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Showing posts from February 9, 2014

The Work Goes N Before the Paint Goes On

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With life giving us the need to have a job that pays I seldom have the time during the school year to paint what I want to paint. Not to be redundant but one must be ready for what time one has to actually change into ones painting clothes and get out their and work on a canvas. To be ready I try to make some canvases rather large canvases before I find the time comes in which I can go on out and create. Doing this requires some time spent in my studio where I store my work making the canvases from stretchers and raw cotton duck and gesso. This takes three coats of gesso (gesso is a combination of rabbit skin glue and titanium white paint which is non-toxic) to make the canvas oil paint ready. Without this stuff the paint would soon rot the cotton duck that canvas is made of, so we coat it with gesso first before applying paint to the surface. It takes the good part of an afternoon to make a canvas, but once its done the actual painting on it can wait for a very long time.