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Monday, October 21, 2013

A Travel Tip for Finished Pastels...and it's Free!


'A Partly Cloudy Day'            5x7           ©Karen Margulis
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I ran out of room.  My finished painting section in my Gogh Box couldn't hold all of my Pawleys Island paintings.  Final count was 35 paintings.  The Gogh bpx comes with a foamcore sandwich to protect your finished paintings but it isn't meant to hold a week's worth of work. So I turned to my favorite travel trick....and best of all it's free!

A free local travel guide or magazine is a great pastel painting holder!


Local Real estate guide turned painting holder
The trick is to get the slick coated guides...the newsprint guides won't work.  This time I picked up a Real Estate guide at the local grocery store.  All I did was slip each painting in between the pages. There were enough pages to fit all of my paintings. Of course none of them were larger than 6x8 so this trick only works for the small studies.  For added safety you can use a binder clip to hold the pages together. I forgot to bring one with me this trip. 

The paintings will stay clean and safe until you get home and take them out. Don't forget you have paintings in the guide book and toss it while unpacking!  The bonus is you now have a nice little souvenir guidebook from your trip. 

Bonus tip: If you happen to have painted larger and need to protect a painting try tearing out sheets of the guidebook, tape them together and tape over painting. 

Do you have any tips for traveling with finished pastel paintings? I'd love for you to share your tips in the comment section!

4 comments:

Mermaid Sue said...

Great tip!
Now I need to figure out how to get a crease out of a painting - paper got folded accidentally. Grrrrrr. I really liked that one too!

Anonymous said...

This is such a great idea, especially for art teachers and moms. Thanks for sharing.

robertsloan2art said...

It doesn't beat "free" but for cheap, a large pad of tracing paper is my friends' best way to carry finished large paintings home from workshops and trips. I've heard of that for a long time so I used it for a number of my artworks when I moved to San Francisco.

I always save the big flat cardboard boxes that full sheets or mat boards come in. I also save the cardboard backing and big plastic bags that really good full sheets come with. These become transport for finished paintings when I move.

Basically any packaging that protected the great expensive papers on their way to me can usually be counted on to protect the art on its way when I have to go somewhere with it. I bought a lot of huge sheets of glassine to protect paintings for shipping to clients in years past, it turned out handy for layering them inside portfolios I used to store good art papers and finished works.

I also use mat board and big cardboard flat pieces from paper shipping to stiffen portfolios and protect art that's stashed in them.

I also had a couple of largish, 11 x 18" or thereabouts, presentation books that I'd bought on Clearance years ago. I have been using those to store pastel paintings in their sleeves, very carefully getting them down into place and holding them against the black archival liner paper inside the sleeves. If they are packed solid that they don't jiggle around, what's in them remains solid. But they needed tacking at the corners with archival tape to keep them from sliding down to the bottom. Even if it's smaller than the book (as most of my paintings are) I don't put more than one per page using cheap presentation books for storage.

The archival pages seem to work well as long as the art isn't able to move around inside the sleeve.

So I used a lot of different tricks for getting all my finished works to San Francisco when I moved. Most of it was just getting it covered with something that wouldn't smudge it and making sure it stacked flat with sturdy stiffeners around it.

One pastel I had in an inexpensive poster frame, 18" x 24" painting by a friend, came through fine even though framed against the acrylic glazing packed flat inside one of the mat board boxes that was stuffed solid with mat boards and painting boards and other large pieces with glassine over them. It's hanging now and looks no different than when I packed it.

So I use what I have to hand. If traveling again and had money to, I'd get an 18" x 24" pad of tracing paper for any and all large pieces, especially if going to a workshop where I might be doing large paintings.

Karen said...

Wow Robert! Thanks for sharing all of those great tips! The tracing paper I have used before but didn't think of large pads!! I need to make a note if all if these great tips! Thanks for sharing !!