Artist Adriano Manocchia and I go way back...so far back that I can't remember just how far back far back is! We've fished together a lot, mostly on the Batten Kill, but some warm water stuff, too. Even a trip to Pennsylvania to fish together. We've worked on his vehicles a bunch, too. Everything from classic pick up trucks to his Austin Healy. Good times.
He has had an MGB restoration project to keep him busy during the warm weather and I have never-ending yard work to do then as well. But as the cooler weather was showing up, we starting talking about what we were going to do to keep out of trouble when the weather started keeping us indoors.
I've been tying some older featherwing flies over the last year or so; I enjoy the look of them, and once I got bronze mallard feathers to bend to my will somewhat consistently, I began to enjoy tying them. Out of the blue one day a month or so ago, Adriano wondered out loud to me about doing an etching centered around those old featherwings. He didn't have to suggest that to me twice; I jumped right in and sent him photos of the flies I had done to date.
He came up with a lovely concept that harks back wonderfully to days gone by on the Miramichi. Love the gent poling - not paddling - the canoe. Just the way it's done on that river. He hand-colored the flies, really capturing the look of 'em.
Uh oh - my turn. While Adriano is selling some of the edition of twenty unframed (go here: http://adriano-art.com/), my job was to create a fly plate (when did shadow boxes full of flies ever become known as fly plates?) - one for him, one for Bridget and me, and one as a donation to the Atlantic Salmon Museum up in Doaktown, NB. I said I'd like to frame 3 or 4 to sell mostly to raise money to buy more framing and matting materials for more donations to groups associated with the Atlantic salmon. A guy can only dip into his social security check so often.
I usually fool around with a design for matting on a big piece of white cardboard or paper and then transfer that design to a first set of mats. In this photo, you can see the white paper under the double mat, which really shows all the changes I end up making to the design.
Once I've got the mat scheme down to what I want it to be, I've actually learned that it saves a lot of time if I do however many sets I'll need all at one time. If you have a small shop like mine that has to serve as both a woodworking and a framing space, there is a major clean-up that has to be done, say, between making frames and making mats. Sawdust is the enemy. So here's a tidy stack, with a couple different mat options, ready for flies and frames:
