Continuing on now, we're gonna talk about the preparatory layers of the canvas.
This is the same canvas that you saw me stretch previously.
And you'll remember that there's been nothing wet applied to here at all,
it's simply the cotton duck which is unprimed, unsized.
In this case, only stretched.
Now, what I'm going to do is to use a priming material,
which says GESSO right there.
Personally, this is a pet peeve of mine.
Gesso is a specific material that
goes way back to Cennino Cennini in the Italian Renaissance.
It's rabbit-skin glue and calcium sulfate and a host of other things.
It's, you know, one of the original priming materials.
Well, that ain't this. This is actually just acrylic paint,
believe it or not.
So, I'd refer to it as priming just to you
know call an apple an apple and an orange an orange.
But you'll hear people call a priming,
an acrylic priming, gesso all the time.
Now, true gesso, that rabbit-skin glue stuff,
if you want to go ahead and try that at home,
I can't recommend it enough.
That rabbit-skin glue-based gesso is not really appropriate for a flexible support,
like what we've stretched up here.
Flexible, meaning that you know there's nothing behind the canvas.
It's not like a – back in one second.
It's not like a solid support like this,
where there's a piece of Masonite underneath.
The reason is that rabbit-skin glue is a quite brittle material.
It's also hygroscopic, which is a weird word that
means that it reacts readily to changes in atmosphere,
namely relative humidity and temperature.
Meaning that if I use that rabbit-skin glue priming here,
but then the camera starts to move around on a humid day,
and then it gets cold and it moves again.
Well, that's gonna lead to cracking.
And next time you see an early Agnes Martin painting on canvas,
on a flexible support by the way,
you'll notice a lot of cracking most likely.
I'm talking about her work from the 50s and early 60s.
The reason for that is she used that rabbit-skin glue gesso,
she made it herself up at home.
If you're into cooking, if you're into working with your hands,
you'd probably like the procedure.
I do.
But it's really not appropriate for a flexible support.
If you're gonna be painting directly on wood or on canvas stretched over solid support,
knock yourself out. It's great stuff.
For our purposes, I suggest working with an acrylic or,
anyway, a synthetic-based primer.
This one is made by Dick Blick, super cheapo stuff.
It's acrylic emulsion, meaning you can add water to it,
to thin it if necessary.
You can also clean your brushes with water,
no solvent really necessary.
That's nice.
You'll also find some other gessos out there,
so-called gessos, that use polyvinyl acetate,
it's another synthetic kind of emulsion.
It's very similar to acrylic.
For our purposes right now,
for priming, they're really interchangeable.
So, when you pop this baby open,
always remember to give it a good stir.
The reason being that the water and the binder,
that acrylic emulsion binder,
is gonna rise to the top because it's lighter than the pigment,
the white stuff in other words,
which in this case is titanium white.
So if I were just to dip in and start painting,
I'd have stuff that's really runny and quite clear,
meaning that it'd be really streaky and I wouldn't really have
enough hiding power to cover up the canvas – I'm gonna have to put on three coats.
If you give it a good stir first,
you'll ensure that the pigment that settles to the bottom is
quite evenly dispersed now in that primer,
so it's gonna work a lot nicer for us.
By the way, when you cut canvas,
there's always kind of weird little scraps hanging around.
Don't chuck them because that ain't green,
but also because they come in real handy just to you know
clean up brushes and stirs, things like that.
Now, before you start priming,
one thing you need to decide is what you're gonna do about the edges.
And you might want to think about what kind of painting you're gonna be working on.
You might also want to think about do you want to prime the painting,
if you're gonna be working in a Jackson Pollock kind of mode and
the color of this cotton duck is important as part of your palette that you inherit.
Well, then you might not want to prime your canvas at all.
You may simply want to paint on unprimed,
unsized cotton duck or linen for that matter,
or you might want to use something called a size.
This is called PVA size.
It has a consistency of milk.
In fact, it looks like milk.
It dries clear, however.
PVA is polyvinyl acetate,
that polymer we just mentioned.
And size doesn't mean the size of a canvas,
like the dimensions of it, rather,
a size is a clear adhesive that locks in the dimensional properties of that canvas.
In other words, if I were to paint
on this with some acrylic paint that had a lot of water in it.
Let's make up a little Jackson Pollock blob.
This kind of thing.
Now, that water in there, as it dries,
may shrink locally this area of the canvas and I might even get wrinkles in it.
Now, if I apply a size first,
that's probably not going to happen because it's already been locked in
with this clear adhesive which basically just fixes the canvas to stay where it is.
It's still flexible, it's not going to crack like that rabbit-skin glue I mentioned.
The rabbit-skin glue by itself actually is another size material.
But again, I suggest these flexible ones, acrylics or PVAs.
In this case, I'm going to skip that.
It's very easy to put this on yourself at home.
It's basically like painting with milk.
Can't really do it too wrong.
The priming is a little bit trickier.
So now back to those edges,
do you want to prime your edges?
Are you gonna paint the edges later?
Do you want to prime the surface but have
clean edges revealing the cotton duck or linen or what have you?
Well, if you want to do that,
and we're talking about really aesthetics now,
not so much, you know,
the nuts and bolts of how the painting is gonna
react to your physical stress or temperature,
humidity, etc., you could put a piece of masking tape down,
cover that edge, paint-- well, prime the surface,
and then rip that masking tape off and have
a very clean line right down that turnover edge.
So that you'd have the clean canvas on the side and the prime canvas on the top.
Something you can try, if you want.
In this case, let's say that I'm planning on making, I don't know,
it's a Barnett Newman-type painting,
and I will paint over the edges eventually,
so I'm gonna prime over the edges, for now.
The biggest error, the most common error that students often make with the priming
is to put too much on – to dump on way too much priming.
And then when they start doing this kind of thing,
you get left with a texture like that,
with big brush strokes and all this extra paint.
That's really a mess to work with. So don't do that.
Just put on a little bit,
and then really stretch that priming out because it stretches a long way.
Now you probably don't really want to leave any thickness here in your priming because
(a) it's gonna be some brushstrokes that have nothing to do with your painting probably,
and (b) it's gonna take a lot longer to dry if there's a lot of paint on there.
So, by stretching it,
I'm ensuring that I'm not gonna have these very loud, gestural,
you know, kind of brush work in the underpainting,
unless for some reason you want that.
And I'm also showing that because it's thin,
it's gonna dry in, well,
15 minutes or even less,
so if I'm in a rush,
I can start painting almost immediately.
What I'm doing here is painting all in one direction, you'll notice.
I'm going, well in your orientation,
top to bottom, bottom to top.
In other words, not going diagonally and horizontally.
The reason for that is if I want to put on a second priming layer subsequent to this one,
why would you want to do that, first of all?
Well, if you want a thicker,
more absorbent ground to work on,
you might want to do that.
If I put on that second layer,
what I can do is in that second layer,
work perpendicularly to the first one so that
any brushwork I leave here is not gonna be reinforced by a second application,
but rather kind of cancelled out by a perpendicular one.
So, by ensuring that right now
all of the brushstroke that I'm leaving is all in the same direction,
if I want to put on a second coat later,
I can do that in the perpendicular direction.
So what I'm doing now is just kind of fanning out the paint,
making sure it's relatively even,
making sure I'm not gonna have these big tracks left behind
which are gonna get in the way later.
And I just want to make sure that I'm covering,
you know, all of the canvas or 99.5 percent of it.
If you have these little tiny holes in the priming like that,
well, chances are that's really not gonna bother you
at all later since you paint over it.
If you're gonna leave exposed areas of the priming visible in the finished painting,
well, then maybe it would bother you and you want to make sure to knock them out.
Now, by the way, if you're using cheap brushes,
like I am, invariably you get these bristles that get stuck there.
Now, if they get stuck there, it's gonna stay there.
And in fact, when you paint, it's gonna collect paint around it,
which could be really annoying to you.
Or if you're like Agnes Martin, you might embrace that,
and take this as kind of this randomly-inherited chance occurrence that,
you know, the painting almost has a life of its own.
OK, if you're more like Barnett Newman and you hate those things,
Newman actually had a set of 20 tweezers apparently of all different shapes,
you can use a tweezer to get them out or you can just use your fingernail,
pop it out of there,
and then just cover your tracks.
That kind of thing. And no one will ever know.
Now the sides, obviously,
we're just gonna do the same thing.
