Frame

Frame is the name I gave to a (roughly) 16" x 24" pre-stretched canvas on a wood frame. You know, the kind you can buy at craft stores to paint on. My inspiration for this one was actually pretty similar to The Gallery and our photoframes - I didn't like that wall art was static. I suck at maintenance. If I am going to solve a problem, I want to solve it for good (I attribute this to taking very wrong lessons from the opening chapters of a book I read at an impressionable age, but I digress). If I am going to spend the time hanging a picture frame or art or whatever on my wall, it had better be interesting enough that I won't have to do it again, later. Art that changes over time has been my solution to this for years. This project is just another example.

I was playing around with LEDs one evening after we had done a family painting project, and I decided to see how well the canvas diffused light.

Turns out it diffuses it rather well. You lose a little brightness, of course, but the color passes through well, even in daylight.

This is a really simple build. I took a sheet of heavy cardboard from an old refrigerator box, cut it down to the size of the canvas I had, cut eight strips of LEDs, arranging them vertically, in a zigzag pattern (up then down then up then down etc). This was before I had figured out matrixing to do 2d effects (although I have since updated the code on it to allow for that), so the programming started pretty simple. Once the LEDs were installed, I put a pair of command strips (one on each side) on the edges, with the mate for each one in the same location on the wood frame of the stretched canvas. I wasn't sure if I would like it, so the canvas frame itself is still 100% original and untouched. You could paint on it and never know it had been the diffuser for a light for ~10 years.

I believe I built this sometime between 2016 and 2018, but I don't know exactly when. I didn't take any pictures of the build because it was originally just a proof of concept. I ended up liking the way it looked the first night I threw it together, that I never took it apart. It has lived on a few different walls (I am also fond of moving things around for variety. which I have learned many people don't do - weird). It is still pretty simple today. I haven't made any major changes to it, aside from updating the code to support matrix effects. It was an important light, however, in that it would be a prototype for a series of lights I would build later.

This article is part of a series on LED Art as I attempt to document all of the different LED projects I have built over the years.
More will be added as time goes on. The list of currently available articles can be found here: https://dzw.zentormey.com/tag/leds/