Home 'Art' Projects

Well, Gary and I decided last night to suck it up, stop being afraid of our latest project, bite the bullet and finish it.

We had made something called a 'gallery wrap' for my father a couple of years ago. I had photoshopped a picture of him at a famous rock in Norway - taking out all the other people - and had it printed onto canvas. Gary had made a frame and we stretched the canvas onto the frame and sent it on to my parents ... who I believe had to re-stretch it. Lesson learned.

So - we were walking around Brisbane a few months ago and ran into a print shop that had a picture hanging on the wall - in three parts - a gallery wrap. The clincher here was that each picture had to match up at the edges and extend to wrap around to the back. It was one continous photo broken into four pieces.

We stood there and stared at the photo for a long time - deciding that 'we could do that'. And Gary said I just needed to come up with a photo.

So a few weeks ago - I did the math and calculated what we needed to make a huge 4' x 6' photo to hang above our bed from a photo I took at Milford Sound. Crossed my fingers and ordered $200.00 worth of canvass hoping we knew what we were doing.

Gary flies into the states and starts the next phase - making the frames we are going to stretch them on. Plus, he had ordered canvas stretching tools so that we could 'professionally' stretch the canvas when it was time.

Well, the frames have been made for days and we have been chickens, not really knowing how to match up the sides so that the picture is a smooth, continuous picture on the top of the canvas, although there is 'extra' photo overlapping the edges and wrapping around to the back.

So last night we decided to get it done. We did the first middle piece and it looked so nice we were excited to get it finished. We still didn't know how we were going to get them to match - so Gary went with a mathematical formula that he was working in his head. Seriously, I have no clue what he was doing - he just kept muttering numbers, writing them down, subtracting something from something else and voila! A number would emerge that he would mark on the back of the frame and we would pull the canvass to that line and start with the staple gun.

It worked fine (with a few bad calculations thrown in just to keep us on our toes). And here is our final result:

Close up of the wrap on the sides. You need to crop the photo in different places to have overlap - a more confusing concept to me than it should have been. I had to diagram it out to make sure I was getting it right:

And we were to tired to hang it in its place of honor: above our bed (which, I might add is my MOST FAVORITE piece of furniture Gary has built me so far ...):

Yeah, I know the bed is a mess - Gary and Charlie are still in it ... (OK, and my side does not look so great - I haven't picked up for the day day - so sue me ...)