Kit Glaiyser walks through preparing linen canvases for oil painting: building wooden stretcher frames, stapling the linen tight, and applying rabbit-skin size with a double-boiler method to create a protective, drum-tight surface. The rough linen weave can show through the finished work.
Okay, now today I've been preparing some new canvases. It's actually linen I've been using. It's really lovely, quite coarse, thick linen, which I really like. So I get this big roll of it, and then obviously make the stretchers. As you can see, beautifully made here. Well, actually not that beautifully, but yeah, pretty nice. Basically a kind of frame with quadrant. Basically the quadrant lifts the canvas off so that you don't get, you don't push onto the borders basically. And then there's a cross strut just to strengthen it. This is all made with a circular saw and corner clamps. I've got a system I've developed over the years which works really well. So yeah, so after I've made the stretcher, then it's a case of marking it up. You can see here I've marked it up, so then I'll cut this out with scissors, and then I'll be using my staple gun, which which is over here, this meaty thing. And basically, here's one I made earlier, as I say. So you sort of go around the edge, putting it tight and stapling it. Then I use the traditional preparation. So this is actually called rabbit skin size. It's not actually rabbit skin, but it's basically a glue you can see it's a bit gloopy, that you mix up and then you basically heat it indirectly, which is why I've got this pan within a pan, so there's water underneath it. You heat it up, you warm it up, and then you basically spatch it on. So this one here I've already done, and you can see it, it kind of ends up like a drum, quite nice and flat. And also preserves the canvas or linen so that you can paint in oil paint without it reacting with the canvas basically. I really like this linen because it's got a nice kind of warm surface. It's quite rough. I don't know if you can see there, but it's actually quite a kind of rough weave. It's got a lovely texture to it, and actually I've used it in this painting here where you can see, if you get up close, I've sort of let elements of it show through from underneath, and it's just really nice. There we are. And the sparkly bits are the glue, which is kind of nice as well. So yeah, so I'm just about to cut all these up and then stretch them, and then, then I'll size them. So lots to do.
