Father’s Day Framed Floating Pictures in a Faux Leather FrameTutorial

There’s something about my Dad’s office that has kind of a manly air to it. Perhaps it’s the marble core lamp or the big, fancy wooden desk or the weather thingies that hang on the wall, but there’s something about a man’s study. Isn’t there?

So when I was trying to think of something to make my father, I realized that he doesn’t have any pictures of family in there. I mean none. Perhaps it’s because it is the room he uses to get away from us all but that’s just too bad, now. He’s got a new faux leather frame to hang in there.

Oh, and heads up, my computer got fried (yay newer faster computer!) so I lost a bit of my images and whatnot for my tutorials in the coming weeks (boo lightning!). At any rate I’m gonna work with what I got and there might be areas that I have to explain a bit  more than show. Sorry, folks.

For this project you will need:

• Framed piece of art
• paper bags
• brush
• acrylic paint in black/dark brown and medium brown
• foam core board
• gift wrapping paper
• pictures
• hot glue gun
• Mod Podge matte
• spray adhesive

Now i don’t have a before picture but I’ll try to “use my words”. This frame was plain jane oak. Flat, no fancy edges, nothing. Inside was a rustic painting with birdhouses in a row. I’m sure you’ve seen one just like it at some point in time.

So you’ll need to take a couple of paper bags and start wadding them up in a ball. I used paper lunch sacks because I have a boatload of them from when I loved homemade microwave popcorn. Basically I purchased a case at Sam’s and nowadays I don’t even have a microwave so another use for them is great!

And really wad those suckers up as tightly as you can. Smooth back out and tear oddly shaped strips out of the bags. You’ll want some that are long and skinny and some that are short and fat, but not a single one with a  straight edge.

Take those strips and wad them up one more time. Unwrap and smooth flat with your hands. You’ll notice that they lay down well but still have the wrinkles in them. That’s perfect. Take a healthy daub of Mod Podge and smooth it onto the frame and press the paper down on top, wrapping around the edges if necessary. Don’t smooth all of the way because we want to maintain the wrinkles (so it looks like faux leather and not just faux) but you need some pressure so that it fully adheres.

Take a little bit of Mod Podge on your finger and go over the edges as the pieces of paper begin to overlap. Continue for all around the frame and allow to fully dry.

Next take your brown paint and put a little puddle on some scrap paper. Take your brush and dip into the paint and then brush the excess onto the paper so that we have a trace of paint rather than a glob on the brush. Smooth over the entire frame, allowing more to collect in some places than others.

Next go over with your darker brown or your black paint, again dry brushing the paint on and allowing different amounts to lay down to keep a good  variation. You can go over this again with the lighter brown if you want to bring the tone back down to a medium shade.

My frame fit 3 5×7 images perfectly. So I cut out 3 5×7 pieces of foam core board, painted the edges black to be less noticeable and attached another piece of foam core to the back with a hot glue gun for some extra height.

Then I attached my pics to the foam core board with Mod Podge and allowed to fully dry. (okay, now you can see that I’m totally fibbing, I actually painted the edges after I attached the pictures and it was the dumbest idea ever!) Oh, and I printed my pics up in sepia tone to match the manly vibe and color scheme we’re rocking.

Next I took a piece of foam core board and chopped it down to fit by being attached to the BACKSIDE of the frame. Since mine wasn’t made to have any space between the glass and the back I had to rig something else up. This is something else.

Next I took my gift wrap (this is actually tissue paper from Wal-Mart) and attached to the foam core with spray adhesive. Then I hot glued the images (actually the foam core behind the images) directly onto my papered board.

Now, again, my frame wasn’t made to be floating so I had to use little daubs of hot glue on the inside edge of the frame to hold the glass firmly in place. I just did four little daubs in the corners and that seems to have worked very well. Next I flipped the sucker over, made sure that things were properly centered in the front and then hot glued the dickens out of that board onto the the backside of the frame.

Allow the glue to set and then hot glue the dickens out of some saw-tooth picture frame hangers to the backside and, voila! You’re done and good old dad has a great new image to place in his study, office or man cave!