How artist's canvas is made
The word canvas comes from cannabis, because the cloth was first woven from hemp.
- stations
- 6
- things upstream
- 56
- raw sources
- 17
- steps from the ground
- 9
The short version
Painters' canvas today is mostly cotton duck or linen, a heavy plain-weave cloth. It is woven, cleaned and sized, then coated with two or three layers of acrylic gesso, a white primer of titanium dioxide and chalk in a plastic binder. Ready-made canvases are then pulled taut over wooden stretcher bars and stapled at the back or sides.
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Weave the plain cloth
Cotton or linen yarn is woven in a simple over-one, under-one plain weave. Duck canvas packs its threads more tightly. Cloth is sold by weight, from about 4 ounces a square yard for light to 12 for heavy.
about 4 to 12 oz/yd2
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Wash and size it
The woven cloth is washed and pressed flat, then sealed with a size that stops later layers soaking straight through. Traditional sizing used rabbit-skin glue, and modern lines use an acrylic sealer.
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Mix the white primer
Titanium dioxide for whiteness and ground calcium carbonate for tooth are stirred into an acrylic resin dispersed in water. The chalky filler gives the dried surface enough grip for paint.
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Coat and dry
Primer is spread across the cloth in two or three thin coats, each dried before the next. The coats fill the weave without hiding its texture and keep oil paint off the raw fibers, which oil would slowly rot.
2 to 3 coats
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Build the stretcher frame
Wooden bars with a slightly rounded front edge are cut and joined at the corners. Many frames have loose mitered corners with small wedges, called keys, that can be tapped in later to tighten a sagging canvas.
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Pull taut and staple
The primed cloth is wrapped over the frame and pulled evenly from the middle of each side outward, then stapled at the back or sides. Even tension keeps the frame from twisting and the surface drum-tight.
Goes in
Worth repeating
- One of the earliest surviving oil paintings on canvas, a French Madonna with angels, dates from around 1410.
- Canvas weight numbers run backward, so a number ten canvas is lighter than a number four.
- The word duck, as in cotton duck, comes from the Dutch word for cloth, doek.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and artist's canvas starts as these 17 raw sources.
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Sources
These sources say little about the factory steps themselves, so parts of this line are a general description. Treat the details with care, and tell us if you know better.
Cite this page: "How artist's canvas is made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/artist-canvas