I Built a Glowing Frame for My Wife's Painting
October 21, 2025 · 28 min · 539 views
My wife made a beautiful oil painting of lemons for her return to art, and it was hanging on the wall, forgotten and lost in the shadows. I couldn't take it. So I built a frame for it. Not a simple wooden frame, no no no. When life gives you lemons, you make LED-monade. Trademark pending.
She didn't ask for this. But the painting deserved better than a dark corner, and I needed a project smaller than the ones I'd been tackling, because the one coming after this one terrified me. Also, I wasn't going to pass up a pun that good.
The result is a black pine frame, held a bit away from the wall so the LEDs can glow behind it, with a small wooden light holder on top that points a second strip of LEDs down onto the painting itself. A removable power bank and a QuinLED-Dig2Go controller sit on the back, held by magnets, so I can change the glow without touching the frame.
The miters
I started by ditching plywood for pine planks and cutting four 45-degree miters. The thing about a frame is that you never see the problems until you cut the last piece and try to close the loop. I now know this as the law of compounding errors: like compound interest, except it works against you. After way too much cutting and recutting, I had four usable pieces glued up, and a pile of scraps I'd end up needing later.
The light holder
The light holder was the highlight of the build and also the low point. I shaped the pieces with the Dremel moto-saw, the jigsaw and the track saw, then needed to route a channel for the aluminum LED track. The first piece was already too small to hold safely under the router. The second one I routed in the wrong order, and half the plank came off with it. Third time, I routed first, cut the shape second, and finally got a clean channel. Then a tenon on the holder, a mortise in the frame, and the three parts became one.
Magnets and a power bank
I glued the magnets onto the controller with 5-minute epoxy and drilled matching holes in the frame. One magnet may have gone in backward, but it was already buried in epoxy, so I took the 50/50 and lost. I also tried wireless charging for the power bank. That failed too.
Sawdust filler and aluminum tracks
Woodworking: miters, homemade filler from sawdust and wood glue, mortise and tenon, and that routing has to happen before the piece gets too small to hold. Also, not to get too attached to a piece of wood. LEDs: aluminum tracks with white diffusers keep the strips from cooking the wood, and WLED meant one controller could handle the blue backlight and the white painting light instead of two separate setups.
Watch it
Watch the full build on YouTube.