As with anything, trends and preferences change and evolve over time and the picture framing industry is no different. It was only a few decades ago when the only way to generate decorative mounting would be to add washlines and panels with watercolour and ink. Of course, back then there was not the array of mountboard colours that are available today, so painting on coloured lines was the easiest way to achieve this. But now, that skill is fast disappearing from the framing workshops around the country, and indeed, we don't offer this either.
This doesn't mean that we cannot be creative with mounting, though. We hold around 150 colours of mountboard in stock, and with our computerised mount cutter can cut multi-layer mounts to compliment the colours and tones in your artwork. However, we also have another trick up our sleeve when it comes to creative mount cutting - black-core mountboard.
Mountboard is made up of a core that gives it thickness, a face paper to give it colour, and a backing paper. Most of our coloured mountboards have a white core, but we have a small selection of colours that are available with a black core too, and this opens up a vast range of creative possibilities.
For example, if the aesthetic balance of a pictures mount is compromised by the white core of a mount, or indeed multiple white cores from multiple mounts, then a black-core mount can often get around this.
It is also sometimes possible to use a single black-core mount in place of a double white-core mount, as the core provides the accent colour to the face, as normally provided by the second mount. This also applies if doubling up black-core mounts - the Breakfast at Tiffany's poster here shows four bands of colour in the mounting - white, black, gold, black, achieved by using just two black-core mountboards.
Similarly, the black-edged step on the inside of the silver frame shown here from our Sun range, is replicated in the black cores of the stepped double mount with silver in between.
There are no hard and fast rules as to when you can used black-core mountboards in your mount design. Black-core mountboard does not meet conservation standards, so should not be used against high value artwork without consideration, but otherwise black-core is a useful and powerful addition to our mountboard range and we are, of course, always on hand to give advice on it's use and show you how it looks on your artwork.
