How to Pick a Mat for Picture Framing

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, I am Debbie Reeves at John's Design Center and I am here to tell you about custom picture framing. As you look at your picture, you want to pick out some of the colors that are in it. There are different ways that you can do it. You can use a dark mat which pulls all of the dark colors out of your picture. This one happens to be one of the suede mats and we've used a wood lip which is called a fillet on the inside. Or, you could use a light mat with a dark underneath (or sort of a light, medium underneath). Or, over here, you have one of the mats that had texture to it. We put the dark which helps to pull out all of the dark that is in the picture. Or, you could do a plain mat with a dark inside which does that same thing. So, there's a lot of different choices for every picture. The way that we pick our matting is we have this holder here and first we decide which mat that I want just a little bit of color to show. So what I'm going to do is put this right in there. This will hold my mat on there so that you can get a visual. Then, I'm going to put a little bit lighter mat on the top so that I have the light mat on top and the darker color (just a little bit) on the bottom. Where this one down here with the suede matting, we've done just the opposite. We've put the darker mat on top so that now we have the dark mat on top with a small little gold that picks up all the yellow in the trees. This makes even a more dramatic look on this particular picture. "