Florentine Frame
When this frame came in I fell in love with it at first sight.
I loved it's age and condition but the client wanted to
restore it to it's original gilded finish.
After hours of careful chipping away I had it back to it's carcas.
With a little more cleaning I decided that the frame would need to be dis assembled cleaned of all its old glue residue
and re glued using the original animal glue.
Giving the glued frame time to dry. I began the first stage in it's
preparation which begun with a preliminary coating of rabbit skin glue. After 24 hrs drying, the first wash of thinned down gesso
was applied, after a further 24 hrs I could begin coating the frame with full strength gesso.
This was done using a hvlp spay gun. I prefer to spray my gesso ,esp on this type of frame to minimaize pooling.
Twenty coats of gesso later, once lightly sanded and recarved in places to sharpen up the leaf detail. The frame is ready to receive
it's yellow bole...again applied in the same manner as the gesso below.
Unlike the yellow bole, the frame is finally given a layer of red bole.
This is applied via brush as I don't want the red to mask the deep areas on the frame where the gilding may be difficult to reach.
In the end I used six books of 23.5 loose leaf gold.
After eight hours of burnishing......
carefully rubbing back the gold to simulate a little ageing,
the whole frame was burnished...not my favourite job and after
a whole day a visit to the physio was in order
and finally, the finishing coat.
A wash here and there of various wet and dry potions and powders
and we are done!
It's was funny. When the client came in it took a little time to convince him this was his frame.
I'm in the middle of oval florentine at the moment....better call my
physio for another session!