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White, clear and tinted techniques with Acrylic Gesso

To prevent your oil paint from sinking into the support, you should always prime your canvas; here we will demonstrate using white, clear and tinted gesso to prepare a canvas. Best practice is to use 2 to 3 coats on stretched canvas; when using white gesso you will have a brilliant white surface to start your painting. Clear gesso allows the natural colour of the canvas to show through, and a tinted gesso will provide you a coloured ground to start with, which can have a dramatic effect on your work. Here we tinted white gesso with Acrylic Mars Black to provide a neutral mid-grey. Leaving one area of the canvas raw, we ran a swatch of colour across all three prepared areas, the white, clear and tinted gesso, as well as the unprimed canvas. You can see how the oils sink into the canvas rather than sitting on top as it does on the prepared surfaces.

Video transcript

Hello, I want to show you why priming a canvas is important to preserve your work and to prevent paint from sinking into the support. When using oils you must always prime the canvas. Although acrylic can be applied directly to unprimed canvas, priming will prevent paint from sinking in. I’m priming a quarter of the canvas with Winsor & Newton Professional Acrylic White Gesso, it’s a very popular primer. You should always apply 2-3 coats, here I’m applying the final coat – which gives you a brilliant white archival ground to work on. Winsor & Newton also make a Professional Acrylic Clear Gesso, which I’ll use to prepare the next quarter. This allows the natural surface of the colour of the support to show through but gives the same priming strength as the white gesso. Here I’m mixing Professional Acrylic Mars Black with the Acrylic White Gesso to create a mid-grey for artists working in a tonal technique. I’m priming a quarter of the canvas with this mid-tone grey, you can in fact choose any colour to tint your gesso. Priming your canvas in this way not only protects your paintings but can create dramatically different results within your work. I’ve left a quarter of the canvas unprimed, now look how the oil paint sinks into an unprimed canvas and bleeds. This will show you why you must always prime a canvas when working in oils. I hope you’ve found this useful.

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