I've Been Framed (Joy Project Update) (Patreon)

My one goal going in to Goodwill was to find a frame for this really pretty 12" x 18" print I bought at a craft fair and suspended in its flimsy plastic sleeve on my kitchen wall. 

As you can see in my photo on the left, the plastic sleeve is not doing the beautiful art by Joe Wirtheim any justice. This bad boy needs a frame. So! To the secondhand shop! 

While they did not have anything quite right for my medium-sized print, I did find something just a touch... larger. Like. Basically two and a half times larger. Like. Large enough for me to hide behind and be completely hidden from view.

43" x 30.75", babyeeee. 

This frame had actually caught my eye a couple trips ago, but I wouldn't let myself buy it because I didn't actually have anything that large that needed framing and I didn't have any future projects in mind for it. 

But!

The gold edges! Both exterior and interior! The weathered blue-teal of the front-facing panels!

AUGH.

WANT.

While looking for justifications to spend the $14.99 on this beauty, I thought back to The Joy Project. I completed my first round of sketches for all the submissions, but I hadn't yet started to assemble them into a cohesive image because I've been indecisive about the dimensions of the final piece. Do I make it square or landscape or vertical? Do I make it one giant image or two that display side-by-side? Do I make it so it's formatted to be viewed on a phone screen, since that's how the majority of people will see it? Do I size it so it's best viewed in real life, walking along a long horizontal scroll along a wall, making the viewer literally walk alongside it to travel from beginning to end? I didn't know!

Well, I thought. I could just let this frame decide the dimensions of that piece for me.

So, here we go. The Joy Project will fill the 36" x 24" open space within this mottled blue-teal and gold 43" x 30.75" frame.

And I'm sure I'll find another project for the faux-antique map that's currently in it.