I have this piece of art I really like. I got it about 15 years ago at a thrift store. I’m not sure what you call this style/medium. The only thing I’ve seen is “folkart”.
It is dingy and I want to clean it. Particularly the white fabric background.
I don’t remember exactly what I did but at some point I tried spot cleaning and this was the result:
construction:
base: 1/4" hardboard composite with canvas sort of fabric glued on
hardboard I don’t know if this term is regional or well known. It’s that brown sheet that is often used on the backside of cheap modern furniture, like a bookshelf. It’s smooth on one side and rough on the other.
Top and bottom edges are in a groove of wood molding strips; these are stapled on and can be removed
design is made up of little items glued on: beads, small rocks, cord, ceramic
doesn’t seem to be a top coat or anything
There’s not really any hidden areas to test.
the glue is quite robust, I have been surprised that hardly anything has fallen off.
Any ideas? Hardboard really can’t get wet.
I wish I had properly protected it years ago.
Your first tries on spot cleaning look to me like the canvas was painted in white. So I’d look for options to clean paintings and maybe retouch the spot you tried to clean with white paint.
This seems to be a pretty detailed guide.
I’m pretty sure that that guide is one of those AI-generated spam sites. In this case, it appears to use a character where the LLM involved wasn’t too sure about whether the character is a house painter or an artistic painter. Which doesn’t mean that the information on it is necessarily wrong, just that I’d be cautious as to errors. If you want information from an LLM, probably better in terms of response quality to just, well, go ask an LLM yourself without the distortion from a spammer trying to have the LLM role-play some character.
Thanks for adding that context!