From the course: Painting Foundations: Acrylic
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Preparing your support
From the course: Painting Foundations: Acrylic
Preparing your support
- Most white canvases you buy in the art store are pre-primed in the factory using acrylic gesso. Traditional gesso was first used in oil painting, but it's now being produced as an acrylic version called acrylic gesso. The only reason you'd use gesso is if you're working on a raw canvas or unprepared board. It primarily gives you a surface to paint on top of, and gives you a better surface quality for the paint to be absorbed into. So if you've got a raw canvas, here's a demo of how I would apply acrylic gesso to it. So traditional oil glue gesso was made with animal glue binder, and it usually used rabbit-skin glue, chalk, and white pigment, and that was usually Titanium White. So you've got a chalk, which is absorbent, a Titanium White pigment, and then something to bind it together. It creates a surface that is both absorbent, and has a tooth, a texture quality to it that allows the paint to grab onto the surface. So modern acrylic gesso is a combination of calcium carbonate…
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