New-to-Me Artwork

When I was at my parents' house over the summer, we somehow got onto the subject of the artwork of Al Richardson.  He's a former oil man who started a new career in the 70s as an artist.  My dad has a few of his hand-watercolored pen drawings of oil derricks.  They used to hang in his office, but they'd since been wrapped up and relegated to a closet in a guest bedroom. 

I actually love these pieces.  They remind me of my childhood.  So my parents offered to let me have them.  Only problem is that they screamed 1970s in a very bad way.  Note the brown and orange matting.

My dad blessedly knows how to do picture matting, so he got out his box of matting samples, and we spent a good amount of time trying to find just the right color to use.  I then took the sample with me to Hobby Lobby and bought two big pieces of matting.  They were on sale at 50%-off, so I only paid $8 to have these pictures updated. 

My dad got them done pretty quickly, and they look 100% improved!

The lighting isn't very good, so I'm not sure you can truly see how very improved these pictures are!

We'll hang these in the guest room... as soon as we can get in there to start beautifying it.  Right now it's packed to the gills with boxes full of Star Wars stuff.  Steven finally got around to listing a bunch of stuff on Craigslist, so hopefully we'll be able to use that room again.  It's kind of weird to see him getting rid of his Star Wars collection (and he's not getting rid of all of it).  We spent so many hours years ago scouring area stores to find the new releases, but truthfully, I think the joy was in the search more than the find itself.