10. Plein Air Hawaii Gear Guide, Part 2: Supports, Canvases, and Papers
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Introduction
I have been making artwork from the landscape and teaching Plein Air on location in Hawaii for nearly 15 years and I’m still learning something new every time I head out into the field because not only are conditions always changing - weather, landscape, tools, skills - but also so am I. As, of course, are you. Heraclitus said you never step into the same stream twice; therefore, please use this gear guide more philosophically rather than prescriptively. Some of the gear below you’ll use for certain situations, and others you won’t use at all. Each time you go out will present new challenges and surprises. Ultimately, your Plein Air practice is about artful adaptation.
This gear guide is separated into five parts and will cover the following three related topics in each part:
That means I will be introducing and explaining the types of gear you might wish to have, but not necessarily the exact brands or where to get them. Any links in this article are for informational purposes, and I have no affiliation with them whatsoever.
Please note your use or non-use of any of these products or any of these types of products out in the field in changing, and possibly even dangerous, conditions is at your own risk.
One more thing: first and foremost, this is a guide about fine art painting gear for the tropics. As far as I know, no such other guide currently exists in print or online.
Raphael oil-primed linen canvas on panel
Centurion’s oil-primed linen panels
Handy Porter by Guerrilla Painter
2. Supports, Canvases, and Papers
TL; DR: When en plein air tropicale, use lightweight canvas panels or hot press paper blocks.
Supports
Support is the general term for anything you make two-dimensional artwork on. It can be a canvas stretched onto bars or glued to a panel, a primed board, a piece of watercolor paper, or even a sketchbook page.
For Plein Air painters new to the practice, I recommend starting a size or two (or three!) smaller than you normally would in the studio so you may complete a work in the few hours you have on location, or with a day’s drying, some sand and bug removal, and a few finishing impasto flicks soon thereafter.
This means for most students, and even for me, I steer toward paintings that will fit in a backpack, bag, or easel kit. 4” x 6”, 5” x 7”, 6” x 8” are great starter sizes. More experienced painters may feel more comfortable with 8” x 10” and 9” x 12” supports. I’ve seen students and colleagues here in Hawaii paint larger supports up to 30” x 40” (and even larger) in a day’s session, usually spending six hours on a work. At that size, however, there’s only so much one can do in a single sitting, and often the image quality and surface details suffer when trying to attempt anything approaching naturalism with accurate drawing and color.
There are many different types of supports available to the tropical Plein Air painter via the major online retailers as well as your local art supply, craft, and discount stores (yes, there are indeed good deals on perfectly workable student supports at places like Ross Dress for Less). However, it is essential to note that the generally agreed-upon best support for paintings is one that is dimensionally stable i.e. a canvas on a rigid substructure. Commonly, these dimensionally stable rigid supports are known as panels and boards.
Canvas is any woven substrate made from a fiber. The world of canvas is way bigger than most people realize and has come a long way since Venetian artists made the transition from small wooden religious panels to shippable symbols of maritime might. After the Italians denuded the region of hardwood for the commercial boom that funded the Renaissance, center-cut panels of old-growth trees were impossible to find, and some enterprising artists developed the canvas sailcloth and stretcher system we still use today.
Those early canvases were made of very large workaday weaves. As the process refined, portrait-grain linen surfaces were designed in the flax-rich north of Europe and continue to be produced there today.
In the last 50 years or so, synthetic fibers like polyesters have become prevalent amongst a certain cadre of artists. I am not sure where the science is long-term on synthetic woven supports, but I’d have to guess there’s a longevity inherent in plastics that perhaps outweighs any chemical concerns such as dimensional stability, off-gassing, and other interactions as mitigated by sizing, priming, and rigid substrates.
Panels are wood. At least traditionally they are; nowadays there’s metal, too. The best modern wooden panels are usually made from some type of plywood - that is a properly, archivally processed laminate of a hardwood like birch or maple layered or plied with an archival adhesive like a polymer glue and without drying or preserving agents like formaldehyde but rather finished via heat and pressure. Metal panels are most often aluminum or some other thin, rigid, lightweight metal with an equally scientific array of adhesives and coatings.
In decades past panels like Masonite made of wood pulp with iffy glues and dangerous chemicals were often the only available choice of readymade rigid support for working artists. There have been improvements in such chip boards in recent years, but I recommend staying away from Masonite and their chipboard ilk for professional use for no other reason than if they get wet, they essentially melt and your artwork becomes a soggy waffle. If you must, then the Centurion brand of oil-primed linen MDF panels are your best option as the canvas layer is indeed high-quality, but the MDF chipboard does pose risks.
It is always recommended you buy or make oil-primed canvas laid on wooden panel for tropical Plein Air painting with oils because the canvas is removable and the support is stabilizing, especially in humid environments. Metals can absorb waters and salts in tropical air differently than wood, and can pit, rust, or corrode if not of sufficient quality more quickly than wood might deteriorate. Naturally, oil-primed canvas is better than acrylic-based gesso-primed canvas for oils. However, oil paint can go over acrylic gesso without much worry because of acrylic gesso’s chemistry and texture. Oil paint over acrylic paintings, on the other hand, is another matter, and generally not recommended.
What are recommended are these sweet oil-primed linen wooden panels by Raphael as shown above. They hit all the marks for me.
Boards are paper. Think cardboard, not wooden boards. Like Masonite, boards are susceptible to moisture as well as bending. Boards are layered and glued pieces of pulped paper, similar to modern plywood panels, but are lighter weight and less expensive. They always warp when left unframed and standing; it’s just a matter of time. That time is shortened in fluctuating humidity. So… stack them flat when unpainted, and lay flat, unstacked - with interleaving or bagged - to protect the surface, when painted.
Boards are almost always prepared with pre-stretched, pre-gessoed cotton canvas using acid-free acrylic primer. It’s this primer which saves you from any inherent (i.e. built-in) vice you might have in the support system. It is important to note that due to the manufacturing process of pre-stretched canvas board means that if you remove the canvas, you destroy the board. So it’s best to leave them attached, and let proper conservation scientists do any remediation to a canvas board if damaged.
You can find affordable, acrylic-primed ones in multi-packs at discount and craft stores. Boards are usually less bulky and heavy than panels, allowing you to stuff more of them in your support carriers, like these excellent ones: Handy Porters from Guerrilla Painter. When painting outdoors, after a long day, weight and mass is always a consideration, especially if you have hiked in somewhere, or just don’t want to have extra junk to carry around. Occasionally you can find an oil-primed board and the price is about five times that of discount gessoed boards. I just figure, if you’re going to spend the money for artist-grade materials, make sure you have a thin panel instead, as it’s stronger.
Either way, a good archivally primed board is just as good a support for students and artists for general use as higher end oil-primed linen panels, the main benefit being price for budget. You will see almost no perceptible difference in the action of painting on them, unless, of course, the board has warped prior to painting.
Canvases
When most people think of canvas they think of lightweight cotton duck with acrylic gesso stapled onto strainer bars like some of the Blick products below.
It’s not as simple as that.
Brands sometimes reference a famous painter or city or the like as you can see in “Vincent” by Masterpiece when they are trying to promote pre-made upmarket products.
Or, you can select the weights, weaves, and colors of raw, pre-sized, or pre-primed canvas from pure cotton, pure linen, flax blends, polyester filament, and much more on huge rolls. A Dutch, oil-primed, pure flax linen by Old Holland example pictured here starts at over a thousand dollars per roll. Artists who wish to stretch their own supports to a desired tension or size or surface that is custom to their needs usually go this route.
In larger markets like New York City, there are artisans making custom canvases (and panels) to order for busy artists, as well as in-house technicians for major blue-chip names who have craftspeople on full-time staff. Truly, the sky is the limit for some artists when it comes to expense.
For tropical Plein Air painting, small, lightweight canvases are preferred. Most commercial canvases are on strainer bars, not stretcher bars. A strainer set-up is a fixed-dimension shape. Stretcher bars have the ability to actually expand via a dynamic system of wooden and metal bars, braces, shims, and/or keys as seen below.
Either way, your choice to head out into the field with small, lightweight canvases is most likely going to be based on budget and timing: what have you got at hand?
Blick pre-stretched canvases
Masterpiece’s pre-primed linen on stretchers with braces and shims
Old Holland’s oil-primed linen roll
Papers
Paper was invented by the Chinese. Or the Egyptians. Or the Polynesians. Depends who you ask, and what kind of “paper” you mean.
Most people think of paper as the stuff that you get in a notebook for school. That’s essentially a cheap, slurried wood pulp dried on industrial machines. That kind is the Chinese kind.
Then when you get into beaten and mashed fibers you’re talking papyrus (whence paper gets its name) or kapa.
But artist-grade papers are an invention that is a technology that bounced around from Asia to the Moorish Mediterranean to the Americas and then back again using cotton fibers and/or silk.
Nowadays, archival, acid-free 100% cotton paper is considered the most professional of choices. What that means is all the bad parts (lignins) of the cellulose fiber (wood or cotton) has been removed. Cotton is made from dried, polymerized sugar and oxygen and has stronger, more stable molecules than wood (10x more polymerized, to be precise). When the lignins, which are the acid that makes old newspapers yellow, and old books’ dogears fall off, are removed, you get nice, white paper that lasts for decades, rather than months.
Cotton paper is preferred by watercolorists, printers, and other two-dimensional artists who are using media that has liquid in it because cotton paper can handle the moisture. You can have it bound in a codex (that’s a regular book, pad, or block), on a scroll (think religious tome or wall-hanging), or loose-leaf.
Below are some examples of a watercolor block by Magnani, some loose-leaf by Fabriano, and a generic canvas pad. Magnani and Fabriano are both Italian, where they’ve been mastering the art of paper-making for centuries. Both are arguably the finest commercial producers of the best paper for artists on the planet.
Whether you choose a block (paper glued together at the edges and forming a solid mass that allows you to paint directly on it without stretching), or loose-leaf, or a pad, painting on paper en plein aire tropicale is a challenge as your paint, whatever the medium, is bound to dry practically immediately.
Often sketching, drawing, and painting on paper outside is most successful using materials and tools specifically designed for it. For example, watercolor pencils and pastels are excellent and easy choices for paper, whereas acrylic and oil require extra preparations.
Ultimately the choice between the affordability, ease, and quantity of paper compared to the expense, longevity, and strength of canvas-lined panels is one of personal preference based on experience.
One last thing: paper texture. Just like canvases, your paper support can have a variety of finishes or surfaces - from hot press (smooth) to cold press (toothy) to rough (well… rough) or to a canvas-like woven surface texture. Moreover, paper texture and weight are likewise planned and designed to do different things for each medium you plan to use.
As a good rule of thumb, the smoother and thicker the paper, the finer the detail you can render.
Therefore, for most Plein Air artists who are traveling smaller and lighter, heavy-weight hot press will be friendlier to a greater number of your artworks in the field as cold press, rough, and flimsy canvas pad papers will just appear too texturized for most representational artworks. Of course, it’s up to you. You might just find you like to travel with a large, loose-leaf, rough sheet that you set up outdoors and go nuts on it.
Magnani Portofino 100% cotton, hot pressed, watercolor block
Fabriano’s 100% cotton, loose-leaf paper
Generic paper-style canvas pad
So that’s it for “Plein Air Hawaii Gear Guide, Part 2: Supports, Canvases, and Papers”. Feel free to share this #artsupplies #gear guide to your favorite social channels using the links below with the tags @andrewrosemfa and #andrewrose and also link back from your sites. For permission to publish in whole or part, please contact me in advance.
Next up: Easels, Pochades, and Tripods.