Linen Canvas on ACM Panel for Painting - Why and How

Attaching linen canvas to ACM as a painting support.

[NOTE: See important additional information at the end of this description]

Hi, well the intro ended up being longer than I thought. If you want to know why you would bother doing all this preparation, start from the start of the video.

But if you want to jump straight to how to do it, here are the chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:22 Why bother putting canvas onto panels?
3:55 How I attach linen canvas onto ACM and prepare it for painting

Enjoy.

IMPORTANT NOTE: there is a possibility that the PVA glue may migrate (under pressure from the required weight) through the back of the canvas and some may end up in spots on the surface of a primed canvas. I haven't seen this (haven't yet looked for it), but others have in commercially bought canvas boards. This is not a problem IF the priming itself is acrylic - any PVA that ends up on the surface should bond with the acrylic priming now underneath it. Paint will also bond with any PVA that ends up on the surface (advice from MITRA).

However, if you use pre-primed canvas that has been oil-primed, you could end up with the situation of some PVA migrating through the back of the canvas onto the front and sitting in spots on top of the oil prime.

This would in effect by putting something plastic (the PVA) on top of something oil (the surface of the 'pre-primed with oil' canvas), which is not best practice (in face a no-no), and may even cause those parts of the canvas to have parts of the subsequent layers of paint that are not attached. You should only ever have layers of acrylic under oil, never acrylic anything (like PVA) on top of oil. There is a longer conversation about this in the comments.

Summary: if using acrylic pre-primed canvas no problems. If using raw canvas that is primed later, no problem. If using 'pre-primed with oil' canvas, you need to be assured that no PVA is migrating through the back of the canvas onto the surface.