Frame Time


Tips to make your bare walls pop.


Remember your college days when decorating meant buying posters and taping them on the wall? Now you’re smart and sophisticated, but it’s not easy to find good original art. And while plain white walls may look great in the movies, in reality, they can be a burden. One solution is to buy four or six identical ready-made frames and crop old posters in unusual ways. We found a vintage Guinness beer poster and cut it into four equal pieces, one in each frame. Then we hung the frames in a new order. The result was an abstraction of the original, no longer recognizable as an ad campaign for brew. In fact, friends always ask us where we got those pictures!

If having hand-done artwork gets you excited, there are plenty of websites that offer silk-screened posters for sale, many under $30. The posters announce book readings, concerts, and openings from years past, done by talented graphic designers who are trying to eek out a living by running a print shop on the side. Again, by cleverly cropping them, you can create an original work of art perfect for the kitchen or bathroom. Or just savor the original design and make up an interesting back-story about what you were doing at a book reading in Wichita on November 8, 2005.

Some great places to find silk-screened masterpieces:

www.studio18hundred.com

www.cryptographics.com

www.atomicbooks.com