Blog

My dad was under the weather Friday so he had to cancel his portrait sitting.  Instead of updating progress on the portrait I'm posting a little about the panel preparation. 

My goal is to complete the portrait old-school--no photographic reference, working from drawings and color sketches done from life.  I have taken a photograph, and will take a few more, to make sure I have something to complete it with if it turns out I require so many sittings it qualifies as torture.   So the panel will be pretty traditional too, with the exception of having no gesso layer and using an alkyd oil primer instead of lead white.  The materials are pictured below:

Based on the drawing so far I'm going to use a 22"x28" format.  For the panel I'm using 1/4" Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF).  Birch or Maple plywood would be better but I had a few sheets of MDF already.  Because MDF absorbs a lot of moisture I gave it two coats of shellac.  I ripped 1^1/4" strips of  ^3/4" plywood to cradle the MDF.   Also pictured is  medium weight linen, some large palette knives, a bag of rabbit skin glue and a double boiler for preparing the glue, can of oil primer, plenty of clamps, glue, air compressor and a brad nailer.

I cut the plywood strips for the long sides 28 inches and the short sides I cut to fit between them, 20 ^1/2".  I flipped the panel over on it's front side, glued and clamped the strips along the long edges (the east and west edges).  Then I applied glue to the bottom and ends of the short cradles, clamped them along the remaining edges (north and south edges), then attached them to the long cradles through the corners with brads. 

In 24 hours it will be ready for the linen to be glued onto it, which I'll describe in another post.   I hope you feel better dad.