A Special Embellishment for Graffiti Style Art

When Ryan brought in this unique piece of graffiti style art, I knew we needed to do something special. Ryan spent much of 2020 and part of 2021 deployed to the middle east with the Minnesota National Guard’s 834th Aviation support battalion. These citizen soldiers were extended twice due to Covid 19 and one of the leaders of the group commissioned this art by artist Greg Gordon.

It depicts current events, the places they were deployed and the helicopters flown, along with a bunch of other cool stuff. Ryan chose a red lacquer frame from Larson Juhl’s Komodo line along with chestnut and berry mats to complement the colors. We topped it off with TruVu’s Museum glass for maximum clarity and protection from fading. We chose the taller frame to accommodate the embellished spacers which in this case is purely aesthetic. It is a technique we use to create room in a frame for 3D objects in other projects. It is also used to give an appearance of a piece of art floating in a frame.

Ryan gave us full creative rein although we discussed some ideas. I went to Shelby, our lead framing artist and she had some great ideas. What you see is the result of some conversations, sketches and a whole lot of drawing and painting. I might be a little biased but I think she knocked it out of the park!

Here is the transcript of the Video:

Tami: Hi, it’s Tami at Frame Minnesota in Eagan. And today we’ve got a special project that Shelby has been working on. And I’m going to let her tell you a little bit about what we’re doing.

Shelby: So, this piece, we wanted to do something a little bit different. The customer wanted something very unique, so what we did is we added painted spacers. So, that is these pieces along the edge there, those are designed to keep the glass up off of the artwork.

And these ones I hand-painted, pulled out pieces from the artwork that I felt would look cool, and added them in. We don’t have the glass in quite yet, that comes next. But there we are.

Tami: It’s easier to photograph here. Now, the story on the art is our customer was deployed to a number of different places over Coronavirus. And because of coronavirus, his stay abroad was extended, and extended, and extended. So, you see little Coronaviruses here, you see something… Iraq, you see Syria, Jordan.

I think with the group he was in, he wasn’t able to tell us a whole lot about what he was doing over there, but the piece of art was created for everybody in his unit. And he hasn’t seen it yet, so it’ll be really fun if we can take a video when he does see it. Tell us a little bit about how you did it, Shelby.

Shelby: So, first I made a little bit of sketch on a piece of paper to figure out what I wanted to pull out as far as designs from the piece.

Then I made my little matte board spacers, got them all glued up and fit to size. I sketched my design onto those, and then I went in with my paints and brought them to life.

Tami: Sounds pretty cool. And that took a while, didn’t it?

Shelby: It did take a while. I think this one took probably five or six hours, I would guess.

Tami: So, I don’t think I charged enough. I did that on purpose, actually. It was something we wanted to try. And he was a really nice young man, so we thought we would give it a try on this piece of art.

Tami, with Frame Minnesota in Eagan, your custom picture framing source.

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