Paint won’t stick?… Is your canvas to blame?

I keep several of these cheap canvases around the studio to practice technique. they can be life savers.

Wonderful tips! I have discovered another solution to this problem. Coat the entire canvas with linseed oil and let it dry. The paint will stick to any canvas cheap or expensive. Because it is the Gesso that makes paint not to stick to canvas.

I switched to sunbelt and wow!!!!! Night and day for sure

Can you recommend a good gesso to add to a cheap canvas? I just stocked up. 😉

Should I add more gesso to medium priced double acrylic primed canvasses or should they be good to go?

Thankyou sr that’s such a big help

BS

How do learn from u.

I kn nothing about drawing and painting

But I want to learn for an absolute beginner

Hey Kevin you should try painting an underwater scene with jellyfish! That’d be pretty cool!

Other solutions for this issue while using the cheap canvas are:

1) Don't scrub off the "excess" oil after your initial painting layer. Instead put your canvas in a safe place for a few days until that layer is dry, then paint wet on dry.
2) Instead of putting 2 or three layers of white paint, you can buy a decent brand of acrylic gesso and just give it one coat of that over the really thin amount of gesso the cheap canvases come with. The trick for coating canvas in 1 pass to to NOT use a gesso brush and instead pour some directly on the canvas from the bottle and then use something like a squeegee to spread it around smoothly and easily. This will save time and money over using regular white acrylic paint in several coats.
3) Kill 2 birds with one stone and use acrylic paint (it can be just white and paynes gray or burnt sienna and not full color if you want) to do an underpainting to perfect your general layout, then once that's dry (only takes a matter of minutes) then your oils should behave better on it.

What oil you use

Sunbelt should pay you.

Those value pack canvasses are coated with a substance to prevent mold during shipping and storage. If you take a dish of warm soapy (Dawn dish soap) water and a clean rag, you can actually wipe that stuff off. Just don’t get the wood wet. Then wipe it again with a rag and warm water to remove any residual soap.
The canvas will feel noticeably different. Then gesso a couple of times and you’ll have a MUCH better canvas to paint on.

I’ve also noticed that some of them aren’t even coated evenly with that anti-mold stuff. Paint acrylic over that and you’ll see a bunch of spots everywhere. Washing it first works best, imo.

That was very useful information, ty! One way which I’m wondering might solve the problem, is if one paints 2-3 layers of a good quality gesso over a cheaper canvas, & then use a medium grit sandpaper to run over it just a few swipes, to add even more “grippy,” to help the paint adhere?

I’m asking bc I’ve used that method when painting smaller cheap canvases & it’s worked very well, but I haven’t begun working w/ oils yet.

is this a problem with acrylic too or is it a oil paint exclusive?

Superbe démonstration,malgré que je comprenne pas l Anglais!😀👏❤❤

With the cheap boards, sometimes using like a 1000 grit sandpaper over the surface can help to make it grip paint a bit better.

Fabulous info. 👏🏻👍🏻😃

Thanks so much, this video really helps me a lot I think I found on my problem and I thought it was a paint panel is the camper that is giving me the problem thank you so much and God bless you

I've had this problem with acrylic paint – not so far with oil. I suspect the reason isn't so much the quality of the 'gesso', but two other things: a) it's not primed with enough coats – the best priming isn't much good if there isn't enough of it, and b) cheap canvases so often come from the Far East, and are coated with anti-fungicide in order to prevent mould – you can see this, in fact, if you hold the canvas (or board) up to a raking light – there'll be shiny bits in the weave. Yes, you should paint over that with fresh 'gesso', but if you don't wash the surfactant off, whatever it is, neither the priming nor the subsequent painting will stick. I use clean water – distilled would probably be better – on a cloth, scrub at it until the shine is gone, and then add a couple of coats of acrylic primer.

I wouldn't, by the way, spray the back of a canvas with water to tighten it – if it's that loose, better to take it off the stretchers and re-stretch it. Or even better – buy better canvas in the first place.

Good info. Thanks.