Today’s tutorial is all about custom stretcher frames and how to build them. Personally I prefer building my own stretcher frames rather than buying them in pieces or pre-fabbed from the store. There are four reasons for this:

1. Stretcher bars bought in-store are not sturdy enough for my purposes. I stretch my canvas nice and tight. They sound like a drum when I’m done priming them. Commercially made stretcher bars will warp under that kind of stress.

2. Commercial stretcher bars are slightly bevelled on the surface that faces the canvas. This makes them slope away from the canvas in an attempt to allow the fabric to ’float’ above the stretcher. Unfortunately the bevel is very slight and often, if you’re an emphatic painter, you’ll press through the canvas catching the stretcher underneath leaving an unsightly line on your painting.

3. Pre-fab stretcher pieces are only about 3/4 of an inch thick. I like my canvases to have some presence so I custom make my frames to be double-thick. This gives them an architectural feel.

4. Stretcher bars come in a variety of sizes but almost always in two inch increments such as 10, 12, 14 or 16 inches. By making my own I can make them any size I like down to a sixteenth of an inch.

I’m going to show you the tools I use and the process I go through to make my own frames. It may seem complicated at first, but once you try it you’ll see there’s really nothing to it. It’s a bunch of little steps that will lead to a very big finish…your masterpiece!

(more…)

Today’s free painting tip comes from an experience I had whilst I was a student at York University. Let me give you some quick background info…

York U had it’s practical programming set up in such a way that in order to see an artistic discipline through to the end of your university career you had to take two half-course prerequisites in that discipline. Drawing; painting; sculpture. All disciplines were set up this way and you were expected to take them in first and second year. By doing this, York allowed students to test out a variety of programs without putting in too much time or money. If the students showed no real aptitude or interest for the discipline, once the course was done, they could move on easily to something else without harming their degree. This was a plus for the system.

(more…)

I’d like to show you a clean and easy technique I stumbled across for laying out an image on canvas before you start to do any painting. The cost is minimal and the fuss is almost non-existent.

So, the other night you were sitting around, doodling in your sketchbook and you came up with a killer image of a menacing looking pumpkin headed fellow (who’s actually training to be a sensitivity councillor) and now you want to put paint to canvas and bring him to colourful life.

With an expanse of clean primed canvas sitting in front of you, you grab the first thing handy to trace the image onto it, a pencil. As you’re roughing  in the shapes that will eventually produce the finished piece and start finalizing some of the smaller details, you realize that you made a mistake and pencilled in one of the lines all wrong. Grabbing your trusty eraser you go to town rubbing out the offending linework… but wait! What’s this? The line won’t erase! All it does is smear around, leaving a large grubby blob on your pristine canvas and the original line still in position, silently mocking your efforts to remove its unwanted presence.

Your pencil drawing	Your attempts to erase it

(more…)

Tracing paper has gotten a bad rap.  When I was a child I didn’t like tracing paper.  I didn’t like drawing on it.  I didn’t like trying to store it.  I think it was the impermanancy of the paper that turned me off.  I could see through it.  That allowed things that were underneath to show through, obscuring what I had drawn on the surface.  This just didn’t appeal to me so I put tracing paper in a drawer and forgot about it…until now.

Over the last few years I have been rediscovering the values of tracing paper and what a fantastic asset it can become in an arsenal of tools for furthering artistic endeavours.  I always keep a pad of it on hand now.  I’d like to relate to you my technique for using tracing paper so it might help you in your own artistic practice.

(more…)