Canvas Prep

Seems like I am getting further and further behind in my blogging.  It has been five months since we lost mom to the sudden diagnosis of leukemia.  And then, this last week, my niece and her family lost a baby in her second trimester.  Just pray for all of us, things are still pretty rough.  I know you didn't come here to read about my problems though.  So...

Today I want to tell you about canvas prep.  One of my students looked at me like I was crazy when I started talking about getting the canvas prepped for an ink drawing... so, it must be time to review that again.

Take your canvas, prepped or not, I do not care...IF you are going to do a pin and ink project on it, it needs to be smooth!  You don't generally pick one up from the store and just get to go home and start inking your project.  Your pin hits those little divots or dimples in the canvas and you no longer have any straight lines!

Take the canvas and sand it with a medium grit sandpaper. Wipe it down with a damp rag and let it dry a couple of minutes. Now paint it, I don't care what color as long as it isn't white.  IF you use white, how will you know if you got into all the little dips?  Let it dry.  Sand it and wipe it down.  Let it dry.  Paint it again, with a DIFFERENT color... you want to be able to see that you got the entire thing covered.  Let it dry.  Sand it, wipe it down, let it dry.  You guessed it, go back to your first color and paint it again.  This isn't a fast process, but well worth it if you want a baby bottom smooth surface.  Keep doing this til it is as smooth as you want it.

Here is a picture of one of the projects I just inked and will be painting soon.

One more note on basecoating a canvas... I do not like to use my best fresh paint for this.  Just seems wasteful to me.  I take my paints at the end of a project and dump them into "old odd bottles".  I have bottles of craft paints that are just all the leftovers poured into one bottle... might be five or six different greens and blues poured into one bottle.  Then, I do the same with reds and oranges.  You have paint left out after a project, just grab a bottle with a color similar and put that paint into it.  I keep the same three or four bottles of "leftovers" going and use them for my basecoating.  It really doesn't matter that is wasn't mixed up good or that it is all streaky with different colors.  I am just basecoating!  

So... hope this helps.  IF you don't understand about the "leftover bottles" of paint, let me know and I will get some pictures posted.  

I was hired out by Neiman Marcus to do some flower paintings on their Jo Malone bottles this Friday, I will try to get some photos and post on that in the near future.

Have a great week and I will try to be back soon. -Pam