...but how do I capture this magical effect?

Everything went wrong when I was trying to frame my pastel painting.

After checking several art stores I found I could not get the heavy grey board I wanted to use. I decided to laminate the grey board to a heavier board and spent $40 on a couple of sheets. I have laminated boards before without a glitch but not this time. This time the weights I used left impressions on the surface of the grey board. So I added another grey board but separated my weights from the grey board with a piece of foam board. Success!

I continued laminating the spaces. I knew this would be tricky because they need to be precise. I needed to make my own spacers because my frames are deeper than most for the shadow box effect I like to use when framing. I don't know of available commercial spaces that are wider than .5"

Meanwhile my husband was in our unheated barn trying to cut my expensive, Tru Vu 70 Anti Reflective  glass. He went through several pieces without success. $$$ He thought maybe it was just too cold. He brought the VERY LAST piece of glass into the house to warm up while he went out to buy a new glass cutter.

When my husband returned home he decided to practice on broken pieces. Still having trouble! Then he played around with his height above the table which allowed him to apply more pressure when cutting. Ok. Time to try on the last piece of glass. Success, YAY!

Great I thought. But no. He had used so much kerosene on the glass to get a good cut that all the soap and water in the world wasn’t cleaning it off. I spent hours just to settle for a cloudy mess!!! Finally I thought I just have to go with it.

I put the glass in the frame and attached the spacers. Next the painting. I lifted the painting and saw the miss matched measurements of the spacers. It was obvious because the white heavy board bits were glaring. This happened because all the layered laminated boards were thicker than the rabbit on the frame.

It was now about 10 pm. I skipped lunch and hadn’t eaten dinner yet. That is when I finally let go and surrendered to the disaster.  I still made the trip to the city but only picking up my painting from the last show since I already had a train ticket, $78.

AT LEAST THE SUN WAS SHINNING!