Thread by @TonyNoland

Older daughter has taken up painting. Small canvases aren’t super expensive when you buy a multi-pack on sale at a big box art supply place, but she’s gone through several of them already as she’s practicing.

What’s a tight-fisted dad to do?
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One option was to suggest that watercolors on rag paper might be as much fun as acrylics on canvas. (That is, use social engineering to steer her to a cheaper milieu.)

Didn’t work.

Being the handy guy that I am, I considered buying a roll of art canvas and making a stretcher. She could have as many canvases as she wants, for a fraction of the price of pre-stretched and mounted canvases.

I got a MAJOR eye-roll for that suggestion.

“Besides,” said young Frida Kahlo, “I’d still have to gesso the raw canvases, like I did in art class at school.”

Gesso? What is this “gesso” of which you speak, my beloved?

Gesso, for all of you ignorant and uncultured savages who don’t already know, is a heavy mixture of water, white glue, plaster of Paris, and pigment. It soaks into the canvas, binds to it, and, when dry, gives a textured surface for the artist’s paint to adhere to.

Folks, this sounded RIPE for the DIY touch. I already have all that stuff in my workshop, AND I know what to use it on instead of canvas: wood.

Hell, the Mona Lisa is painted on wood, and if was good enough for da Vinci, it should be good enough for practice work here.

And so in this instance, as in so many other DIY projects, it’s plywood to the rescue!

As it happens, I’ve got a stack of offcuts of 1/4” oak veneer plywood. It was the work of 20 minutes to zip a piece of it up into standard sizes of 11”x14” and 14”x18”. (She’s painting on 6”x8” canvases now, so these will be the step up in size she wants.)

After dinner tonight, I mixed up a batch of gesso, rolled it on two boards, decided it was too thin, added more plaster of Paris, mixed again, re-rolled the first two, then did the rest.

A quick check online said that a 16oz jar of gesso is ~$15. That probably would have done all the pieces I have cut right now.

For $30, I bought enough glue and plaster to make a couple of gallons of gesso. After it dries tomorrow, I’ll know if this all worked.

I’ve got lots of plywood offcuts cluttering up the shop. Even if I went and bought a fresh 4’x8’ sheet of 1/4” veneer, that’ll still yield large “canvases” way cheaper than buying them.

There was no flex to these, even in the larger 14”x18” piece. But I could see that going larger, I might have to frame them up a bit to keep them flat.

Of this, I am fully capable.

This thread has been brought to you by frugal parents everywhere, who want to support their kids and help them grow and expand their horizons, but who aren’t made of money, for Pete’s sake.