MITRA Forum Question Details

That should work fine and create a rather stable painting substrate. You can follow the procedure outlined in our “Rigid Supports” downloadable pdf in our resources section; https://www.artcons.udel.edu/mitra/resources for the procedure. I would use acrylic dispersion gel medium if avoiding BEVA 371 rather than PVA dispersion so as to not add an additional resin to the composite.  The “gesso” in the Gessoboard is already bound in an acrylic dispersion so why add another material to complicate the situation.

I would probably size the linen with a thinned fluid acrylic dispersion medium rather than animal glue to avoid the reactivity of the glue, to keep the materials list as short as possible, and prevent any diminished adhesion between the glue size and any acrylic dispersion that soaked through to the surface of the linen.

​​We try to avoid promoting any one single brand but if you buy a higher quality acrylic dispersion medium from a notable brand (so not the cheaper stuff) you should be fine.
And yes...the medium is different than gesso (which has fillers). There are instructions for how to attach fabric to a rigid support in our "Rigid Supports" document in the Resources section if you need more information.

In our line of acrylic dispersion gel mediums, gloss performs better than matte as an adhesive for mounting fabric to ​panel. I think this is probably the same with other brands. For prepping canvas to receive oil primer, while thinning a painting medium does work, there are low-viscosity acrylic mediums and ready-to-use acrylic sizings that can be applied full-strength without thinning. We offer one, I believe Golden has several, and there are probably others I haven't tried yet.

​Yes indeed Matthew...and thank you. I believe we do recommend to use gloss over matte in our document but if not thanks for stating that...I will check and amend it just in case we have neglected to include this.