Painting on Board

Painting on Board

The Lantern Floating will go on tonight at Magic Island.
My plan was to paint on site.....until I looked at the web site. It is not starting until 6pm.
That is okay.  But there will be masses of people and the possibility of painting from
a good vantage point is slim.

So far Joyce Wu is going to join me. I have taken my mahogany 11x14 boards and coated 3
of them with Acrylic house paint. They are the WRONG kind of board (live and learn).
They are very splintery and I had to SAND each one (I have no garage or deck ,I live in a highrise).
The splinters then had to find a home (long story). Even after a good thick coat of acrylic house paint,
there is still too much grain in the wood to paint over, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Needless to say
there are tiny little splinters all over my bedroom .

So, a huge part of painting plein air is prep. If you are going to use board, the best board is
HARDBOARD. It is also called MFB I believe. You can buy it in big sheets and have them cut it to your
specs. Get the 1/4 thickness or 1/8 .  The big sheets should yield about 24
evenly cut 11x14 . If you are going to want larger boards get the thicker board so it does not bend.

You can easily get canvas instead. That is what I usually use, but the  board is only 15 bucks a sheet
and that means a lot more production at less cost.

I would advice purchasing a mistint of acrylic house paint to coat the board. A lot of serious artists say NO,
but if you want to paint a lot and often then you want to find fast cheap ways to have a lot of surface to paint on .  Unsplintered board of the appropriate thickness coated in a pale mistint works until you sell your first

$1000 buck piece of art (then forget it, just go buy the good stuff)

mistint sort of light yellow which is my favorite base color