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Gesso is one of the most important materials for painters. So much of it is used and it
is used sooo often - especially if you make your own canvases. A huge downer though is
how expensive gesso is especially if you're covering a lot of surface. so as my part of
my "don’t buy it, make it philosophy" i put together this video to show you a cheap
and easy way to make your own. Gesso is made of a binder, fillers, and white
pigment that is usually titanium dioxide. So these will be our components! Let's start
with the binders.Traditional gesso uses rabbit skin glue as a binder and sizing - i will
NOT be using that and will instead be making acrylic gesso. PVA wont do as the main binder
although it is a polymer it is not acrylic- to make this gesso as high quality as store
bought one its important to splurge just a little on an acrylic based binder. You can
either use white acrylic paint from the art store, or transparent acrylic medium also
from the art store, or latex house paint. In this case, i will use latex house paint.
Latex house paint is not latex its actually acrylic as misleading as that is, and is usually
sold in larger quantities for much cheaper. You wanna get the highest quality product
in the store but The most important part though is checking the ingredients. You can see here
that this ingredient list is printed extremely poorly but I managed to figure out that the
main ingredient is acrylic and that it contains titanium dioxide. It also contains some vinyl
acetate which from what I understand, it's basically PVA glue. This isn't ideal but I
really believe it won't do any harm. If you want a painting that lasts 200 years, this
may not be the way to do it. I only care that my pieces don’t expire before i do. I think
this will do fine. I will begin by dumping a solid amount of this latex house paint into
a plastic container that i plan to use to keep my gesso in. Next step is filler! For
this i am using whiting chalk. This is the chalk that is used to draw lines on tennis
and football fields - it will act as both filler and pigment. Whiting chalk is extremely
cheap and is easy to find in hardware and material supply stores. You could probably
also use crushed up chalk but to me that doesn't feel enough.
Make sure that you have sifted the chalk beforehand. I'm placing around 5 cups of chalk into this
batch, and then I'm using a paint mixing attachment on a drill to mix it up gooood. When its mixed
enough, you’re basically done. Told you this was easy. Here's a quick test of the
result - I'm using the gesso on a piece of unprimed and un-stretched canvas. It's very
opaque and gives great coverage. It also dries Matt but isn't chalky- all in all this is
a good gesso. I hope you found this video useful! Please remember to leave a comment
down below if you have any questions or suggestions. Thanks for watching!