Do you love elephants?  Great!  I do, too!   What I love the most about the world’s largest living land mammals – besides their ability to communicate in sonar, amazingly intricate bone structure, and their production of ivory – is their high level of intelligence.  These decedents of prehistoric mammoths have come a long way as a species: surviving extinction, avoiding poachers, and becoming world renowned canvas artists!

The canvas paintings of one of the world’s most beloved creatures is a beautiful contribution to the modern world of humans.

“Anyone who spends time with these wonderful mammals and observes them when they paint freestyle, cannot fail to understand that they simply love what they do,” states The Elephant Art Gallery Director Issaraporn Kaewthanasawad.  It is apparent in the resulting artwork created by elephants that imparts their contentment in the act of painting.

Wanalee
There are several popular elephant painters that have touched the lives of everyday human beings.  Wanalee is an Asian elephant, hailing from Thailand, that has been lauded as royalty and has had her artwork shown internationally since 2005.  This gentle giant was adopted by the late Princess Galyani, the elder sister of His Majesty the King of Thailand, and is still considered one of the world’s most talented famous animal artists.  According to The Elephant Art Gallery, Wanalee’s artistic style has been described as “free flowing expression with a rich combination of vertical, horizontal and lateral strokes and then occasionally producing a more studied basket or ‘nestlike’ image with the brushstrokes ending in a flourish toward the middle of the paper.”

That’s pretty impressive!

 

Tao

Most likely you’ve heard or have even used the term “rescue animal”.  Would you ever consider this term for a brilliant beast like Tao?  It is documented that this elephant artist was rescued from the streets of Bangkok, although little else is known about Tao before his brief art career.  Although Tao has retired from canvas art, his artwork can be seen online and one-of-a-kind pieces are in homes across the globe.

Kaew

Born in Lampang, Thailand’s Thai Elephant Conservation Center, elephant artist Kaew is very intelligent and also absolutely terrified of chickens!  Although this phobia is typical among the world’s biggest land beasts, that hasn’t stopped Kaew from creating beautiful pieces of artwork for the  masses.  Kaew is considered a rarity in the elephant art world because of his ability to arc his brush strokes, coming very close to creating a circle formation.  His artwork was so revered that he became a top selling elephant artist in 2010!

Elephants Are Amazing Artists
As you can see elephants are not only intelligent peaceful animals, they are also incredible artists that have a unique ability to touch the world with their talents!

The Opportunities To Create Art Are Endless!

Here are more excellent art project ideas for young people, especially children who have art projects and assignments!

Murals

Murals are fun and simple art pieces that make the artist feel as is there are no restrictions on their ideas.  In the case of children and young adults, it is important to encourage their imaginations and curious nature.  That is why I feel that murals, using pre-stretched canvas from CanvasLot.com, is the best option for letting kids of all ages let their imaginations run wild.  Pre-stretched canvas can take a lot of different ideas and mesh them into one.  For a project, try a natural landscape scene – paint trees and other natural plants in background then hot glue a few animals on the horizon line of the piece.  Add a sun or a moon or both!

Collage ArtCollage Art can be a derivative of the aforementioned mural, where hot glue and inanimate objects and even newspaper clippings can all become the best interpretation of a child’s inner most thoughts.  Remember those days of clipping out random letters, words, and phrases as a kid and pasting them on magazine pages?  If not, it’s a good start for a project with your child!

Still Life Paintings

Still Life paintings on pre-stretched canvas may seem advanced to some children but fear not!  Still Life can be exciting and help children understand forms that occur within their surrounding environments.  Children see objects such as pencils, markers, apples and oranges, and even toys every single day – why not get them to draw these objects, then paint them?  This is one of the best ways to help a young person to conceptualize the everyday objects in a way that helps them replicate what they see.  Now, don’t get discouraged!  I cannot tell you how strange animals look on a piece of canvas that I have try to paint… and I will spare you them odd images but you can help your child discover that even in still life, “abstract” results can yield some of the most encouragement in the art world and at school!

Results?
Well, it has long been debated that art is in the eye of the beholder but hey!  This is a school art project: this is meant to be FUN!  So, instead of reaching toward the projects as a matter of an “A” or “F” grade, reach for the fun of discovering where art can take your child’s imagination.  Who knows?  There may be a Picasso in your midst, that you may have to ground from time to time.

Until next time, keep creating and painting!

Canvas serves many purposes in the Art World and also in fashion – clothing, accessories, and shoes can all be produced with canvas.  In addition to being one of the most important tools of artistic expression and apparel, canvas also inspires creative individuals to pursue careers outside of the seemingly glamorous lifestyle of an artist.  There are a few rewarding jobs that can turn into careers that have been inspired by canvas, and I am going to list just a couple of them that I find both interesting and rewarding.

Museum Guides
Art Museums.  Historical Museums.  Natural Science Museums.  Music Hall of Fame Museums.  These are all places that have been inspired by the human spark of expression.  Museum Guides, or more traditionally tour guides, are people that hold a special place in my heart.  These are the people that have the great fortune of looking at the art that they love every single day, and get to take brilliant new experiences with them every day that they go home.  The museum guide is at the forefront of a magical adventure in any art museum or gallery housing the work of the world’s most renowned human beings.  Could you imagine working at The Museum of Modern Art every day, or giving the inside scoop about The Mona Lisa at the Louvre?  How exciting!  To think, it’s all because of canvas!

Creative and Performing Arts Teachers and Instructors
After only a couple years of studying art as a solitary student, I have determined that some of the most important people in my academic career have been those with an artistic inclination.  My band directors, art teachers, and communications coaches are usually at the forefront of my most cherished adolescent and college memories.  I find that these individuals most inspiring because they showed me at an early age how to appreciate art and even sound (in relation to music as an art form), although I hadn’t an actual clue about the importance of it at the time.  I believe that canvas inspired these people into action, so much in fact that they decided to share their knowledge in a classroom setting with young students.  At some moment in each other my former teachers and instructors live, they were visually struck by the language they read on canvas, heard through musical arrangement, or experienced through the power of performance.

Long story short, I am grateful that their inspiration was shared in this particular manner.

Are You Inspired?
These particular occupations are worthy of praise in my book because of they require a high level of dedication to the history of art, and the understanding of how art can be an effective educational tool for children and adults!  I feel inspired by these people, and look forward to learning more from them every day.

All for now!

At what point does canvas become a piece of “art” and under what conditions?  Of course opinions may vary, but I will be so bold as to ask and to answer this burning question that has left me quite curious.

I will begin with a brief hypothesis: Canvas becomes art at the moment it has been transformed by the person that impresses their idea upon it to share a message within a visual conservation between the artist and the observer.

By definition, canvas is a textile.  As the trusted community editors of Wikipedia would say, “Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other items for which sturdiness is required. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame. It is also used in such fashion objects as handbags and shoes.” (retrieved June 21, 2012 – G. M. H.)

Conceptually for the artist and his or her audience, it is a plane that is used to express emotions, re-tell stories that were either once forgotten or rarely if ever shared, and convey messages that are otherwise gone unheard.  To further explore my hypothesis about canvas I would like to further explore the genre of Abstract Art that may help to prove my point.

ABSTRACT ART
For the past year, I have been wildly obsessed with Abstract Art.  Being a writer and watercolor painter, the visual language of this genre speaks to me in a way that is a uniquely personal conversation between the artist who has created the work and my own interpretation of what that person may want me to know.

I find Abstract Art incredibly personal, and enjoy learning about the artist that has taken the time to share their stories with others.  To “learn” about the abstract painter, I read their work through the observations of an unwitting outsider.  I like to let the painting introduce itself to me then relax my own expectations of how I am supposed to feel about it, and simply receive its message.

The personal touch of Abstract Art is evident in the surface of the canvas that the artist uses.  This person has taken the physical plane of the canvas and transformed it into an extension of themselves with the use of pointedly purposeful pencil outlines, lines formed from paint on natural bristle brushes, and cuts made in the canvas to create sharp effects that emphasize points and arguments.  Digital images of abstract art are just fine but for the full effect of the messages of Abstract genres, I highly recommend visiting your local art museum!

I am not sure if there is a point to be proven necessarily by stating my opinion about the creation of Art on canvas… but I am happy to be able to kind of, sort of explain it in a way that utilizes the term hypothesis!  If it doesn’t make sense to you, then take a moment to enjoy this James Abbott McNeil Whistler painting below and keep Canvas Lot’s Blog “bookmarked” for more of my explanations.

Tech and art are a partnership for the ages. Where for years certain things were considered impossible to do or improve upon in the art world, in recent years technology has opened up countless doors once thought permanently shut, as it has in all areas of life. One such area to which new tech has brought exciting opportunities is that of art reproductions on canvas. Previously, reproducing prints of artworks was a difficult process, involving extensive set-up, and no process was able to acquire quite the level of exact detail desired by collectors. However, in the past thirty-odd years, a few brilliant new developments in printing technologies have changed all that by introducing a new type of print known to the art world as “giclée.”

Like many artistic practices, the history of the giclée print is an odd and fascinating story. It begins in the late 1980’s, when image scanning and image printing technologies were starting to reach a level of excellence and exactness that had hitherto been unavailable. Printers were getting better and better all the time, and eventually one was made known as the IRIS printer. This seriously cool piece of machinery produced color prints that were unparalleled at the time for their image and color reproduction, and it did it without leaving the typical “dots” that come from printing with other machines.

This neat new printer had a few major differences from a normal high-quality printer. First, the ink was sprayed continuously from four 1 micrometer glass jets, instead of as needed, and the particles of ink were charged electrically. A vibrating piezoelectric crystal, which caused it to spray at a 1 Mhz rate, regulated the flow of ink and all of the excess ink that wasn’t used was deflected by an electrostatic system to a waste area (thus why it was electrically charged). Instead of printing on a flat paper, the paper (or canvas) was wrapped around a cylinder in the machine, and the ink was sprayed on slowly, line by miniscule line.

The IRIS printer was originally designed and used to create high quality “proofs,” or sheets that would be used to test out color printing jobs before they were printed in larger amounts. However, the accuracy and spectacular beauty that the printer was capable of was soon noticed by a few folk with an artistic eye, who began to test the printer’s capabilities at printing fine art reproductions. This process quickly caught on, as it was capable of producing much more exact and long-lasting reproductions of art than the other processes at the time, the most popular of which was lithographic printing. In addition, once a piece had been accurately digitized and set up for printing on an IRIS printer (a process which still took a lot of work and expertise), it could be digitally stored and used whenever needed with little to no further set up required.

While the process of using IRIS printers to reproduce art on paper and canvas began in the late 1980’s, there was no universal name for the technique until 1991, when printmaker Jack Duganne came up with the term now in common use, “giclée.” Duganne didn’t like his gorgeous art prints being referred to as “proofs,” like other, less artistically-inclined prints made with IRISes, so he went in search of a better term. Duganne wanted a term that would get away from the computer and tech aspects and focus more on the artistic edge of the thing. He noticed that the French word for “nozzle” was gicleur, and that gicler meant to squirt, both of which relate to the way the printer works. He took these terms and came up with “giclée,” which has since caught on. The term wasn’t universally loved, as photographers liked the term “digigraph” and some found giclée to be pretentious, but the term spread and now means any high-quality art reproduction on canvas by large format printers, and not just those made on IRIS printers.

Since the 1990’s, giclée prints have grown hugely in popularity, as they provide a great middle ground between owning an original piece of art and having a lithographic reproduction. Giclée are much cheaper than real works, look almost exactly like the same thing, and are much more exact than other reproductions. In fact, many art museums have begun to display extremely high quality giclée prints!

If you’re interested in seeing some examples of giclée printed art, take a quick jaunt over to our sister company’s homepage. As we’ve mentioned before, Art Warehouses uses the same spectacular, top-quality custom stretched canvases we sell at Canvas Lot to print the very best giclée reproductions anywhere online or off. For art lovers like us who just can’t afford that multi-million dollar Picasso, giclée prints provide a thrilling and affordable opportunity to own great work and keep it in our own homes.

Printing and scanning technology isn’t slowing down, and is set to keep getting better every year. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll have robots that can use brushes to reproduce every stroke made by a master! Until then, giclée prints are simply the best reproductions available, and a great example of how tech and art can combine to create some absolutely marvelous examples of human creativity.

A great work sits finished, canvas still aromatic with sticky paint on the easel. As you sit back and rest for a minute in that addictive feeling of having completed something you feel great about, you start to move into the next phase of art. Suddenly, it’s not about making art, it’s about showing it. Or maybe you just bought yourself a gorgeous, eye-popping work from your favorite painter, and you want to give the canvas a prominent place in your home. Lucky for you, and your piece, displaying canvas is a fairly easy process with options for pretty much any place you might want the work to shine.

To Frame, or Not to Frame?

Before you start picking out a spot on the wall, it’s a good idea to decide whether or not you want your work framed. While framing can often add to a work in a variety of ways, such as adding another aesthetic dimension, protecting the work and even upping its value some (depending on the frame), many artists and art-lovers are choosing to display unframed canvases. This decision is purely up to you, and there’s no right answer. Simply look at the painting, and decide whether it would be enhanced or reduced by a frame. Frames generally come with hanging implements already installed on their back, so to display framed canvas, you just need to put nails in the wall at the desired place and hang the work on the nails.

The most common method for displaying an unframed canvas is to hang it, and in this regard you essentially have two choices. You can either install something on the wall to hang the work on, or you can put something on the canvas to hang on a nail on the wall.

On the Frame Hanging

If you think you might move the canvas, and you don’t mind having to carefully insert screws into its frame, its a good idea to install a hanging implement on the frame itself. There are a huge amount of options for this, such as brackets of various kinds (i.e.: a D-ring bracket), mirror plates or ring screws attached to art wire. Some top-notch canvas makers create their canvases with art wire already attached for your hanging convenience, so check your piece to make sure you even need to install anything.

Even with built-in hanging implements, sometimes you need a piece to sit more stable or flush to the wall, and that’s when you’ll want to try out brackets or mirror plates. These can be screwed into the wood on the back of a frame and have a loop or hole that sticks up a bit from the top and/or sides of the canvas, allowing you to slip them over a nail. Like with the framed canvas, use a level to mark exactly where you want your nails, so your canvas hangs straight. It’s also a good idea to remember to hang things at eye-level, otherwise it can diminish the viewing experience.

On the Wall Hanging

If you’d rather not attach anything to the canvas, or you know that your piece won’t be moving much, try an on-the-wall mount. For a basic mount of this kind, you just need nails or tacks placed in a straight line on the wall so that the lip of the canvas sits on top of them, but there are many better options available than this. Check out the hardware store or art supply store for such items as J hooks, or special picture hanging devices from manufacturers like 3M. These all work essentially the same way, by sticking in or to your wall and providing a surface or point to hang the canvas on by its lip. Some products, like the 3M Command Strip, offer a sturdy way to support your canvas without putting holes in your wall or otherwise damaging it.

Cool Alternative Display Methods

There are two other ways of displaying a canvas that are worth noting here. If your work is big enough, say four feet tall or more, it’s becoming more and more popular to simply lean the work against the wall at a slight angle. The weight of the piece should keep it in place, but only do use this method if you’re sure that people won’t be bumping into the work at all. A second interesting alternative to wall hanging is hanging a work from the ceiling. For this, just put some eye-screws spaced to the size of the canvas into your ceiling, hang chains from the eyes, and then attach those to brackets in the back of your canvas (you may have to install these yourself).

Using one of these methods, you should be able to display just about any canvas in a way that’s both safe for the piece and looks great. Just pick out the ideal spot for your new piece, decide which method would work best for that spot and go to town. Soon enough, everyone in your house will be able to enjoy your spectacular new artwork, and you’ll feel secure knowing the piece was displayed correctly. All that’s left to do now is pick up another canvas, and start the process over again!

While growing up as an adolescent in a tiny island town on the Texas Coastline, I kept myself occupied by reading Archie comic books and Stephen King paperbacks.  This love of illustration and literature gave me the inspiration to draw.  Ever since I drew a few freehand portraits of Archie, Betty, Jughead, and Veronica I was obsessed with illustration and collecting art supplies.

My near obsessive drive to collect art supplies and artist canvases seems aimless but there is a goal in mind: I want to express myself through paints and canvas.  Most of all, I want to share my ideas with my social circle.  This desire to share art led me to like minded individuals outside of the coastal barrier.

After leaving the tiny island town and moving to the Texas Hill Country, I decided to surround myself with artists that inspire me and to frequent art supply stores.  Fortunately, I have been able to meet some of the most amazing artists in Texas and have been able to add to my supply closet in the meantime.

You may be wondering: how do these two things go hand in hand?

I will tell you!

Here are 2 art supply recommendations that I have received from local artists in the Texas Hill Country that have not only helped me to understand that shopping for the best materials is not only easy but essential to conveying the message that you originally intended!

ARTIST CANVAS
“Always use top quality canvas.” – TigerStyle, TigerStyle Gallery of Art

Even though I primarily use watercolors and the appropriate absorbent surfaces, canvas has been recommended to me by friends in the arts community.  I have looked into a few stores such as Michael’s Arts and Crafts and Hobby Lobby but I have become a huge advocate for purchasing my art supplies and canvas in bulk at wholesale prices.

PAINT BRUSHES
“Sure, you could use a couple of rocks and pieces of grass from the ground but try a couple of paint brushes instead.  You’ll find a way to may the art speak.” – Animus Prime, Animus Prime Photography

I have found this sentiment to be the most helpful.  When I first shifted my creative expression from illustration to collage art and painting, I would use materials that I found on the ground while walking in city parks such as clusters of bird feathers and colored glass.  After Prime’s recommendation, I have found that I love using paint brushes – especially Da Vinci Short Handle Nova Brushes (you can find these brushes on dickblick.com).

There you have it!

Canvas and Paint Brushes are two recommendations from local Austin artists that have really pushed my artistic endeavors in a new direction.

Finding Quality Canvas Can Be Dirty Work

For the past three years, I have dabbled in watercolors and oil paints.  This dabbling has led to art shows, countless exhibits, commissioned pieces for family and friends, and a unique lifestyle that has all the amazing perks an aspiring artist can imagine!  It has also led to the frustrating task of finding quality canvas!

If you’ve been searching for the best canvas at the most reasonable price then you already know what I mean… or maybe you don’t.  There are certain things that all aspiring and professional artists have to look out for when selecting the perfect canvas for the perfect artistic endeavor.

Here a few insider tips that I would like to offer to you that will not only save you time, but lots of dollars!

Tip 1 – Don’t Worry About Stretching Canvas Yourself

Stretching canvas may not be the most difficult thing in the world but it is time consuming and can take much practice if you’re inexperienced or simply do not have enough time to learn how to do it yourself.  In this case, you will need to purchase pre-stretched canvas.

I recommend relying on a professional company that sells pre-stretched canvas to established artists.  I purchase from various art supply companies in my hometown and online vendors.

Tip 2 – Beware of the Notorious Warped Canvas

That’s right, my friend.  The warped canvas is your worst enemy!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve finished a near perfect painting, let it dry, and a few hours later the wooden frame is bowed.  My heart races, my palms sweat profusely, and I get annoyed because my canvas has expanded and contracted – warping my potential masterpiece into a broken idea.

To avoid this, I look for canvas with a stretcher that runs down the middle of the frame.  The middle stretcher provides stability and does not allow the canvas to bend the wooden frame that it is wrapped around.

Tip 3 – Buy Wholesale Canvas

Being a professional artist is incredibly rewarding but to reap the benefits of such rewards, you have to keep the costs of your artistry down buy investing your dollars in canvas that is affordable and easy to find.  Wholesale options are the best that I’ve found, and often the best quality for those of us who do not want to bother with the hunt from quality.

This will save you time money and keep your stress levels down when an unexpected call to paint paint paint dials in!

Keep on painting, my friend!

The whirr and crunch of machines provide a soundtrack for a light billow of sawdust scenting the air in the warehouse. Rows of wooden planks, soon to be cut into stretcher bars, sit by hundreds of canvas rolls, miles of protective wrap and a never-ending stream of new, freshly stretched canvses. The loud, punchy sound of a pneumatic staple gun bursts out in frequent, somewhat consistent blasts, punctuating the time and mixing with the sound of the machines to give the place a rhythm. Workers of many types perfectly executing their respective tasks, each different from the next and all important. You’re in our warehouse, a place of sounds, sights and smells, and you’re about to see how a canvas takes its journey from a simple wish in your mind to a package at your door.

Of course, before anything is stretched, we have to receive an order! While we do keep a large amount of canvases in stock in the most popular sizes, as well as those we use for our sister company’s prints, many of our customers order very specific sizes that we actually produce as they’re needed. Our quick and accurate production process is capable of a turnaround time that’s remarkably efficient and fast (so fast we often surprise our clients!). When you order, either online or over the phone, it’s processed by our professional customer service and processing agents in our offices, where we have a powerful computing system that keeps track of all the orders.

These orders are then sent to the warehouse, where the requested canvases are either pulled from our backstock or crafted almost immediately. To stretch your canvas, we first take one of our hundreds of rolls of pre-primed canvas, and use specialized machines to cut it to exact, perfect specifications for your canvas, which is somewhat larger than the final piece in order to leave room for stretching.

We then produce a wooden frame of the correct size for the canvas. We cut our own stretcher bars in shop, using highly-accurate saws that are worked by trained professionals. Each frame requires that we cut four stretchers with corners specially designed to fit together to create the rectangular frame. As we mentioned in our previous post, we use a machine called an underpinner to efficiently put the corners of the frame together, creating a gorgeous frame for the canvas.

From there, the cut canvas and frame are taken by our expert canvas stretchers, who use pneumatic staple guns, staples and stretching pliers to ever so carefully and exactly stretch the canvas over the frame and then staple it in place. This is the heart of the whole process, and it requires an especially professional touch and years of practice to get right. That’s why we hire only the best stretchers around, and also why you can be sure that you’re getting the best possible canvas when you order from us.

After the canvas is stretched, it goes into an almost equally important and exact process of being prepared for shipping. This involves wrapping it in a very specific manner with protective materials, which are taped so that they will ensure protection through the entire shipping process. We then put the canvas in a perfectly sized box, which makes certain that the canvas can’t rattle around in the box during shipping. Since we create so very many custom sized canvases, this requires having quite a few different sizes of boxes on hand, as you can imagine.

Once the order is created and packaged, we process the shipping info, and it arrives on your door in a matter of days! It might interest our readers to know that canvases we stretch for our sister company, Art Warehouses, go through the exact same process as our custom stretched blank canvases, with the added step of the cut canvas being printed on with our amazingly high-tech and beautifully precise giclee printing machines. These machines print line by line in wonderfully high-resolution special ink, creating unbelievable reproductions of paintings that are identical to the original painting.

Our process might sound precise and complicated, but our team of experts has streamlined the whole thing to be so efficient that it takes only days to complete. That’s why we’re able to produce and ship stunning, unsurpassably excellent canvases in almost no time for less than you’d typically spend on the materials to stretch your own canvas.

We’ve made it our mission to bring you the very best canvases anywhere, and save you both time and money doing so. We think we’ve succeeded, but put us to the test! When you’re ready to get the best canvases around, our warehouse, with all its sensory delights and years of expert knowledge pooled in one place, will be ready to go into action and show you what levels of excellence canvas can achieve.

As we’ve discussed here, canvas is the most popular and, in our estimation, the absolute best painting surface because it is well-suited to the demands of painting media – most notably holding and displaying paint. Because of its perfect nature for painting, a huge amount of techniques have been developed over the years for applying that paint to the canvas. While it would be impossible to list all of the techniques in the world, here are a few very interesting styles of painting that we find give spectacular results when combined with a high-quality canvas.

One technique that’s interesting to note is not exactly a painting technique, but a preparatory one. Despite it’s greatness, when canvas was first coming into widespread use, many Renaissance painters used extreme measures to mask the natural characteristics of canvas, mimicking the appearance of flat, smooth-textured (and more expensive!) surfaces, such as wood panels. As canvas use gained prominence, it became more and more acceptable and common to allow the characteristics of canvas and paint to show through, influencing the development of techniques and artwork.

Whereas some painters strived for flatness and near-photographic realism, others began to relish the textures created by thick layers of paint. Impasto uses large rough brushtrokes, full of ridges and globs, to create a textured surface. This technique plays with the way light falls on a painting, creating varying shadows depending on how you view it. Impasto is also an extremely expressive technique in that it shows the actions and intensity of the painter, and can be clearly seen in the works of artists such as Vincent Van Gogh. Another technique employing a rough style, though with much less paint than impasto, is dry brush — a technique in which all the water or oil is squeezed out of the brush before working on the canvas, creating uneven and scratchy brushstrokes.

For those that do prefer a smoother texture to their painting, wet-on-wet may be the technique for you. Also called alla prima (meaning first attempt), it involves, as the name suggests, applying wet paint on top of wet paint. The advantage of this is speed. Waiting on paint, especially oil paint, to dry can take days, weeks or longer depending on conditions, but it’s often necessary in order to prevent the layers of paint blending together — a potential disaster when working with small details. Alla prima painting exploits this blending, and a range of painters have harnessed the fluid qualities of the technique in their respective style — though it is perhaps best championed by the Impressionists, such as Claude Monet, who used the quick method to capture their immediate perceptions of a moment onto canvas.

Drip painting, loosely defined, involves a gap between the brush and the canvas when applying paint. It can be as simple as letting paint drop from above onto a waiting canvas, dancing around like Jackson Pollack, slinging paint onto an upright canvas and an array of other imaginative means (a certain scene from “The Big Lebowski” comes to mind). By creating a distance between artist and canvas, the technique embodies a sense of liberty from traditional painting styles and subjects — with less control, your painting can become more abstract and expressive.

While these days it may seem curious to see spray paint hanging on a wall rather than on the wall of a gas station or a boxcar, canvas is just as suited as brick for displaying the art form. Though it seems like a quintessentially modern style, the first airbrush was designed in the late 1800s, and spray paint cans were quickly put into production in the mid 1900s after the development of the aerosol can. Spray paint and airbrushes typically use compressed air to release a fine mist of paint, smoothly and evenly covering surfaces. Since the paint is applied in single-color layers, careful planning and a vision of the completed work is usually required with complicated designs, and the use of stencils and other tools allows for more precision and other effects.

If paint seems too boring or traditional a medium to apply to your professionally crafted canvas, look even further through history to the technique of encaustic. Encaustic is also called hot wax painting, and uses a mixture of colored pigments and heated beeswax in lieu of typical painting materials. As long as the mixture stays hot, it can be painted as well as sculpted onto your canvas, allowing for some truly unique creations. Because the mixture dries solid, you can also use it as a type of painterly glue in order to collage all sorts of materials into your work.

As you can see, there are a wide variety of techniques available to the painter that chooses canvas. These are only a few, and there are hundreds more just waiting out there for you to try on your own canvases. Whichever techniques you choose to work with, our custom stretched canvases are the ideal surfaces for both your masterpieces and experiments. We’d love to be a part of your creation process, and we know you’ll love our work just as we know we’ll love yours.