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Hinge Artwork Into a Picture Frame Mat


So here we are now with our piece that we want to hinge. I have a mat, I have the backing board that I'm going to use, and I have the piece that I'm going to frame.

So what I want to do originally is to do the typical way that a frame shop would do this. I'm going to book hinge the mat to the backing, and then I'm going to do what we call a hinge to the art to the backing also. So what this does is this is a very flexible tape, very aggressive, sticky, that I'm going to put down and I'm going to create a book hinge. Once I get that, I want to line this up to where it has a good line that it adheres to, and now I want to hinge that back and I want to bring my artwork in here and bring this down.

At this point, you line it up as much as your personality dictates. I dictate things pretty exact, so I'm going to want to measure and see that I get exactly the same on both sides. Your eyeball is pretty good. I was within about a 64th of an inch there with just looking at it. I'm usually not that good, that's right five eighths, and that's exactly five eighths so that's great.

At this point, you want to be able to hinge this back and stick the piece down. So you bring that back, I've got a weight on here. What I'm going to do now is use a material that's called P90. It's extremely available and used in the framing industry. It's probably framed about 20 million limited edition prints over time, if not more. What I'm trying to do is adhere it to the back of the piece. I only want to catch the first eighth of an inch on the top of the piece. I want to move this up, just bring this down to where I don't actually get a lot of adhesive onto the art itself. Bring that over, and that is the first half of a hinge.

The second half is to take a piece and hook that down across that. This is now ready to hang. Now remember what I was talking about earlier. The whole idea of hanging the piece just from the top is so that if the print, mat or backing ever expand and contract at different rates over you don't get buckling in the artwork itself. So the best way to do it is you just hang it from the top. At this point, you can take this, you can carefully move it back, you can make sure that's hooked down well, we can tip this back, and then we can hinge this down and we have our framed, hinged piece of. That was a professional way of doing it.

Now I want to show you a really, fast way of doing it. This works the best if you're working with smaller pieces.
I'm going to hinge the art right to the mat. This is best if you do not need perfect alignment, it can go very quickly. I've hooked the tape down to the top edge; I'm putting the art over upside-down. Bring the mat over the top and get visually what I see.

I push the mat down there and you can see this is a very, very fast, easy way of adhering and hinging a piece, and if you have it just hooked at the top so it just hangs and things can expand and contract at different rates, you'll find that the piece doesn't buckle. So remember what I talked about earlier, just never, ever, take a piece of artwork and adhere it all the way around. Don't tape dots of glue and glue it on the back. Just hang it here from the top, let it hang within the mat and you'll be just fine. Thank you very much.