First, thank you all for your wonderful comments.
I have been out of town for a wedding, then I was swamped with business, and taking Janet and my parents to doctor appointments, then customers even on Sundays. Great to be busy.
I apologize for not answering your questions on how I did the bevels sooner. As many of you know I love doing all kinds of specialty bevels and I have been playing around with different ideas over the years.
With one of my corporate clients I have been doing a set of 15 to 20 matted photos each year of their corporate retreat (no frames, just mats). And each year, the mats must be the same basic design, except different mat colors can be used as appropriate, and each year I get to decide what to do. However each year, the basic design must be different, so they can more easily remember which year it was. This approach helped me investigate different mat design ideas.
This particular one "The Crow" is from a collection of Henry Jackson photos I framed for a used book seller. He had me do 9 of them, all from around 1900, and the colors of all of the painted bevels were slightly different, depending on the colors in the photo-chrome. "The Crow" has a bottom window mat of a Crescent Museum Solid rag 4-ply mat. The bevel is painted with an acrylic base, then 2 to 4 additional colors are brushed, blotted, sponged, or stroked on at separate times.
At the same time I also paint 8-ply bevels with the same base and colors on four pre-cut strips of Crescent Museum Rag Solid 8-ply mat board. These are generally from fall-outs or off cuts of various 8-ply mats I have used in the past, or some I stock; exact mat base color of these are generally not important because only the 8-ply bevel will show. I then apply the 8-ply under the top mat, in pinwheel fashion. On the first pass for this one, the various lines of color from the brush strokes were two wide for the delicate lines in the photo, so I had to redo the process to come up with a different way of brushing for finer lines. The time for doing complete mat package, from pulling the mats to size the boards, cutting the windows, doing the bevels, mounting in a sink mat, booking and placing in a storage envelope, and clean up takes less than an hour. The time for painting both sets of bevels, with 1 base coat and 4 additional accent colors, including set up and clean up is less than 30 minutes.
The customer liked my work well enough, that he brought in 10 "trade cards" he is trying to sell; he just wants me to mat these, no hurry, so he has a better chance of selling them.
The two different painted bevel mats works on some art, but for many, a single painted bevel - 4 or 8 ply - works better.
