Making My First Canvases and Frames

Until now, I've only been painting on cradled panels instead of stretched canvases. "Panels" can be made out of almost any rigid material like plywood, MDF, and even aluminum and steel. A "cradled panel" just means that the panel has a reinforcing frame attached to the back. As you can imagine, a 3/4 inch thick sheet of plywood, 48 inches by 48 inches square would be quite heavy, would be difficult to hang on the wall, and could warp and twist during periods of high humidity. By attaching a "cradle" to the panel, say a frame of 2 inch by 2 inch solid wood, you can use an 1/8 inch thick hardboard or even a 1/4 inch thick plywood as your panel and greatly reduce the overall weight of the piece while increasing stability.

Since I have a background in furniture making and design, as well as all the tools, it's been great fun making all my cradled panels. But as my pieces are getting larger (up to 48 inches by 48 inches) it's becoming more difficult to store and move the pieces around my little "shop" (currently my "shop" is our car port which is completely open on 2 sides so I also have to deal with weather, wind, and rain.)

So, a couple days ago I set out to build my first canvas frames and stretch my first canvases. I'm going to take some video and photos during the process the next time I build my frames and will post them on all my sites around the web. For now, I only have photos of the finished pieces.

The most difficult part for me was to get a neatly folded corner. So many of the YouTube videos and artist discussions forums I found showed these terribly amateur and messy corners. Or the discussions tended toward the "just make hospital corners. Haven't you ever made a bed before?" type which I don't find helpful. (I don't think anyone finds those types of commenters helpful! Hint, hint, nudge, nudge to those types of commenters.... You know who you are!)

So with that, here are a few photos of the finished canvases. I'm thrilled with they way these first ones turned out as well as how nice the corners are. Now I just have to figure out what to paint...

Next time I'll record a video and do step-by-step of how I made the frames and the corners.