Ok, here’s the deal. Once upon a time, long long ago, I owned a small business with a photographer and did a lot of framing in my basement. I had a nice matboard cutter and a plethora of matboard. I usually paid around $4-$6 for a whole sheet. That’s 32″ x 40″ usually and you can get a decent amount of cuts out of one sheet. Any time I wanted to mat something or frame anything personally, I had everything at my fingertips and it was uber inexpensive.
Fast forward to now, 2019, and I haven’t had that business for several years. I have three small pieces of art that I had originally matted in yellow that I wanted to change to white and I didn’t even need new frames! I have those already. After calling around for some quotes I was absolutely horrified at the ridiculous amount people wanted to charge me for what I knew to be incredibly cheap and easy to do.
So, since my yellow mats were already the size I needed, I busted those puppies out and decided to turn to my ever-present solution to design dilemmas… spray paint.
How to spray paint matboard
The process took several coats to get good coverage as obviously the paper soaks it in quite a bit. You can see in the bottom left of the above picture that my first pass didn’t yield much coverage. I wonder if the Rustoleum 2x cover line would’ve done better. I used Krylon Fusion all- in-one coat.
After several coats, I wound up with great white matboard that served its purpose for me for WAY cheaper than getting these redone completely. I am actually thinking about doing it again and going with a light aqua color to create a little more contrast so we’ll see how that goes!
Here they are back in their frames as a part of our dining room gallery wall! These special frames contain some precious memories of my grandpa’s pictionary drawings. Check out my post on that fun project! What do you think?
