Happy Summer everyone! This post has nothing to do with summertime, but I hope everyone had a wonderful solstice nonetheless. This post is kind of the opposite of summer; it’s another skull painting that I finished last winter, but I was waiting to get it framed before I published a full post on it.
A Canadian Lynx Skull in watercolor, on paper. This painting was done back in 2017 when we were still living in our apartment. Then the move happened, and the painting got packed away for a while, though it was finished. When we moved into the new house, I still couldn’t put it on the wall until that wall was painted. There were also decisions to make about how to frame it, because it ended up being an odd size, despite my plans.
I decided to do something rather daring with the framing of this piece…I liked the painting as-is, but I wanted something grungy about its presentation. So after I had all the high-quality scanned backups that I would ever need, I committed to burning the edges of this painting and displaying it on patterned acid-free paper. That’s right, I burned this painting. Sounds scary, right?
Well, I had a test-scrap of the same type of watercolor paper that I had painted on, and a tea-light candle, so I could practice the technique before letting the flames touch the real thing. Once I felt confident in the rate of burning, which angles were effective, and how to get particular soot-stains, I switched out the scrap paper for the full painting and proceeded slowly and with great caution. If you are ever going to try burning any type of artist paper, I recommend doing so outside, or under a ventilated hood as I did because the paper didn’t just smell like burning paper….there was something chemical about it. But I’m not dead yet.
Once the painting was charred to my liking, as I said I chose some patterned and textured acid-free scrap-book paper and cut it to fit the frame. I chose this white Belmont frame based more on the room that I would be displaying it in, than for the painting. Above you’ll see the finished piece displayed in our nearly finished guest bathroom.
