Preparing Panels, Canvases, and Other Supports for Painting, Gilding, and More

canvas-part1 canvas-part2 Images: Preparing a canvas for painting.

This activity teaches students how to prepare common supports, namely panels and canvases, to receive paint. The preparations outlined below ensure that any media applied to the support goes on evenly without risk of bleeding into or through that support. This activity can be undertaken as a stand-alone skill-building exercise or it can be a prelude to paint making and testing using hand-made lake pigments, hand-grown verdigris, and/or hand-levigated azurite. The Making and Knowing Project has found it useful to have various prepared panels and canvases on hand for other hands-on activities and experiments, such as applying metal leaf, varnish enamels, and metalpoint, and pounced designs.

panel-composite Images: Gessoing and scraping a panel for painting.

Learning Objectives

The activity of preparing supports has several potential learning outcomes, which can include:

  • understand the behavior of wood and fiber supports under various conditions (e.g., wet/dry; slack/tension)
  • understand how intermediary layers help isolate paint from absorptive supports
  • exprience the time and effort required to complete under-acknowledged yet critical preparatory steps in the art-making process
  • experience how support texture and ground layers affect the application and appearance of paint, metal, etc.
  • gain an appreciation for unseen elements in a finished work of art


metalpoint-composite Images: Preparing paper for metalpoint. Right: Metalpoint portrait by Rogier van der Weyden © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Supports, Substrates, Surfaces, and Grounds

The terms “support” and “substrate” are often used interchangeably to mean the material structure or backing to which art media are applied. For instance, canvas, panel, plaster, paper, metal, and glass are all supports. The support itself provides a surface for the application of media (e.g., canvas for the application of oil paint), but in its raw state, a given surface might be unsuitable (e.g., raw canvas can have a coarse texture; it is absorbant, so wet media bleeds and spreads). It is common to apply ground layers to a support so that it gains an even and impermeable surface for the application of fine media such as paint, metal leaf, and resins. Common grounds include size (glue), gesso, wax, and bole. In some cases, colored grounds are applied to supports in order to help achieve a particular artistic effect. In general, some media adhere better to particular supports and grounds than to others.

various substrates for painting

Teaching Support Preparation

Preparing Supports: Presentations

Preparing Supports: Activity Sheets & Resources

Follow-up Activities: Making Paint and Using Supports for Painting

The Preparation of Supports in Ms. Fr. 640

Numerous entries in Ms. Fr. 640 address the preparation of supports for the application of various media. A non-exhaustive sampling includes:

The author-practitioner mentions techniques for preparing supports in passing, as in the entries “Painter” on fol. 56v and “Drawing” on fol. 62r. There is no systematic way to catch all instances, so it is useful to search broadly. It is also useful to search the edition for particular supports such as “canvas,” “panel,” “parchment,” or “stucco,” techniques such as “gilding,” or terms such as “imprimatura,” “ground,” and “seat,” being mindful of homonyms and context.

There are also several essays in Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France that explore the use of various prepared supports, including: