Benefits of Stretching Your Own Canvas

Series Summary

Painting is the art of using a pigmented medium to create a picture of reality filtered through the imagination, the senses, emotions, and life experience. Artists the world over have multiplied the uses of painting as a vital mode of human expression, whether recording history, retelling myth and legend, expressing religious fervor, or exploring the unknown. From early history to the present, we have records of men and women making graphic representations of their world, showing their understanding and their curiosity. In this free video series, learn how to stretch a canvas for painting from a professional artist. She will tell you the benefits of stretching your own canvas, the tools you will need, how to put stretchers together and how to size the canvas. She will also show you how to staple each side of the canvas to the stretchers.

Video Transcript

"It's a great thing for a painter to know how to stretch your own canvas. It's going to save you a lot of money in the future and it's kind of something that I think a lot of people are intimidated by to think of stretching your own canvas. Because of the tools and like getting down and doing it but it's not that complicated as you will see today and it's something that's really worth knowing. It doesn't take that many tools and you can get canvas at actually a lot of fabric stores and definitely art supply stores and stretchers and you can even make your own stretchers and buy the canvas. It's not too expensive and it's a great way of doing things. Also if you want to make like different shapes that you wouldn't actually like wouldn't be able to get in stores very easily. If you've got some ideas that you want to try out; you're making your own frame then you're really going to need to know how to stretch your own canvas. So it's a good thing to learn and I will be teaching you this now."