Hurrah!! I am very excited about something that almost no one else in the world will be interested about, but tough, this is my blog and if I don’t tell all of you I will drive my friends mad by explaining it in very great, painful details to them. Probably several times. 🙂

One of my many goals this year has been to find an inexpensive, professional way of presenting and protecting my ink paintings. I am working hard on moving my arts practice towards the professional, but I still need to work around my chronic shortage of funds. Framing each work is simply not an option. Framing a few for exhibition is more manageable but still crippling, and in the meantime new works are being stored in cardboard envelopes all over my studio.

I finally found the photography and print system where works are bagged in clear celo bags, with a strong car backing to stop them being bent. I’ve trialled some different types and sizes of bags and found one I like that’s sold in Australia here.

I turned down the idea of matting for presentation because I love that my works are all different sizes (which would require hand cutting each piece of matting exactly – which involved maths. Ahem!) and I love the ragged edge on the torn paper… enter photo corners! After seeing a lovely paper work mounted in a gallery using photo corners recently I was ecstatic! Yesterday I sat down to order some supplies and looked at several hundred types of photo corners… there’s a few essential things that I need. They must be archival, acid free, obviously. I’d like them to be very unobtrusive and neat, no daggy tears from batches being pulled apart or things of that nature. I’d like them to exactly colour match my cream paper OR the black backing card. And I need to be able to afford them. The more I looked at, the less happy I was. I stumbled across some templates and decided to try and make my own. It was fiddly and time consuming but SO WORTH IT! I can exactly colour match, they are almost invisible unless pointed out, they do no damage at all to the work but secure it firmly, and I can make the corners to the best size for the work instead of being stuck with a standard size that overwhelms tiny inks and is insufficient for large ones. Whee! Check this out: