Studio Equipment
Easels
When I started studying painting at the U of M we were issued some pretty basic equipment. The easels were noted for a couple of things - basic functionality, and surviving years of abuse at the hands of students who didn’t really know what they were doing. I studied those easels, read up on them, designed several variations with the idea that once I set up my own studio I would build my own super easels. Well, that was about 5 years ago, I started once but got interrupted and repurposed the wood for another project. In the mean time I cobbled together something that worked more or less and have used that for a couple of years. A couple of weeks I got tired of swearing at it and futzinging around every time I put a new canvas into it. SO I broke down and BOUGHT an easel. I still plan on making myself one, but in the meantime I am able to work a bit easier.
My ‘Make-do’ easel
This started life as a display stand for an exhibition at school. The wood was recovered from household renovations, I had bought the T-Slot tracks for another project and repurposed them into this temporarily. The hardware is from a Lee Valley collection of knobs and nuts for making woodshop jigs. The shelves are the pen ledge off a white board I pulled out of the garbage, cut in half and (with apologies to Monty Python) adapted to my needs by hammering it with a piece of wood with nails in it.
In use
One of the reasons I got this easel was the ability to have 2 work boards on it. This way I can put my reference image right over the work -
A very nice feature is that I can lay the work area right over 90 degrees and work on a piece like a table if required. Very useful for some applications.
A quick note on some of the background - you might have noticed a large number of political campaign signs - These do not represent anything about my politics but reflects my practicality - after taking a class on water colour from Thomas Chan I learned the fantastic versatility of coloplast sheeting. Basically a plastic version of corrugated cardboard. You can buy it, it comes in a variety of thicknesses and colours up to 4’ x 8’ sheets. And costs about the same or more than comparable sized plywood. However ! Due to being waterproof it is the material of choice for lawn signs - especially political campaign signs of all sizes.
I made friends with the ALL the provincial and federal campaign offices and they donated a bunch their unusable yard signs to me. (Mostly people who were no longer going to run for office for whatever reason) Several hundred big chunks of plastic that are not going to the landfill
In fact, the liberal party’s are my favourite. The ink is not hard to remove and I strip them back to blank remarkably easily. Oddly enough the conservative signs refuse to cooperate with me and will not accept any attempt to be changed.
