Use the Materials You Love with Jessica Fields

Artist Jessica Fields (Ep.67) loves canvas. But she doesn't love that extra bounce that happens with a stretched canvas. 

For this reason she uses canvas panels for her smaller work. 

For her larger works, she wants the final painting to be on a stretched canvas in part due to shipping costs. But again, she doesn’t want to work on a stretched canvas.

Her solution?

She takes canvas off the frame, pulls it around a panel for the duration of her work and then restrestches it back onto the frame. 

This way of working gives her the canvas texture and the hard surface to push and pull her palette knife across. (It also saves her money in shipping.) 

Put it to Practice:
It can be easy to dismiss some instinct you have about how you like to work. "Oh, I should just get used to this canvas bounce. It can't make that big of a difference."

But liking how you work is important. Each of us has tendencies and likes and dislikes. how much bounce you want from your surface isn't a small thing to have an opinion on. There are probably natural surfaces you like working on more or less than others.

Pay attention while you work. And occasionally try a new surface just to see if it might not work better. you'll learn a lot in the practice.

This is also why it's helpful to stick with a surface for awhile while you figure out your opinions about it. If you're always switching between surfaces, you may not realize that it's a surface thing that's bothering you.

If you stick with one for a while and THEN try something new, you'll know enough about what you think about surface A to then compare that to surface B.