DIY Wood Panel's

[DiazHA]

Can anyone point me in the right direction on making wood panels. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Odayga]

You can order some masonite from dickblick or get some from a local hardware store and have them cut it for you. i usually go to home depo to get my wood panels/masonite. then buy some good ol' gesso and gesso the panel. wait about a day for it to dry.

[Ilaekae]

Just make sure to gesso both sides of the panel, especially if it's over 10" or so, or it will sometimes curl/warp or pop in the center. If the masonite is tempered, make sure you lightly sand it first to give it a slight tooth to hold the gesso. When you gesso, and you want an extremely smooth surface, be sure and sand between multiple coats of gesso.

[DiazHA]

Thanks guys, does anyone know how to make the frame for the pannels? does one glue the panel to the frame or staple it, screw it on? thanks

[Odayga]

ive seen people put "bars" under it so one can hang it on a wall. they're pretty much thick stretcher bars for canvases but they use em for masonite too. hmmm. as for a frame. i remember my teacher gluing it on.

[DavePalumbo]

Birch ply (or any other hard wood) makes a really nice panel. I personally don't care for Masonite, but I like hard woods. Like Ilaekae said, just give it some Gesso, even amounts to both sides. I generally do three thin coats in alternating directions (one up, one side to side, one up). If you do get a warp, you can just glue some strips of heavy ply to the back and that should straighten it out

Framing, you'd just do it like any other painting. Stapling it in (using a point shooter preferably, not actual staples) is ideal. Gluing is fine until your buyer wants to change the frame (which happens very frequently) and finds that it's now a part of the surface.

[Qitsune]

I know Curry's has some wood panels that are a thin ply mounted on a thicker stretcher-like structure... if I were would I'd find a store that carries those and I'd go look how they are made, probably the stretcher stappled together from the inside and then glued to the ply. If you do that to have a gallery canvas look, you don't want stapples to show.

[Seer]

As for the gesso, where do you usually buy it? Is it sold under a different name in hardware/paint stores or even sold at all? I recently purchased some refined linseed oil from a hardware store and it cost me 1/6 of the price of the bottles sold in a local art store, which was more than I thought I'd save:P

How thick should the final grounding be, by the way?

[Elwell]

As for the gesso, where do you usually buy it? Is it sold under a different name in hardware/paint stores or even sold at all? I recently purchased some refined linseed oil from a hardware store and it cost me 1/6 of the price of the bottles sold in a local art store, which was more than I thought I'd save:P
Hardware/housepainting supplies supplies ARE NOT ART SUPPLIES. They are manufactured and processed for different intended uses, with different standards of quality and permanence. For instance, linseed oil sold for housepainting or wood finishing is far more likely to yellow or wrinkle than oil sold as an art material. Art supplies are expensive for simple economic reasons; manufacturing costs are high and demand is small. Never the less, by avoiding craft stores like Michael's and shopping at the big dedicated art supply chains like Pearl or Utrecht, or online (Blick, Jerry's, ASW, etc), you should never have to pay list price.

EDIT: Sorry, just noticed you're in Europe. That does make things more complicated, as shipping costs from US sites are ridiculous, and I'm not sure if there's a Scandinavian equivalent of the high volume American discount art supply chains.

[joelhinxman]

Thanks guys, does anyone know how to make the frame for the pannels? does one glue the panel to the frame or staple it, screw it on? thanks
do ya mean frames on the back or frames around the final picture.

for frames on the back of the board i was tought that putting them on with both small nails and wood glue is best. the small nails are mostly to hold the frames to the back evenly as the glue drys. make sure is gona be a really strong wood glue hold. not elmers school glue. if you have a large mass of chepo arylic medium that works too i used that alot in college. but that medium was really bad and not to good for painting wid.

for gessoing i always found it easyer to spread around with me hand or a big flat putty knifey thingy(i know it has a name but i cant think of it). that way can make each coat pritty even and smooth so ya dont have to sand as much to get a good smooth surface. if thats the kind ya like.

[Ilaekae]

I like to paint on a surface with tooth because i paint drybrush. What I used to do, and will be doing again in about a month, is getting about 5-10 full sheets of the ultra-thin outdoor plywood (about 3/16"+, 4 x 8 feet) and CAREFULLY cutting it to standard sizes with a radial saw. I then cut and staple together 1 x 2 pine (1 x 3 or even 1 x 4 for bigger boards) flat, two-three staples at each butt joint on each side, hammered down flat if they protrude slightly. The plywood is glued down to this with a good wood glue and laid perfectly flat. I cover it along the edges with wax paper strips just laid down, and put the next glued panel on top of it. When I have 15-20 of the same size stacked, I put some scrap heavy ply on top and weight it down qith about 60-80 pounds of rocks and shit and leave it sit for a day.

The next day, I cover my work table with poly and start to gesso scrap pieces of cotton and linen cloth (even old sheets that aren't threadbare, and washed burlap sacking for a really rough surface) to the wooden panels, making very neat corners and edges and extending the cloth to the back. (I do a lot of fabric work, so I buy large lots of mixed cloth and sort the canvas weights and too-light stuff out, which is what I use for the painting panels.) You can use cheap medium for this part, but I just use the gesso, slopping down a quick coat on the board first, laying the cloth down and rolling it out with a roller or piece of wadded poly plastic around a rolled sock. Then I immediately coat it with gesso. If you're careful as you work, you end up with a panel the size you want, with perfect edges that don't need framed. When the painting is done, I put four little rubber bumpers at each corner about 1-1/2 inches in on the back--white preferred. They look like little white rubber candy drops with a thumtack nail coming out of the center. This keeps it away from the wall and makes it looks like it's floating.

Before I paint, each panel gets an additioanl 2-3 coats of gesso in opposite directions, including the edges and the cloth overlapped to the back. For maybe a hundred bucks and two or three afternoons, you can end up with 1-3,000 bucks worth of panels ready to go, depending how much wood you started with. About 20 years ago, I made 1,600 24" x 32" panels for a friend's show in five days.

And you don't spend a cent for frames later...

[DiazHA]

Thanks for the response everyone. It was really helpful. I will be making some panels this coming month.

[Seer]

Hardware/housepainting supplies supplies ARE NOT ART SUPPLIES.

.

Art supplies are expensive for simple economic reasons; manufacturing costs are high and demand is small.

Thanks, that's exactly what I was wondering about. I wanted to make sure I wouldn't be a sucker buying certain materials from art stores.

I love these kinds of discussions where you really pick up a ton about some overlooked parts of art making.