Your mats are always beautiful, Russ. Just out of curiosity, do you ever use black core or other colored core mats? It seems like for this specific design, a BC mat would be less labor intensive.
Just curious.
Rick
I used to but I really don't anymore.
My reasoning is that I can make more by painting a bevel than buying a core colored mat, and I have more options for color, and as I tell my customers, it is "hand painted", not vat dyed. It is truly "custom" for your particular piece.
My price for a single color painted bevel is the same as a window mat [of my collector package mats] of the same size. And sometimes I also end up getting a 3rd mat in the design, the one that is painted. Or many times, they only want a single mat but when I show them the painted bevel, it is an easy sell, just having me add an accent color on the one, or mostly, adding a second mat of the same color as the first mat, but with the painted bevels. And I can cut both mats out of the same sheet!
I do enough painted bevels that I have my labor times down pretty good, I allow 15 minutes for 16 or 20 or smaller. but it is generally around 8 minutes for a solid color, as follows:
1. Set-up and Cleanup [5 minutes]
This includes taping, pulling the tape off later, and lifting by box of acrylics about 2 feet from under the work table, getting water, getting a scrap piece of glass, washing brushes, tools, at the end of the session.
2a. Apply Base color [3 minutes for 16 x 20 mat]
Single color out of acrylic jar onto glass, wet brush slightly, mix in acrylic and brush with wide flat brush.
2b. Apply Mixed Base color if regular base color not in my set of colors. [5 minutes for 16 x 20 mat] If I need to mix the base color from 2 or 3 different colors, I add about 2 minutes to get the second color and mix well, 3 minutes to apply for total of 5.
3. Additional accent colors - up to 4 -[1.5 minutes per color]. I apply accent colors with paper, sponge, etc., etc,.
For this particular piece I allow 15, but I estimated actual times as Set-up and Cleanup [5 minutes] and base color [3 minutes] for a total of 8 minutes. Actual time was 10 minutes because I had not used this particular dark silver-grey before and it was very thick and had pieces of graphite in it so I had to spend more time to mix.
Also, on this particular piece, the top two mats (one with painted bevel and one without) are the same mat so I could cut from the same 32x40 piece, which saves time [ordering, receiving,] and money. If I would have used a colored core, I would have needed to order another mat.
I believe my time estimates are very accurate, for me. Last night I was doing two separate jobs, each with an acrylic jar color base, and then 5 accent colors, and my time was around 25 minutes for the 2. And I did a quick wash of brushes between the first and the second. And no color cores can give on the beauty of a hand painted variegated bevel.
For some pieces, If I was using a level II mat, instead of the Level I here, and I needed only a single color, (the same color as one of my inks, or watercolors), I have a quick an dirty way of painting, that takes less than 5 minutes, including clean up time.