures, countries, different races and faces, and just women all over the world.

So that’s what this piece is about, and I came to Tami to say, “How can I protect this piece? But how can everybody still be able to see it and experience this 3D without the frame hiding it?” I wanted the frame to just push out the artwork and make it pop. So we wanted to keep it simple, but still something that looked amazing. And so Tami, explain what you did for me.

Tami: Well, we made a five-sided plexi box, and the reason that we did that is just exactly that you could still see the artwork on the sides. You can see it from the front.

You can see it from the top and the bottom. If you put something like this on a very deep frame, sometimes it has a little bit of a tomb-like effect and you definitely don’t see the sides of the artwork.

We kept it really simple. It’s just a black frame and the clear plastic acrylic box, and I think it turned out really nice that it shows off Kelly’s artwork just wonderfully.

Kelly: I love it.

Tami: We love it too. And if you love it, Tami with Frame Minnesota in Eagan, and we’re here for all of your crazy projects. Anything you can dream up, we can frame.

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