What a happy discovery it was for me to see how framing an artwork on paper, even with an inexpensive Ikea frame, adds value and depth to it. Taping a border around my watercolor paper also does the trick. It gives me afterwards when I remove the tape nice and crisp borders.

On a course I recently did – Fresh Paint with Flora Bowley –  we had to create a 100 little paintings on watercolor paper, size about 20*20cm. The idea was to loosen up, let creativity flow, overcome creative blocks, self judgement and that feeling of being scared to change something in a painting because it feels too precious.

After the course, I was sitting there with all those paintings (I must admit I stopped at 75, felt it was ok) and wondered what to do with them. I did not feel particularly attached to most of them. Until I put one, just for the sake of trying, in a frame. Well, that was interesting. All of a sudden, it looked much more valuable, more interesting.

With that came a next idea. I picked 12 I liked most out of the stack and started putting up a tile composition on my living room wall. Have to admit it took a lot of measuring to get the whole thing the right way on the wall, but I am very pleased with the result.