# Canvas or Paper? Help!



## jasellyn

My son is a pastel artist (one of his portraits is attached) who has been given a huge commission to do a portrait for his day job boss...he had a question which I, as a watercolor & pencil artist, was at a loss to answer. Any help would be so gratefully received!

The painting will be quite large--should he use a painting canvas or some really big paper (his usual base)? If canvas, should he use unprimed or primed? The only reason that he was thinking unprimed was because it's darker and the pastels would take better.

Thanks in advance!!!

Jasellyn


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## George924

Unless your son has used the canvas before this instance and knows what the results and outcome will be, I would go with the normal support that he has always used. It sounds like he has not used the canvas prior to this moment and if he does try to create the piece on canvas I would always recommend primed and if you want to stain the canvas a neutral color added into the gesso will work most wonderfully. 

I would use the paper...or even pastel boards, the largest format of paper I could find is 19X25...here is a couple of links.
http://www.dickblick.com/categories/pastelpapers/
http://www.dickblick.com/products/canson-mi-teintes-drawing-papers/

But I know if it needs to be a larger format, StoneHenge paper is also quite a bit larger...http://www.dickblick.com/products/stonehenge-paper/ I use StoneHenge exclusively for my color pencil work. Hope that helped and let us know how it turns out.


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## jasellyn

Thanks so much George! It truly answers the question and I've sent your message to him and I will definitely post an image of the final product.

I use Stonehenge for my pencil work as well--it's wonderful for colored pencil work!


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