Well, the key thing to remember here is that because I was doing this for myself, I wasn't exactly going for archival quality of any sort here. I wanted something that evoked the texture and weathered appearance of the pyramid in the photo, and give the rock itself an "appropriate" setting.
Both the frame and the mat were made in more or less the same way. The frame size is 11x11 inside the rabet. I cut some scraps of NC91201 Cosmopolitan gold to size and built it. I then cut NC61502 Chantilly silver so that the back edge of the first frame sits right on the top of the sloped edge of the second frame. Then both frames were attached with glue and offsets to make one frame. No pics of that, since it's pretty cut and dry (pun intended). Once the frames were together, I needed to make the brick design. I tried a couple of different things, like trying to cut v-grooves by hand, or making bricks on the Wizard. Making a ton of little bricks on the Wizard would have taken forever, so I opted to go a quicker route. I cut 1/4" strips of a slightly textured rag matboard, then cut those strips into 1/2" bricks with an old paper cutter. The bricks were then glued, one by one, to the frames, as pictured below:
Once all the "bricks" were glued in place, I sealed them with Modpodge to make sure they were good and attached to the frame, and make sure that the matboard would be able to take the following steps. I think I used maybe three or four coats of the Modpodge, and really tried to fill in some of the major gaps. Picture below:
Once the sealing coat was dry, I was ready to add the texture. I picked up a can of Krylon's Make it Stone spray paint from the craft store, and coated the entire frame with a couple of coats, letting it dry about an hour between the coats.
After letting the final coat of spray paint dry a few hours, I painted over the textured paint with a yellow acrylic paint. The color is called Camel, but it's really more of a dark butter color. Now it was really starting to look "right."
Can only include five images per post, so to be continued. . .