One of the highlights at the Tru Vue® booth at the West Coast Art and Frame Expo was seeing how custom framers would display, preserve, and protect some of their own Frameable Moments™. We invited custom framers who had been featured in our most recent ad campaign to submit pieces that captured personal memories, which we displayed at the booth. Charlie Barnes, owner of The Custom Framer in Highland Park, IL, chose to celebrate summer fun and family traditions in his piece featuring his grandchildren and his family’s vacation home.

 

 

The Moment

 

Titled “The Grandkids,” this piece is inspired by the innocent fun of Charlie’s grandkids playing on the shores of Lake Superior where his family’s cabin is located. Every summer, the whole family, including Charlie’s three daughters, spouses, and grandchildren, visits for a back-to-nature vacation where the beach becomes the center of activity, especially for the kids.

 

 

The Design

 

Charlie wanted the piece to reflect the sense of fun, frivolity, and freedom his family enjoys on these vacations, so he took the opportunity to experiment with the design elements, using a shadowbox to provide the depth needed to play with some new ideas.

 

 

Beginning with the background, he took a photograph of the part of the lake where his grandchildren like to play and augmented it to create a “cartoonish” image that serves as a foundation for the sense of playfulness of the piece. This background image extends along the inside edges of the shadowbox to cover the entire interior of the frame.

 

 

Working with different depths

 

Taking advantage of the shadowbox depth, Charlie mounted individual photographs of two of his grandchildren on spacers at three different depths. This three-dimensional approach gave the piece a sense of movement and allowed Charlie to incorporate different images into the piece, capturing the various activities the kids’ enjoy in the water. The frame is a two-inch-deep Roma frame in white wash which gave the piece a rustic feel. This project was glazed with UltraVue® UV70.

 

 

“Creating this piece gave me the opportunity to try some things my customers don’t typically ask for,” said Charlie. “It’s good to experiment and imagine how else a custom framer can use the depth and space a shadowbox provides. Framing offers so many different options for keeping memories alive.”

 

 

Check out the links below to see how other framers commemorated their Tru Frameable Moments at WCAF.