Canvas preparation time!

With the big art show just a few months away, I thought it would be good to take a day or so to get a bunch of boards ready for painting. Since I haven't been painting in Oils for too long, I was primarily painting on stretched canvas and canvas board, which were just the basic, store-bought kind. After much reading on canvas texture, stiffness, and other features I didn't particularly care for with the pre-made stuff, I decided to make my own Gessoed boards.

After a quick trip to the lumber yard, some serious measuring and calculating (I wanted to get the most out of my purchase!), and my husband's awesome cutting skills (we'll forget about his mitre saw accident 5 years ago...), I now had a huge amount of individual boards to prepare!

I figured the best way would be for me to setup my big, folding table in my office/studio, and just spread out all my boards across it.

You'll also notice that the boards aren't all that large. That's because I'm figuring out that it's much, much easier for me to transition from Watercolors to Oils on smaller paintings. It gets kinda daunting having to fill up a huge canvas with paint, when you're still learning how to handle the little challenges, let alone duplicate those on a large scale. So by starting small, I can gradually work my way back up to larger sizes. The boards I'm preparing now range between 4 x 6" up to 8 x 10".

After a light sanding on the hardboard panels, I applied a fairly heavy coat of Gesso. It's basically an acrylic primer, and it helps to seal the boards so the oils don't seep into them, thus ruining your gorgeous piece of work!

Just a couple more coats of Gesso, with sanding in between each, and I'll have a whole lot of boards to paint on!! So you can start to see (hopefully) more updates here very shortly! :)

Campfire Necessities - 9 x 12"

Living in a rural area has many benefits - one of them being the frequent dinners we have at our lakefront home, around a nice, cozy campfire. We love to sit outside at dusk, in front of a warm fire (helps to keep the mosquitoes at bay), listening to the haunting sound of the loons, and watching swarms of bats hovering and diving around our heads (also a good deterrent to mosquitoes!)

One of these nights last year, my mother and niece were visiting from Toronto, so we decided to go all out... not just hot dogs, but 'smores!!! Yummy... needless to say, this way of eating isn't very good on the waistline. But who can resist 'smores!!?? There's a reason they're called 'smores, cause you always want "some more"!  :)

This painting can be purchased through my Etsy shop.