Hi and hello!
Guess the every week thing turned in every 3 months thing, so I will apologize to all my followers, both of them :P. I have left the photography part to the side a little, been busy with the other jobs, here and here.
Back to the main subject, I have made a custom photo frame, using the Fiesta ST picture from a shoot I did some time ago. I had a frame idea in my head for some time now, mostly inspired from others and mostly inspired from books, book covers and other small design things. This is not quite what I had in mind but it is a starting point. Having the permanent worry and panic, like most of us have when we have to buy birthday gifts, I switched to my old ways of making it, instead of buying it, so it was a good opportunity and have enough reasons to do it. And again, thank you Veli, for the ST experience and looking forward for that LSD ;).
SO! Here it is:
First 3D simulations and mock ups
...hope you like it, thank you and good night!
Just joking. The main idea was to have a metal print (witch is kinda hard to obtain in this part of the world..apparently) mounted on a floating wooden frame. After messing around for some time in the 3D software trying and calculating what materials I can buy and how many things I need to make something relatively big but not get to much materials thrown away, came to this result:
Size and proportions simulation
Looked good, the proportions well ok, some of the picture proportions were affected due to size and materials restrictions, but time was of the essence and none to lose. To the hobby shop!!
Bought a wood panel, some balsa wood and a bunch of pine wood rods. Got them all cut and glued ( sounds crazy but bear with me ), the rods were only 10 mm wide and the frame needed 30 mm for the sides. Cut the length, glued the width, cut the 45 angles and 8 hour later, I just had some shorter wider pine rods :D . Assembly time:
One of the corners, after lots of sanding for precise fitment.
Here you can see the 3 different wood fibers from different rods. The glue used was a Bison Super Wood Glue, that thing is crazy, small amounts of glue, sticks in few seconds, partially dries in 1 hour and cured after 24 hours.
Corner closeup, the seam would be later filled with more glue and sand once more before prepping for paint.
This little guy helped also :P
PS: In the gluing process, I used EBC Green Stuff Brake pads, for stopping ;) ;) the wood pieces from moving, hint hint pun pun :D
After everything has dried and harden and set in it's place... the world was a desolate place... oh.. ok the frame, right. More sanding, more cleaning, trying to make it feel like it was made from one piece not millions. To attend that problem, 2 layers of spray paint were applied, with the trademark matte black.
That's a nice way of using a tripod
Came out better then I expected. The painting location was a little bit of a problem but improvising and using public spaces got me out of that issue.
The pictures are kinda..well for a photography site could have been better, but I wasn't planning to do this post at the time of the build, so phone pics will do for now.
Next up, the back paper support and the picture balsa supports:
The "blarker" the better :)
Now just waiting for the actual print, witch barely made it in time, even if the files were sent almost a week prior.
Finally here, one test print and the final print mounted on a 3mm dibond panel. It's not AdoramaPix metal print, but as I said, I worked with what I had. The print is a c-print at 240dpi on metallic paper. Turned out pretty good.
The order got in between some big orders at the local Lab I used, but with few hours before being offered to the "client" ( in a very Discovery build show time frame ), it made it, got glued in place .. wrapped and I was on my way....to go get my car from the shop..where it had a third of the engine not on the car...talk about deadline pressure.
And here is the final product, now I just have to do more :P
It was a cool experiment, a calculated one, turned out as a quality product, much better then the ones you buy and stick a flimsy print inside, but it can be done much better. If you want the next one to be yours, don't be a stranger and give me a call, amazing things get made working together.
Until that time,
CheeRS and keep them shooting!