Monday, 01-Aug-11 20:51:00 CEST

Preparing hardwood plywood painting panels

Today I prepared hardwood plywood panels for painting with oil or acrylic. I found out that 6mm thick panels are nice to paint on with oil paint. I found that my local hardware store has hardwood plywood plates that are 2440 by 1220 mm and 5 mm thick. These plates have three layers of wood. These plates can be sawed to nice 30 by 40 cm panels. Here below you see a pile of these panels. They originate from two plates.

The initial challenge is that the edges have loads of splinters so it is not so pleasant to handle the panels like this so I have to sand the panels. Here I have mounted a simple sanding machine to the table. The sanding paper I used here was a coarse paper P100.

I had difficulties with splinters. It turned out that one of the original plates splintered very easy while the other plate behaved nicely. I tried to minimize this problem by changing to P150. It would not help so much. I proceeded carefully to avoid as many splinters as possible.

When I finished the sides I decided what were the best side of each panel and that side I sanded with fine paper P150.

Then I continued by cleaning the fronts with water to avoid dust in the grains of the panels when I would paint the panels with gesso. Gesso is used to avoid discoloring of the painting and to let it stick to the panels better.

When I paint with oil paint it takes really long time before the paint is dry. To transport wet paintings in a convenient way I figured out that I need a wet panel case. This is a box with ridges holding the panels. The panels are held in place in the case with a 3 to 4 millimeter deep groove were the panels slide into. It is nice to avoid painting the edge in front of the groove of the wet panel case. On the other hand I would like to be able to use standard frames and these have a ridge 6 mm deep.

Here I tape the edge so that the gesso should begin 5 mm from the edge.

I use a roller to paint the gesso.

Here I apply gesso to the roller.

Here I started rolling the gesso on to the board.

I rolled two layers gesso on the panels.

Here I started to remove the tapes of the dry panels.

Here is a stack of hardwood plywood panels ready for oil or acryl painting.