I pick up stretchers at yard sales and thrift stores. You can get them cheap that way. I got four of these 24 x 24 inch stretchers years ago at a garage sale. They were covered with some godawful 70s gold-and-orange-on-brown patterned fabric. O ick. I pulled the old fabric off and stretched canvas over them. The other three are sporting paintings that I’ll probably keep, but the fourth was never finished. The underpainting on the old canvas was done about 10 years ago, and it’s not something I’m likely to ever want to finish, so I decided it was time to pull it off, restretch the canvas, and start over from scratch.
The stretcher is old, but it’s still nice and sturdy. The crack along one bar is only superficial. I’ll need to tighten up one of the corners, but other than that, it’s perfectly usable. I love the look of the old nail heads and the way the paint seeped around and through the back side of the canvas. No, that’s not a good thing. It’ll eat the canvas where it wasn’t primed. The seeping is a by-product of using heavily thinned, drippy paint. It goes where it wants, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. I primed the canvas along the edges, but that didn’t keep the paint from being wicked around to the back, where the canvas was left raw.
red paper boat 