I posted this today to Artists’ Exchange over at about.com. Thought I’d like to keep it around too.

I was contemplating designing and building an easel or two for the studio here. Currently I use pseudo-walls that have points at which I can mount pieces on rails. It’s a little bit limiting, and the number of times I’ve had a very wet painting topple over on me are too many to count.

So I need something that has the top brace bit, etc. Wheels would be nice, etc.

So, before I sat down at the local art supply store and sketched their $600 model, I figured I’d search to see what’s out there. Off to http://www.google.com

Found a couple people selling video tapes of how to build really light-weight tripod easels – good for watercolours in the field, but not serious large format paintings at the hands of an abusive clutz (me).

But I want plans and designs, and I don’t want to pay for them. Cheap, remember. Besides, I could stand to do this weekend, and having to wait would suck.

That lead me to http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/people/grosser/easel/body_index.htm who has online plans to build what looks like an incredible easel. Sure, it doesn’t flip down into a horizontal mode, but I have a feeling I’d never do that anyhow, even for gessoing. I don’t have a problem getting coated in gesso doing it vertically now, so why change?

In my search, I also found this page over at the Federation of Canadian Artists. Come nice pieces on artists statements, Canadian taxes, and much more.

Update: Also found plans for a more lightweight easel that isn’t completely evil, and could be made pretty accomodating of larger size pieces.

Also found this rather nice little unit though it might be a little tougher to make to their specs.

And, the holy grail – someone’s made knock-off plans of a tilting easel available online as well. Maybe I’ll hae to abuse my father or Tania’s step-dad into making one or more of these puppies.