DRAWING AND PAINT

Discover New Modern Abstract Art Painting Style and Start Creating Original Paintings.

You began with store-bought canvases, but now you’re ready for the big time: making your own canvas abstract art original paintings. As you head to the craft store, you ponder the basics of canvas material and stretcher boards. Pine is the usual wood used for stretchers, but you have an idea. Why not balsa? Both of your projected goals are to be on lightweight canvas, after all, and you needn’t a heavy-duty saw to prepare balsa wood for use as a stretcher, as your craft saw will do just as well. The clerk agrees when she sees your sketch of the highly anticipated projects, and shows you to the canvases. You choose a lighter sort of canvas to make your double goals of canvas panels and stretched canvases, in the handy width of 50 inches, because you decide on the spur of the moment to make the two projects at the same time. A 50-inch width will result in two 20x24-inch pieces of canvas. “Don’t make your canvases any larger than this for the first time,” warns the clerk, “because they may warp.” So you journey home happily from the craft store, though you keep the clerk’s business card with phone number, just in case of problems.
You lay out your material on the flat surface that you have cleared, and begin making canvas paintings. For your project of constructing canvas panels, you place mounting board down on your table and cut to the desired 20x24-inch measurement, and then place the mounting board on top of your canvas material and trim the canvas to one inch larger than the mounting board, all around the board. After applying glue to the back of the canvas, you place the board and the canvas together, trim the corners and fold down the edges. You weight the glued canvas evenly with a drawing board, and let it dry overnight.
In the meantime, you cannot wait and you start your work with the balsa wood stretchers. You’re well-skilled with a miter box and saw in 45-degree miter edges to the end of your balsa wood stretchers. You assemble them into a 20x24-inch rectangle, gluing the edges just to be sure to get them square and professional-looking by using a T-square to firm them up. You staple or nail them together and begin the hard part: waiting until morning until the glue dries.
It’s morning already! You hurry to your projects and see that the glue has dried as you’d planned. You begin your day by returning to the canvas panels project. From the roll of heavy brown backing paper, you cut a rectangle slightly smaller than your 20x24-inch panel, glue it to the back of the panel, weight it and begin the drying process once more. This step acts as a counter-mount and prevents warping. Once dried tomorrow, it will be ready to be painted, but onward to the stretching of the canvas on your dried balsa wood stretchers! After cutting a piece of canvas 22x26-inches, place the stretcher as evenly as possible on the canvas, so that an equally-wide margin of 1-inch appears around the frame. Tack gently in the center of each side, then grip the 1-inch edge with pliers and hammer more firmly a tack on each side of the center about 2 inches apart. Repeat until each side has three tacks, and finally progress from the center towards the corners, alternately on each side, until the entire canvas is tacked. A trained clerk will have given you wedges to hammer in the corners to take up any slack; finish this last step and voila! You are ready to paint your art project, and you have constructed your very own canvas panels and stretched your very own canvas.

This post was written by: beemagnet77

BeeMagnet is a professional graphic designer, web designer and business man with really strong passion that specializes in marketing strategy. Usually hangs out in Twitter has recently launched a blog dedicated to home design inspiration for designers, bride, photographers and artists called HomeBase