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Ways to Display Your Art

So I'm gonna show you some examples over here on ways to display your art. So the first one was this Riker Mount box. Now we talked a little but about this before. When we were talking about ways to have a sketch book and this is a butterfly box or a Riker Mount, or a specimen container and it's just a little box, it has these pins in the sides that keep it from falling apart and you can order them on the internet. It comes with a little piece of padding in there. And you just cut up any little scrap of drawing that you do that day and put it in there and if you want you can buy these hooks separately. They even have stands that hold them up on the table. Put it in there, put the cover on. So you don't need to buy a frame, there's no special framing or. And then you can put the pins back in and just hang it right up on the wall. So here we have an example. They make a great kind of gallery wall display. They come in all different sizes, big ones, little ones, medium ones, they even hav...

e teeny tiny ones. And you can hang them up by the hook or you can also just shove pins in the back box that's in there, shove a bunch of pins in there and it's permanent on the wall and you just take the top off any time you want. And I recommend, you know, if you're doing a daily sketch instead of doing it in a sketch book do it on a piece of paper and then just change it out. Or if you are doing it in a sketchbook, you can also just take you sketchbook and hang it up by some clips like this. So what I have is my little moleskin notebook and I did a little water color and I hung it up, just clipped it. Tomorrow if I do a different sketch in it I'll turn the page, probably re-clip it. Just keep it up all the time, just like you would have your art hanging on the wall I guess. This is something I kinda wanted to point out to you. Because this is just a little extra added bonus. This is great for travel. So you know how in the last segment we were painting with a gouache? And I was emphasizing a lot that this watercolor is not permanent and if you get it wet and you come into it, it's going to lift up again. So, we like to use those things to their advantage, and what you can do is you could just take a little piece of paper and you could coat with medium or not. This one's not even coated, and real thick, just put some dots of your favorite paints on there, you can get watercolors in a tube, or you can get the gouache in a tube. And just paint it on there, so now this is just basically like the tiniest, most portable watercolor pallet you could have. You could shove this in your wallet. Because when you get your brush wet and you re-dip into this and smear it around, now your brush is going to be loaded with blue. And you can do a teeny tiny little painting like that and not even have to carry a paint set with you. Another thing, great way to display your art, so we've been working on clipboards all the time just to keep our paper flat in case there's a problem with wrinkles in our table, just keep your art on your clipboard and hang your clipboard on the wall. And these also make a great gallery display. Stack a whole bunch of them, you know, like have seven clipboards hanging on your wall and seven blank pieces of paper and just tell yourself when you come home oh there's my paper, better fill it up, what am I drawing this week? Oh, I'm drawing my dinner. Every day draw your dinner, put it on your clipboard and you'll have this whole gallery every week and you can then snap that, put it on Instagram, whatever you wanna do, share it with the world, even if it's just your dog at home. Also, clips, clips, clips, more clips, these clips come in all kinds of fancy colors now, copper clips, white clips with copper, they make ones that are just fully made out of wire. These are just regular office supply stores, I think I got this at target but they're super decorative now, so any painting you've done, like I have messy edges on these, I didn't even bother to tape it off and I think it still looks neat just clipped to the wall with some thumb tacks like that. Course your most basic go-to here is washi tape just tape your drawing to the wall. Don't even have to worry about clips and washi tape isn't going to really damage your drawing or your wall too much either, it's pretty removable. Here's another example, I started doing a little sketch in this notebook, this is just a spiral bound notebook with lines on it. I don't usually paint on lines but here I started doing a little sketch, I got a little carried away, I even put some italics in here ended up being like a full on painting but it's in like my notebook that I would like keep class notes in or something so I just thought well, I'm just gonna hang it up. Like it's okay if it's sort of this not fancy art paper, it can still just go up on the wall. Also with this one, these are just my tracings. And this tracing in particular, I did all my black lines and I transferred it on, then I was gonna paint it, but I kinda liked it so much I put just a few tiny little white highlights on it and really made it pop and I saved all my stuff. And this, I was just trying out like do I wanna use coated paper, not coated paper. What samples of colors, removing techniques, different blues, but sometimes I think that if you save the scraps before the finished piece they really hold the most promise 'cause that's when you're inspired and you've got this great idea in your head and it hasn't really come to fruition yet and it shows this moment of inspiration that when I go back and look at it again I kinda get that feeling again looking at it. Like, oh I love that, I love that when I'm just about to bust out and do that good idea so I like to save those scraps and just look at 'em. I think they make nice are too. And then there's the clothesline. So I just took I was practicing doing all our different candy techniques that we just painted and I thought what if I do some metallics and some colors and I did a whole bunch of 'em and I thought, well, let's hang 'em up. So I just tore out pieces of a notebook because I really like that kind of office supply look but you could do this on a fancy bunting, you know like a banner with flags or something too. And then it looks nice if you add some tassels, these are little tassels I made. So let's make this one. This looks kind of fancy, again, doing that kind of a school science chart chalkboard look maybe we have a little bit of a scroll like where people do a fabric scroll, calligraphy type of thing. Those are our inspirations for it but again, it's just, try not to use too fancy a material, so there's archival high quality stuff and you can get to that but I think it's great to just hang up what you have. I have this little drawing that kind of reminded me of a little chalkboard and thought well let's make it look a little bit more like one of those chalkboard displays. So I got some chopsticks, and you know those aren't expensive and this is just twine. This happens to be waxed linen thread 'cause I'm gonna do some book binding and I like this for that so I'm gonna use it for this also. And have some scissors. So I take my drawing and it's just the right size for these. Carefully break them apart. Okay. Now if your drawing was any bigger than these chopsticks you would go find a piece of wood trim, you know like in a hardware store, they make wood trim in every size. And they actually sell kits on how you can hang posters this way and they just get a quarter round from the hardware store and they take some double stick tape and they tape it to the wood from the hardware store and string it up and it becomes like the fancy kit on how to hang your poster like a school chart or you can use chopsticks. I broke my chopsticks a little crooked so I'm fixing that. So, there's a narrow end and a wide end I think I'm gonna go narrow to wide, doesn't matter at all. Put your own aesthetics. And I'm gonna cut a piece of string longer than I need. Just tie them together. Wrap it twice and tie a square knot. Left over right and right over left, or the other way around, but that makes a square knot. Two chopsticks tied together with a square knot. We're gonna slip that over the top of this. Pull it down a little farther than you need. I want that to be about that far, do it again. This one's right over left, and then left over right, just to keep you on your toes. Now that's in there, I'm gonna slide it a little farther than I, oh, please don't come out, okay. Slide it up there, sometimes your chopsticks aren't very even. Okay, gotcha. Okay. So, trim the ends. And I'm gonna take my glue stick, I'm just gonna run a little bit of glue, I'm pulling this out further than I need to. It doesn't want to, okay, there. Run a little bit of glue down along here. That way, when I slide this back and I let it dry, that'll stick together and I won't have to fight it so much. Now this paper is pretty thick, this is just some poster board I think was just a scrap I had leftovers from something, so I could just hang that up like that if I wanted. But this other paper that I had when I did this sample, that was some thinner paper. So I just tied these two together on the bottom. Same way, only I used smaller pieces like this. Didn't have the string in between. They end up looking a little bit like the educational charts you had referenced earlier. Yes. Those old pull down It's a theme. Charts, I like it. Can you tell, that's what I'm interested in. It's fun 'cause it's super simple and easy. Uh huh, and I've been looking at a lot of those charts lately, and I noticed a lot of the backgrounds are black, like huh, why would that be, and then I realized oh, that's because people pulled those down in front of their chalkboards and they wanted em to look like people drew them on a chalkboard. I like black backgrounds. Okay, so that's essentially what you do. Do the other side too. Glue the bottom on the same way I did it and then, now you can make yourself a whole little collection of art hanging on chopsticks and if you want, I've done some where I just took my same gouache paint, so watercolors, any kind of paint you have around, water it down and you can paint your chopsticks in like bright colors or metallics or anything you want but I kinda wanted to keep them plain to look in that school science chart look. So, again another collection, and I bet you could probably even do this with napkins in a restaurant, all your free stuff your collecting. Then we have one more technique that I'm gonna show you with this one, and this is wood veneer edge banding. So I had this little drawing and what I did was I actually I was experimenting with things I could put through my new scanner so I scanned a dishcloth. And I put a piece, this is mulberry paper, it's often called rice paper but has nothing to do with rice and I put that through my scanner, through my printer and my scanner and I just printed a dishcloth on this paper just for fun. Gives you a great background to paint on so once you already have a really nice background, you don't have to paint very much at all, I just, I painted a spork because I like sporks and just painted some white background, some green paint and pencil over it, a spork on a dishcloth. But I want to frame it. So I thought, maybe a spork on a dishcloth didn't require me going out and getting a custom frame 'cause this is kind of an awkward size. So I'm framing it on this. Now what this is is wood veneer edge banding. This is something, you can get this at Home Depot or lumber yards, not necessarily at a hardware store, 'cause this is a wood working tool, I suggest ordering it because it does come in two different styles. This one has iron on on the back, and if I wanted to get out an iron right now, I could iron it on the paper. It also comes in self adhesive where you can peel off the back. I think that one is not as good for carpentry because it comes off, it won't hold up on the edge of your sink as well, so it's a little bit harder to find but for our purposes it would be great. But, I'm just gonna use my glue stick, and that works just as well. So, as you can see, I've gotten started. I'm making all my edges. This is actual real wood, this is cherry wood, with glue on the back. I cut a piece so it's just a little bit easier to deal with, I have an angle. And then I just start, lay it where I want it, right like that. Take that angle from the edge. Now you have a few choices, if you're super particular about this, you can use a blade and do some measuring. I'm gonna use a pencil, just draw a little line. Cut it with my scissors. See how that looks, okay, that looks pretty good. Same thing on the other side. So I know I'm gonna start right there. And I'm gonna put that right there. Draw a little line. Cut it. Okay, get out my trusty glue stick. So I'm gluing right over that iron on stuff and this seems to work pretty well. I think it likes the glue. Put it down there, and you do have to press this under a book for awhile. Just to get it to stay on, I would leave it overnight under a book. Now what I did is keeping with this school and office theme, my background paper that I used was a file folder, one of these hanging file folders. So that's a little bit flimsy and for sure if I put wood with glue one side of something that flimsy and long, it's gonna warp, and although I don't mind a little bit of warping, it's gonna really get wrinkled on the wall. So any time something is warping on you, paint the back. With the same thing that you painted the front and that'll even it back up. If there's no paint on it, you can spray the back with a little water and press, just very lightly with water, press it under a book and as it dries it'll flatten back out. In this case, there's no paint on this, so I put the edge banding on the back also. So I've got it now nicely on my front and it's also on my back just to offer some more support. And also, if I want, I can hang something else on the back. Then, you can use a tiny hole punch, you can use an awl, this is an awl, this is a book binding awl, so it's a lot sharper than a regular carpentry awl. And poke some holes in it. Again, I use these a lot because I don't like to measure so I just line things up on it. Take your same string. And here, I'm making a loop. Just going in one side back out the other side. And then sometimes you have to recut your string to fit it in that tiny little hole. Or just make your hole a lot bigger. And then get it in there, so it's a loop. Decide how high you want it to hang. I want it to hang that high, tie it off. Now you have a choice here. If you like it to hang this way or if you like it to hang that way with the string in the front. Actually I would put that on the back with the string in the front, so I'm gonna go with this way. And this I'm gonna glue stick it. I left a gap when I measured how big this piece was gonna be, I left a gap around it 'cause I wanted to be able to see my green, I liked it a lot. There. That is another nice piece to add to our gallery wall.