If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Overdoing

I've come up with a bit more wall space recently, so it was time to frame another page. I've previously talked about this excellent Blue Beetle page by Casey Jones. After my successful experiment with matting a Birds Of Prey page, I felt like having another go at something unconventional. Pretty quickly I came up with the mad idea of cutting out Beetle's chest emblem into the mat. Yes, it would've been easier to paint it on. No, I don't like easy things. Result, pre-frame.

The first thing I wanted to try was following the panel alignment, which I thought might look cool. I could've done with 1mm or 2 of extra space, it wound up a closer fit than I'd planned, but it works well enough.

Then on to the icon for the black matt. I found a giant image of it via google, resized it to fit, then printed it out. The old-school carbon paper cheat of scribbling pencil on the back was used to transfer the image to the card, then it came to the pain staking task of cutting it all out.

I didn't time it, but I think I spent a little over an hour on this. It was actually pretty straight foward once I got the hang of it, just required a bit of planning before each cut to make sure the edge was sloping the right way, and that I wasn't going to run over another part with the blade.

It initially didn't fit the frame quite right, the top of the icon was obscured. I cut 5mm off the bottom (of the matt, not the art!), and hey presto, it looked perfect.

The finished product hanging on the wall.
Left to right: Vigilante (Todd Smith), Blue Beetle (Casey Jones), Mantra (Robb Phipps), Firestorm (Nicola Scott)