For next week: Canvas Stretching!

after the still-life critique, I'll show you how to stretch a canvas and prepare a panel to paint on next week.  Below is a primer on canvas stretching, plus a list of materials needed.  Much of it you can borrow from me if you don't mind waiting in line, but you will have to provide a few things.

How to Stretch a Canvas

What you need (if possible get this stuff from Utrecht or Jerry’s and let them know you’re in this class):

• Stretchers (not to be confused with strainers)—make sure they fit together snugly and that opposite sides are of equal length, ensuring a proper rectangle
• Canvas*—make sure you have at least 3 or 4 inches or so of extra canvas beyond the edge of the stretchers.
• Scissors**
• Staple gun **
• ¼ to 3/8 inch staples (my staple guns take JT-21 staples)
• Tape measure**
• Acrylic gesso (if you are using unprimed canvas)
• Sand paper or sanding sponge*
• Canvas pliers (optional, but recommended)**
• house painting brush 2 inch (or so) **
• skinny flat screw driver and/or needle nosed pliers; (for prying out errant staples)*
• Stretcher keys
• Tack hammer**

*A heavy canvas drop cloth from a paint store often does very well in lieu of “art” canvas—much cheaper, too!

** You may possibly share these items with others

At the very least, you should bring in your own canvas, stretchers, gesso, and JT21 size staples (they fit my staple guns).  You can borrow just about everything else.

Directions

To start out, unfold or unroll and lay out your canvas on a flat, clean surface face down.  It should be cut large enough to comfortably fit over the stretchers to the back inside edge.  Fit the stretchers together to make the desired rectangle (be sure that your rectangle has exactly square [90 degree] angles—don’t stretch a trapezoid!).

After making sure that the weave of the canvas is parallel to the stretchers, carefully fold the canvas around to the back each stretcher and put a single staple in the center of each, making a cross.  The canvas should be “finger taut” between the staples.

After making sure the stretchers are still square (measure the diagonals), start from the staple in the middle of each stretcher and staple down one side of the stretcher to the corner while pulling the canvas finger tight (pull it tight enough to ensure that the weave is still parallel to the stretcher).  Do this on only one side of the center staple.  By working from the center to one corner you will end up completing half of the stretcher.   Do all four sides but make sure that you always do the same side of the staple each time.   When this is completed the staples will resemble a pinwheel or swastika shape.

Now that the canvas is halfway stretched, the tightness of the canvas becomes more important.  As you work your way down the other side of each stretcher, you will realize that you are now pulling against the part of the opposite stretcher that is already stapled.  It is at this point that you can start to pull the canvas as tight and evenly as possible (canvas pliers will become a welcome time saver and knuckle protector).  Work your way down the unfinished side from the middle staple, ensuring that there are no wrinkles between staples. Always work from the middle to the corners.   Excess canvas can be dealt with at the corners.  Also do your best to keep the weave of the canvas parallel to the stretchers.

Once you have finished all four sides of the stretchers and after having made sure that everything is still square, evenly taut (no wrinkles or dead areas), and passes the quarter test, it is time to finish the corners.  The key to good corners is neatness and cleanness.  There are several ways to do them cleanly, and you may need to devise your own way, but I find that if you just make sure that the visible fold goes down along the corner of the stretcher, the rest will take care of itself—as long as it’s neat and clean!  There is no point in doing a nice painting if your support is shotty, you know?  Take pride in your handiwork.

Once the canvas is stretched evenly with the corners finished cleanly, the canvas is still not ready to be painted . . . it needs to be sized/primed.  Acrylic “gesso” is the simplest and most common way of sizing a canvas.  Brush the first coat on liberally with a house painting brush, and sand it lightly after it dries completely.  Put at least one more liberal coat of gesso on after this one, sanding between each coat, but do not sand the top coat.  It’s usual to make the brush strokes parallel to the weave of the canvas, with each subsequent coat being perpendicular to the previous one.  Also, be sure to gesso the side of the stretcher as well, both to protect the weave and for a cleaner look.  Give the top coat of gesso at least an overnight to fully cure, and the canvas is ready to use.

Eventually, no matter how taut your canvas is when you stretched it; due to atmospheric conditions it will relax and start to wrinkle or get wavy.  To make the canvas taut again, with a tack hammer lightly tap some stretcher keys (little plastic or wooden wedges designed for the purpose) into the slots on each inside corner of the stretchers.  Working around the stretcher, give a few taps to each key so that they slowly tighten up together.   This will force all the corners to expand enough to take up any slack that the relaxed canvas offers, resulting in retightened canvas.  Be careful not to tighten any corner more than the others, as this will cause the canvas to go out of square.  Good luck and happy painting!

This semester we will make 7 paintings (not including the color and approach exercises).  Except for the first still-life, you are to make them all on non-commercially produced supports, and at least one is to be done on a stretched canvas.  If you are interested in planning ahead and buying supplies for all seven at once, here are the size ranges you will need:

1. (self-portrait): 16x20-24x30
2. (landscape): 8x10-11x14
3. (in class Abstract) minimum 18x24
4. (at home Abstract) no size restrictions
5. (in-class figure) 11x14-16x20
6. (final project): no size restrictions

Art Club Meeting on Thursday!

So tomorrow is our first Art Club meeting!  All art students are automatic members of the Art Club, so come and take part.  Please show up at High Noon (that is, 12:00 pm) in FA115!  We'll elect officers, discuss possible activities, and talk about ART.

Still-Life Painting Assignment

Outside of Class Painting #1 ART 130

Due two weeks from now: October 10^th.

You are to set up a still life outside of class with at least three colorful, interesting, and related objects. 

The Rules:

·        Use any of the four approaches that we have (or will have) gone over in class

·        Your objects must be related

·        You must make sure that you paint LIFE SIZE or larger

·        Set it up so that you have a strong light source, and always paint at the same time of day.

·        Your subject must be at or just below the viewer’s eye level.

·        Do not crop (or even crowd) your objects, though they may overlap.  Choose a subject small enough to fit easily on your support, and arrange the subject to justify your rectangle shape.

·        Your painting may be no smaller than 9x12 and no larger than 11x14 on any support appropriate for oil painting

·        You must not say “But I don’t have anything interesting to paint. . . “Poppycock!!!  Find a way!  Thinking that way is simply lazy.

Helpful hints

·        Take some time to research some artists that specialized in, or otherwise mastered, still life painting.  Try to paint like them. Fairfield Porter, Janet Fish, William Bailey, Chardin, De Heem, Caravaggio, Emil Carlson, Tom Buechner, Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe, Picasso, Giorgio Morandi. . .all come to mind.  Ask yourself: “How would they do it?”

·        Feel free to bring your partially finished paintings into class for feedback before the due date

Four Approaches to Painting

Four different Approaches to Painting       ART130

Stevenson, Professor

This series of projects is to be completed over the next several class periods on four different 9x12 canvas board panels.  What you do not finish in class you will be expected to finish outside of class using a photographic reference and/or information from your existing paintings. Each panel will have a similar subject (6 colorful objects) and composition to the others, but each will be done using a different painting approach from the others. 

Panel #1--Indirect painting

You are to make a grisaille (pronounced grizz-eye) of the still life.  Use only ivory black and titanium white.  Mix a light middle gray to be the darkest value, and render the still life using a range of light grays. Be sure to keep your values on the high side, and to keep things simple.  Detail can be articulated later.  When the grisaille has dried fully, glaze over each object with the appropriate color.  Using this stage as a point of departure, seek to finish the painting by finding areas that need more of a mixed color or direct approach.

Panel #2—Direct approach using directly mixed color

This approach is very simple.  After making a detailed drawing using a hard pencil (this should take you much longer than the other drawings, and works best if you think of it as a “paint by number”), simply mix and paint the still life directly. There should be one layer of paint—not two or three as in all the other approaches.  There is no restriction on the use of white or any other color.  Simply determine what the final perceived color is by taking into account the local color and the color of the light.  I suggest starting somewhere in the middle of the composition and expanding out from there.  Simple, but not easy!

Panel #3—Direct approach on imprematura ground

Cover a clean panel with a layer of middle gray oil paint (get it into ALL the nooks and crannies of the panel). Do not cut the paint with any mineral spirits, though you may mix in a tiny bit of Liquin to speed the drying time. When the panel is covered, wipe off as much paint as possible.  The result will be more of a stain than a layer of paint.  This is called a ground color, or imprematura.  Do not start this approach until the gray imprematura ground is completely dry.  Loosely block in the drawing using a hard pencil.  Then, using a warm, dark color, block in the general dark shapes.  This approach demands that the painting be separated into darks (usually warm), middle tones (usually cool), and lights (usually warm).  Once the darks are blocked in with transparent warm colors, mix the more opaque middle tones and lights and block them in.  Wherever the color of the ground is correct just leave it showing through.

Panel #4—Indirect approach using “custom” imprematura

Using a hard pencil, loosely block in the drawing on a clean, white panel.  Then, making sure to USE NO WHITE PAINT(because it makes colors opaque and grayish looking), directly block in the appropriate colors using mineral spirits washes (hint: be sure to be accurate, taking into account reflected light as well as local color, but always err on the colorful side.  In other words, if you see a hint of a color, bring it out as much a possible).  If a color is very light, make the wash very transparent, using the white of the canvas instead of mixing tints.  Once all the white of the canvas is covered and the washes are finished to your satisfaction, then you may mix opaque colors to cover the parts of the washes that do not work.  Be sure the let the wash color show if it turns out to be the right color.  Note the way the wash color seems very luminous and intense compared to the mixed opaque colors.  Use these relation-ships to your advantage!

Assignment #2: The Three Eggs

Three Idealized Objects

The project is due in two weeks

As was discussed in class, the color theory displayed in your color chart shows that each of our major hues achieves its highest intensity at a certain point on the value scale.  In real life color on form tends to act this way as well.  For example, on a bright yellow object, the shadows cannot be as saturated as the light areas because of how yellow behaves in light and shadow.  In the same way, on a blue object the shadows appear more saturated than the light areas (even if the local color is a light blue).

For this exercise, you are to make simple paintings of ovoid forms (also called eggs).  For each one you are to choose a primary or secondary color and paint each form as if it was illuminated by a neutral, full spectrum spotlight.  To do this, theorize where the lights and shadow should be (including highlights, core shadow, and reflected light), and place the tints, shades, and the pure color where they would appear according to your color chart.  The goal is to make each spherical or ovoid colored object convincing as it might exist in space.   The attached diagram describing light and shadow on a sphere should help you decide where each value should go.  Be sure to include the cast shadows.

In short, first figure out where the light and shadow goes, and then fill it in as you would the color chart.

Color Chart is due next week!

Remember that you need to have your color charts finished for next Wednesday.  If they are still wet, that's okay.

Color Notes (read this before you start your color chart)

THE NATURE OF COLOR

Painting I

Stevenson

Color breaks down into three parts:

1.                   Value—the lightness or darkness of a color; how close is it to black or white?

2.                   Hue—the title of a color: yellow, red, blue, brown, etc.

3.                   Chroma—the strength or intensity of a color; also called saturation.

So, if any one of these elements changes from one color sample to another, then those two colors are technically not the same.  For instance, if the value and hue are the same, but the chroma is slightly more or less, then the colors being compared are different.   In the same way, two colors can actually be closer in nature than they initially appear by having the hue and chroma similar but the value much different.

Black and White

It is also important to note that black and white hues theoretically do not have chroma, only value.  Therefore they cannot be considered true colors (even though we tend to refer to them as such).  A color mixed with black is called a shade, color mixed with white is called a tint, and color mixed with a combination of black and white (achromatic gray, explained below) is called a tone.  The thing about black and white not being true colors is that a tint or a shade of any color is a change to that color’s value without changing that color’s hue.  It will also change the color’s intensity/chroma by diluting the pigment in the paint, and therefore making it less chromatically saturated or intense.  The density of a pigment suspension in oil paint is pretty much directly related to that color’s intensity.   Because of this, a color is at its highest intensity straight out of the tube, so a color mixed from two different pigments cannot be as chromatic as the pigments on their own.

Chroma at Value

Another thing that you will come be aware of is that each hue reaches its highest intensity at a different value.  Yellow is at its highest saturation at a very high key, whereas blue and violet are at their highest at a very low value.  Green, I think, is surprisingly high, similar to orange, which are both a little higher than red (though not much).  Earth tones tend to come from either broken prismatic (pure) colors or dark shades of high key hues.

It is worth noting that as shades of yellow darken—with more black added—the color that results looks green, even though the hue is still technically  yellow and hasn’t changed at all.  As more black is added to orange—without changing the hue—it gets brown.

Grays

There are basically two types of grays: “achromatic” grays and “chromatic” grays.  Achromatic grays are literally grays without any color, that is, they don’t have hue and or intensity, only value.  They are grays made by mixing black and white.  Chromatic grays are, not surprisingly, grays with color, or grays that involve mixing complimentary colors (and possibly white and/or black).  The range of chromatic grays is almost infinite, and a color is considered a chromatic gray as long it is at least slightly broken, or mixed with a compliment.  You can have a gray that is mixed with equal parts of red and green to make a very broken color that is close to the center of the color wheel, or one made of very unequal parts closer to the edge of the color wheel.  For instance, any blue that has even the slightest bit of orange in it is really a chromatic gray, because it is at least slightly broken by the orange.  It could still look extremely blue, especially if it’s put up against a much more broken or contrasting color, but it is a “gray” nonetheless.  So, paintings that look intensely colorful are often merely made up of chromatic grays.