Recently, David Lantrip, MCPF, GCF, spoke to members of the Professional Picture Framers Association (PPFA)Website about how a computerized mat cutter (CMC) can do more than cut simple mats. Among other benefits, he discussed how they can make it easier to cut cove mats without getting into the math, since that would involve trigonometry. I don’t own a CMC, and can’t justify buying one, but I took the cove mat problem as a challenge. Now I’ve done the analytic geometry necessary to calculate important angles, and it’s not that difficult. But in preparing for this article, I discovered that none of that is really necessary.What’s a “Cove Mat”?Cove mats, as used in this article, are essentially shadowboxesDefined with sloped sides. Cove mat image found on The Picture Framers Grumble (forum)Link. Source: http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff10/clivegshep/118_1822.jpg.“How Do I Make One?”In our new article, Making Cove Mats, we show how easy it is to make a simple cove mat. The most difficult math you’ll need is to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle. But then, if you want to get fancy, like making the slopes of the cove walls each different, or making a cove mat with a non-rectangular base, then things will get a little more complicated. We explain that too. And for you math aficionados, the derivations of all formulas are just a click away. Below are the overhead, oblique, and side views of a model cove mat we made to verify the example plan used in the preparation of this article and shown to their right. It was designed (in Photoshop, only because that’s what I had available) to show off all of the options. I shrank the plan enough to fit on a letter-sized stationary and then printed on our thickest paper. You will get a more legible version of the plan in the article. Click here for a more legible version.“Even if we had the software to make a plan like that, how would we transfer it to the matboard?”There is more than one way to do this. The simplest, if you know someone with the right printer, is described in What I Learned About Printing On Matboard. The more traditional way requires familiarity with a protractor and a yardstick.“So why would anybody need a cove mat like this?”Do I have to think up everything?Enjoy the article!
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