Mounting Feathers to an Acrylic Feather Painting

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Carolyn Travisano and I'm here to tell you about painting on feathers. I think what we'll go over now is basically the mounting and preparation as far as selling it, retail, spaces, how to present them. The easiest way that I found basically is to use a heavy duty double face tape basically to the back of them. This one had very little on. I just put it along the inside of the feather on the quill area. Then I put some on the board. This is just black foam core. We're just going to mount it as such on the board. The reason why I only use a double face, a heavy duty double face tape, is that this is basically for a customer to look at it. It's a presentation that somebody can take a look and say, okay I know that I need to frame this. This is the easiest way possible to do this without damaging the feather. When you go ahead and frame it permanently through a framing studio, they will permanently adhere it to the board. It depends on how the customer wants it done. If they were to use any type of chemical like a hot glue gun, any type of permanent glues, it will not hold its value. They probably would not be able to resell this feather if they were to sell it at a late date. A gallery wouldn't go ahead and do that because it's actually compromising the integrity of the original piece of artwork. For this stage, we're just using the double face tape. It's not going to damage the feather in any way. It's just for selling purposes. I mount it on to the black foam core and then I just take a either shrink wrap. I use just plastic sleeves. It's not the presentation but it works. You need to protect the feather through this process because you don't want it to get dusty, dirty, people's finger prints on it, being handled as a feather. Like I said, they're pretty sturdy, but you just don't want to take any chances, so just a nice protective covering over top of it should be fine. You can get a shrink-wrap at a frame store if you're able to do that, but I get these from clearbags.com. They come in all different sizes, so you can frame them or you can have them put on a permanent matte board and then eventually frame them. It's up to you. Different ways that frame shops do frame these, and I frame most of them myself, is I actually tie down in the final process of framing. I actually tie down or sew down the feather to the board, or I put an indentation through the center of the board and lay the feather in it. Rather than putting anything permanently attached to the feather where it might ruin it, might discolor it, you never know, so it's better to be safe than sorry."