About
PictureFramingTraining.com is a portal website which brings together a group of fully qualified Guild Accredited picture framing trainers, educators, and examiners. It allows you to access high quality training and choose the best trainer and location to meet your needs.
The trainers are all business owners and we got to know each other through our voluntary work at the Fine Art Trade Guild, specifically while working with the Framing Standards and Qualifications Committee.
We are Alec, Ian, Sharon-Lee, Jo, Martin, Janneke and Geertjan. After many years of experience we remain passionate about what we do, and are intent on providing the best training in our industry. Between us, we’ve written articles for industry magazines, CPD content for Fine Art Trade Guild members, conducted in-person and online workshops & seminars and provided technical support for Guild members. Responding to demand for high quality, no-nonsense training and business advice, PictureFramingTraining.com was born.
This concept honours our dear friend, colleague and Sharon-Lee’s husband, the late Steven McKee GCF(APF) Adv. Steven was an internationally renowned framing trainer and educator. He was the first framer to achieve all three of the Fine Art Trade Guild’s GCF Advanced modules and was passionate about the importance of sharing knowledge and learning new skills.
We have five training locations which cover the UK & Ireland and Netherlands. Each venue has a fully equipped workshop featuring professional level equipment, and is also an authorised GCF Examination Centre. As well as the more traditional equipment on offer, each venue features at least one of the three leading computerised mount cutting machine brands – Gunnar, Valiani or Wizard.
Experienced
As well as being industry educators, we are all actively working as bespoke framing specialists. Each of us has built our business from the ground up and operate highly regarded, profitable and professional enterprises. Between us we have over 150 years of bespoke framing expertise and around 100 years of industry specific training experience to call on.
This has enabled us to offer a unique training programme – quite simply, this is picture framing tuition that you will not get anywhere else.
Qualified
We are all recognised by the Fine Art Trade Guild as Accredited Trainers.
It goes without saying that we each hold the base level GCF (Guild Certified Framer) qualification. In addition, we all extended our studies to attain the three available GCF Advanced qualifications. The ‘GCF Advanced’ are specialist subject modules, and cover Conservation Framing, Textile Framing, and Mount Design & Function.
There is at least one GCF examiner at each training location.
Relevant
We are actively involved in setting industry standards, developing best working practice and providing technical support for working framers. As you would expect, as Guild Examiners our knowledge is always up to date. We’ve written study material and technical articles for leading industry publications. We’ve led industry discussion forums, including updating mountboard standards. We have unrivalled experience of how best to apply this knowledge to a bespoke framing business.