A high-quality primed canvas is a guarantee of maintaining the brightness of colors and the durability of the canvas. When priming the canvas on his own, the artist creates the ideal basis for the future painting.
Preparatory stage
Before proceeding with the priming of the canvas, it must be pulled onto a stretcher and secured with a construction stapler or furniture nails. The canvas should be taut and not sag anywhere. Experienced craftsmen stretch the canvas wet to add tension to the canvas.
The canvas needs to be glued before priming. The glue will prevent the appearance of primer and paint on the reverse side of the canvas. For initial processing, PVA glue is suitable. If the fabric is coarsely knitted, then the glue should be applied in a thick layer using a rubber spatula or palette knife.
A denser canvas (tarpaulin, canvas) can be processed using homemade paste. For this purpose, ordinary starch is suitable. So much starch is poured into a saucepan with water to make a viscous mass, and cook until transparency is achieved. The starch paste is applied using a wide flange brush or a clothes brush.
After complete drying, the adhesive base must be sanded. Use fine sandpaper.
Compositions for priming canvas
Priming the canvas to save paint consumption, to make the brush slide easier and to give the canvas a uniform color. Most often, canvases are primed in white. However, if an artist plans to paint a picture with a predominantly dark background, he can add color pigments to the ground and get a canvas of any color.
The glue primer absorbs the paint quite strongly, the strokes will turn out to be lighter and more matte. Glue soil is prepared from one part of gelatin, four parts of chalk or white and 15 parts of water.
Gelatin is soaked and boiled in a water bath, whitewash or chalk is preliminarily dissolved in water and introduced into glue, then a few drops of castor oil are added as a plasticizer.
Emulsion primer is considered the most practical. The first stage of preparing the emulsion primer is the same as that of the adhesive composition. Then, a highly purified drying oil or linseed oil and a few drops of an antiseptic (phenol) are added to the solution. It is necessary to pour in the oil in small portions and stir the solution vigorously. A sign of a high-quality emulsion is the homogeneity of the composition: oil should not separate and float.
The oily primer is obtained using special oily whitewash. After applying several layers of white, the canvas is kept for one and a half years to fix the layer.
Primer rules
The primer should be applied in a thin layer. Apply emulsion and adhesive primer with a wide brush, oil primer with a thin spatula. The movements should be along and across the direction of the threads of the canvas.
Dry the primed canvases naturally and in well-ventilated areas. Do not rotate the canvas towards the sun or battery.
