Frame Styles & Materials at the VanArtHub gallery in Vancouver

Frame styles & materials

Choosing how the frame should look

Floater, gallery, and traditional frames, and the woods, metals, and finishes they are made from. Start here if you know what you want to protect and now need to choose how it should look.

The frame is part of the painting now, so choose it that way

Once a painting is framed, nobody sees the two things separately again. The frame becomes the outer edge of the work, and it either supports what the artist did or argues with it. That is the whole job, and it is mostly a matter of restraint.

The good news is that the field narrows fast. What the piece is painted on rules out about half the options before you start. The wall it hangs on rules out most of the rest. By the time you are actually choosing, you are usually picking between two or three mouldings, not three hundred.

Flat Quiet. Modern work. Scoop Draws the eye in. Cap A defined outer edge. Reverse Steps down to the art. Cassetta A raised outer lip. Float Canvas, with a gap. VIEWER SIDE ABOVE · WALL BELOW
Six moulding profiles cut through, all drawn at the same scale. The wall is below, you are above. A flat profile stays out of the way, a scoop pulls the eye inward toward the art, and a cap or cassetta builds a visible border that becomes part of the composition.

The four woods we use most

  • Oak Open grain, warm and pale. Lifts landscape and anything with a lot of light in it.
  • Ash Paler and calmer than oak. The safest choice against a white wall.
  • Maple Fine, almost closed grain. Reads as clean rather than rustic.
  • Walnut Dark, close grain, slightly purple in daylight. Weight without going to black.

Colour and relative width only. These are drawn, not photographed, so they share one light source and can be compared against each other. Real grain varies piece to piece, and we will show you the actual moulding before anything is cut.

Every guide in this hub

Frame Styles & Materials

Choosing a frame

Materials

Common questions

Questions about frame styles

Should the frame match the room or the painting?

The painting first, the room second. A frame chosen to match your sofa will look wrong the moment you move house, and the painting will outlive the sofa. Where the room does matter is wall colour and light, because those decide whether a dark or a pale frame reads better.

Is a wider frame more expensive?

Usually yes, and by more than you would expect. Moulding is bought by the length, so a wider, deeper profile costs more per metre and you need the same number of metres. Width is one of the easiest places to save money without hurting the result.

Do all the frames in a room need to match?

No, and a room where everything matches often looks like a showroom. What holds a mixed group together is a shared line rather than a shared frame. See gallery wall frame sizing.

Can you match a frame I already own?

Often. Bring it in or send photographs of the corner and the profile from the side. If we cannot get the identical moulding we can usually get close enough that the two read as a pair.

Keep going

The other framing hubs

Back to custom framing

Framed by us

Rather just ask someone who does this every day?

We frame original paintings in-house, at our gallery on Davie Street. Send the measurements and a photograph and we will tell you what the piece needs, including when the answer is that it needs nothing.

Ask about framing Browse original paintings