DIY easel and its drawings with dimensions. DIY folding easel DIY painting easel for children

This DIY tabletop easel is an excellent assistant for an amateur artist.

Of course, you can buy a ready-made easel, but the problem is that they are quite expensive.

To repeat the design, you need dry planed pine slats 15 mm thick. You will also need M6 bolts with wing nuts, washers, and a small piece of 15mm plywood for the table.

The design and assembly diagram of the easel are shown in the figure. The list of parts and their dimensions are summarized in the table.

The design of the easel allows you to fix frames with canvas of various sizes at a height convenient for the painter and at the desired angle. Both the music rest D and the clamp have screw clamps, which, when loosened, the parts can be moved along the pillars of the slide A.

The desired tilt of the easel is ensured by turning the levers C1 O. One of the levers has a 6.5 mm wide slot groove, which allows you to change the arms of the system.

The fixed connections of the easel parts are made on dowels with glue, the movable ones are made using bolts and wing nuts.

Before assembly, the cut, sanded wooden parts of the easel with the necessary grooves and holes must be coated with colorless varnish. The quality of the easel itself, as well as the ease and convenience of working with it, will depend on the care taken in manufacturing the parts.

Louis Dubos, France
Based on materials from the magazine "SAM"

A passion for painting is not a reason to spend money on buying a new easel. It is quite possible to equip a place for creativity at home with your own hands. Therefore, we offer an excellent option for creating an easel.

How to make an easel with your own hands - materials

So, in order to make your own drawing device, you need to prepare:

sandpaper, or preferably a circle with a grain density of 100-120 - 1 pc.;
sandpaper - 1 sheet of the same density;
glue for gluing wooden surfaces;
door hinges 2 cm – 1 pc.;
hanging hooks 13 cm – 1 pc.;
carnations without a cap (2 cm) – 4 pcs.;
self-tapping screws 4 pcs. sizes 16.5 by 2.7 mm and 34 mm by 2.9 mm – 6 pcs.;
furniture screws with nuts and washers – 2 pcs. size 72 mm by 5.2 mm;
pine slats 3 m long - 3 pcs., size 4.5 by 2 cm.

Tools for work:

sander;
wood hacksaw;
electric jigsaw;
pencil, ruler and construction meter;
gloves;
Phillips screwdriver plus hammer;
drill and drill bits 6 and 8 mm;
screwdriver

The simplest case

The simplest way to make an easel is a stretcher. This is a temporary canvas holder that can be useful, firstly, if you are just trying yourself - will it work? Secondly, if you paint occasionally; Let's say, once a year, not every year you are "punched up" on vacation. Artists, forgive me, but you yourself still don’t use such expressions. And not only privately among themselves. Thirdly, stretcher easels are often used by portrait painters working at the customer’s home.

It is better to make your first simple easel with the front legs, which are a continuation of the sides of the stretcher, see fig. on right. When stretching the canvas, its overlaps are left at the feet. When the painting is ready, the back support is removed, the legs are carefully sawed off, and the canvas overlaps are attached to the crossbars. In the future, the same legs can be used to create the next opus; then they are nailed from behind to a stretcher with already stretched canvas.

Note: There is some advantage of an easel-stretcher, especially when working on location - it does not need to be transported or stored anywhere. Until the work is created or when it has already been created, the stretcher easel simply does not exist.

Which one to do first?

Let's say you've already decided - yes, I need a permanent easel. There are, firstly, floor and table easels. Secondly, both of them are stationary or folding mobile (mobile/hiking, wearable or transportable). If your child loves to draw and shows good inclinations in this, then at first he will need one universal tabletop easel for drawing (for watercolors), see below. If you intend to seriously engage in painting yourself, you will need a couple of floor-standing ones, stationary and mobile, and at least one tabletop.

Any of these easels can be made at home. Which one to do first depends on your (or your child’s) genre preferences and work style. To practice primarily easel painting, you will first need a mobile floor easel, then a tabletop drawing easel, and then, if there is room for an art workshop, a stationary floor easel. If you prefer small forms (miniature, caricature, etc.), the first thing you need to do is make an easel for watercolors.

Floor-standing

A stretcher with primed canvas weighs several kg; large - up to several tens of kg. But it should be easily and simply installed on the easel, as well as removed from it, but securely held on the easel while working. The canvas (paper, cardboard, board) must be sufficiently, evenly and directly illuminated, for which the source of working lighting is located low behind the artist, but the canvas should not be shaded by it when working both sitting and standing.

The main types of floor easels for easel painting were developed at the beginning of the Renaissance and described by Vasari in his Lives. Folding tripod easel (item 1 in the figure below) is mobile. It is the easiest to make, it does not take up much storage space and is useful if the size of the painting does not exceed approx. 100x80 cm, and each working session does not last long. The canvas on the tripod is not fixed in any way; it simply lies on the easel. If its supports (or support, see below) are placed high, a sufficiently large canvas becomes unstable. If you place the canvas low, then when working while standing, it is difficult to illuminate it evenly and your eyes get tired, and when working while sitting on a large canvas, your hanging hand will soon get tired; The painter cannot lose the fidelity of his eye and the firmness of his hand.

Note: There is a legend about one or the other master of the Renaissance. A certain rich connoisseur and philanthropist (usually called Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent) decided to invite him to work with him and sent one of his associates for this. He, knowing nothing about painting, but wanting to curry favor, demanded a trial work from the artist. A version of the legend is that the messenger wanted to receive his portrait by the great master for free. He shrugged his shoulders and drew a circle by hand as evenly and accurately as with a compass; The envoy had no choice but to present such a sample to the ruler. He, immediately realizing what had happened, burst out laughing, went to the master himself (optionally, sent a personal message with an invitation), and demoted the overly zealous servant.

The easel-lyre (item 2) is so named for its distant resemblance to an ancient Greek musical instrument; well, without developed associative thinking there is nothing to do in art and literature. The lyre easel can be considered the most universal of the floor ones: you can place a canvas up to 1.2x1.8 m in size on it, and at the same time it can be either stationary or mobile. Easel-machine, pos. 3, (from where - easel painting) is used to create paintings of large sizes up to extraordinary ones.

Note: For the “Battle of Poltava” mosaic, M.V. Lomonosov had to build a unique machine that withstood a load of 300 pounds (4.8 tons) during testing.

About the tilt of the canvas

The problem of lighting the canvas can be easily solved by tilting the canvas by 10-20 degrees. Tripod and lyre easels produce it naturally. On an easel-machine for the same purpose, when creating paintings of regular size, the stretcher is placed on supports, pos. 4 in Fig. higher; When working with very large canvases, the problem of canvas lighting usually does not arise, because the light source is already above the artist’s head.

Why another machine?

Artists who work with strong, broad strokes, such as those in the picture on the right, do not really favor lyre easels. If you paint energetically executed paintings from them, then, being carried away by your work, you can press the brush so hard on the corner of the canvas that... no, the easel will not tip over and the canvas will not fall out of it. But it will give way under the brush, the stroke will “go away”, and the master will have to state that the work is ruined. An amateur will most likely not care what is smeared there, but painting has long moved away from the literal representation of nature. Therefore, if you intend to master technically expressive ways of working, you will need a durable and stable stationary easel or, for canvases of approx. up to 1.5x1.5 m, so-called. stop (emphasis on the second “o”), see below.

Tripod

For the reasons stated above, the tripod easel is not suitable for outdoor travel, although it is not heavy and compact when folded: in the open air, the canvas from it can simply be blown away by a gust of wind or inadvertently pushed over by a random onlooker. However, in addition to beginners/students, a tripod easel or several of them are almost always kept in stock by artists who work a lot at the customer’s home: it is not difficult to bring the tripod to the place and take it back, even on foot. There are (at least, there definitely were) portrait painters who managed to do up to 5-6 works in parallel in this way: they took easels to customers, set them up, and ran from one to another all day long. By the time he gets to the next one, his hand and eye have time to rest.

It is difficult to reproduce a ready-made tripod easel with your own hands: you need the so-called. treukh - a tee with three pairs of legs at angles of 120 degrees horizontally, in which the legs rotate on the axes. The folding limits are the bevels of the ends of the legs. Similar systems are used in photo and video tripods, which can also be used as an easel, see below. In the tripod, which is an easel, there are holes drilled in the front ones (see figure above) into which pins are inserted; the canvas rests on them. Drilling and preparing support pins also require a lot of work, but all this can be simplified to literally half an hour to an hour of simple carpentry work if you make a tripod easel according to your height, manner of work and preferred sizes of canvases. The easel will turn out to be stationary (not folding), but you don’t have to run around visiting customers all day long.

The design diagram of a homemade simplified tripod easel is shown in the figure:

For this you will need 3 pieces of hardwood timber with a cross section of 40x40 mm and a length of 120-150 cm for working while sitting or 170-190 cm for working while standing and/or on canvases of maximum size. In this case, the length of the bars can be increased as much as the ceiling height in the room allows, and their cross-section can be taken larger, 50x50 or 60x60 mm. You will also need a piece of any lumber 0.7-1.5 m long for the stand (support) of the canvas. It is better to take it (the segment) thicker, with a cross-section, say, 60x60 mm (the canvas will easily slide off from a 40x40 mm support) or, better, from 50x75 to 75x150 mm; in this case, it is attached to the front legs with a narrow edge so that the canvas rests on the wide (side), as shown in pos. And the picture, but first the tripod needs to be assembled.

The secret of simplification is in the holes for the key holding the tripod together - a piece of threaded rod from M6 to M10. The hole for the key in the rear leg is drilled according to the diameter of the rod, and in the side legs it is 1.5 times wider. Then the front legs will diverge to the side at an angle of approx. 20 degrees (pos. B in the figure), and the tilt of the blade will be approx. 10 degrees, which is what you need. The back leg of the easel is foldable for easy storage. It is fixed with a cord: its middle is attached to the back leg, and on the sides, inside the front legs, self-tapping screws are not screwed in completely, onto which loops are thrown at the ends of the cord. Too lazy to sew loops - you can just tie them on. The final assembly and adjustment of a homemade tripod easel is done as follows:

The canvas stand is placed after the tripod is assembled.
The base of the easel is laid out so that the front legs move apart as much as possible, and the back legs set the angle of inclination of the canvas that is convenient for you.
Measure how much cord is needed to secure the hind leg and cut it off (with a reserve for loops or a garter); sew loops if necessary.
The tripod is folded, the cord is attached in the middle to the back leg; Screws are screwed into the front ones under the cord.
Lay out the tripod again, secure the legs with a cord, check the stability and convenience of the accessory.
Mark on the front legs the position of the board that is comfortable for you - the support of the canvas, and on the support - the position of the legs under its narrow edge.
They drill holes in the legs and the board for self-tapping screws, attach the support - that’s it, you can work according to art.

Note: in the form of a tripod, it turns out to be a very good children's tabletop easel for drawing, see the video below:

Video: tabletop children's easel-tripod

Lyra

If after the first experiments with a tripod things have gone well for you, you will soon need a more serious easel - a lyre. The machine is a bit complicated to make on your own and too bulky for apartment conditions. If you have enough money to set up an art workshop or you expect to earn enough from painting for this, then a good easel machine will be affordable for you.

The lyre easel is known in a number of modifications. Some of them, the so-called. Stations (emphasis on the “and”) make it possible to work on canvases that literally still fit in an ordinary living room. Unless you intend to take up monumental painting (which is of little relevance nowadays thanks to the availability of film printing and façade plotters), this will be more than enough for you.

Draw monumentally? How is that?

What is monumental painting (Master Mural)? Remember, who was older, how, for Soviet holidays or just like that, the walls of houses were hung with huge portraits of leaders, ideologically consistent paintings (both of which made the Soviet people sick), advertisements for films, and other things of the same size? This is what it is, and there is more left, but in a different key and smaller. And once upon a time in large regional cities (the capital and union significance, of course) there were monumental painting workshops with easels for canvases up to 10x15 m or more. Of course, teams of artists worked on them. Their colleagues working in smaller forms did not like the monumentalists, but secretly envied them and dreamed of being included in this privileged caste.

But let's get back to the topic. The structure and dimensions of the conventional (item 1) and reinforced (semi-mounted, item 2) are shown in the figure:

The canvas is placed on a height-adjustable support (shown by a blue arrow), which also serves as a shelf for small painting accessories, and is pressed from above with a shoe with a grip and clamp sliding along the central bar. The hind leg is suspended simply: on ordinary card loops, pos. 1a. In factory-made lyre easels, the position of the rear leg(s) is limited to pairs of earrings, but in a homemade one, you can place a door hook at a suitable height, pos. 1b.

The only thing that is difficult to do at home is the central bar and the shoe sliding along it. However, it is quite possible to do without both if you paint on canvases not of arbitrary size, but of a fixed height with a certain step, for example. 5 or 10 cm. Such a limitation is unlikely to burden an amateur painter; Drawings of an easel-lyre for amateur painting are given on the following. rice. Actually, it no longer resembles a lyre, because... there was no need for a central bar. So what, just less carpentry work is needed.

Note: The device diagram and dimensions of a reinforced home easel for working on large canvases are shown in Fig. on right. For more information about the lyre easel, see also the video below:

Video: DIY tripod easel

Tabletop (for watercolor)

Small easels, which are placed on a table for work, are called watercolor easels, although they write/draw from them not only and not so much with watercolors. An easel for watercolors is a great gift for a child who is passionate about drawing. It is not difficult for an average home craftsman to make it (an easel; children, as you know, are made in a different way), and with a little modification or if the child’s child, as they say, burns out, it can serve in another useful capacity.

Easels for watercolors can be flatbed (top left in the figure) or framed (bottom in the same place). A frame tabletop easel is structurally more complex, but taking it as a basis, you can come up with a transformable children's easel, the drawings of which are given in the rest of Fig. Once the need for the original quality has passed (for example, if the child has already started writing from a tripod), the transforming easel is converted into a children's work table (inset at the bottom right of the figure).

Another transformer

In everyday life, you often come across a device that also has great transformation potential - a photo/video tripod. In relation to the topic of this article, this means that on its basis you can make an easel that combines the useful qualities of a tripod and a lyre. Moreover, the tripod itself will not lose its suitability for its intended use. Which is very valuable, because... Creative photography and painting are related art forms.

Note: A video tripod differs from a modern photographic one only in the distance between the axes of the tripod screw and the spring-loaded pin that keeps the camera from turning. But before, they managed just fine without this pin, so you can put a camera on a video tripod, and vice versa.

Modern tripods for use as easels require virtually no modification: their integrated swivel and tilt tripod head is an excellent upper grip for a painting. It is enough to attach the canvas support from a piece of metal corner (item 1 in the figure) to the legs with screw clamps of the tripod, and a light, convenient, reliable mobile easel is ready.

With a stationary easel made from a tripod, the matter is even simpler: the lower support, also known as a shelf, is cut out of plywood, as shown in pos. 2. Its bottom stops will be the knee connectors that make up the tripod legs, and the stability of the shelf will be given by the canvas itself, pressed from above by the tilted tripod head. How to turn a photo tripod into a traveling easel, lighter and easier to carry than a sketchbook, see also the video:

Video: portable homemade easel

The functionality of a tripod easel can be expanded to something unattainable on traditional easels using the method shown in pos. 3. The standard tripod screw with a 1/4” thread (machine, not pipe!) is unscrewed if you pull it towards you; it is a regular captive one, and then you can wrap it back up. Since the bolt head on the painting tablet is useless, a support platform is attached to the tripod platform, in which the bolt head is recessed, and the tablet is attached to it, pos. 4. Now it (the tablet) can be raised and lowered, tilted and rotated as desired. If you want to paint the sky from nature, lying on your back, please, from an easel-tripod, this is possible. And if you push the legs in completely, we get an excellent tabletop easel from a tripod, pos. 5.

An easel made from a photo/video tripod will also support a technical painting (stretcher with primed canvas) measuring up to approx. 1x1.5 m, but to install it you will have to make a device, the structure of which is shown in Fig:

The support platform is made of 6-10 mm 2-tier plywood, as shown in the section at pos. 1. Its dimensions are approx. 20x25 cm; extension of the mounting edge approx. 2-2.5 cm. According to the platform, a 3-tiered clip is made, tightly placed on the platform from above. The clip is attached to the back side of the canvas, as shown in pos. 3, put it on the platform - and you can paint the sky from life.

A good tripod is still not cheap, although it costs much less than an easel. On occasion, you can buy an old Soviet tripod quite inexpensively, but when converting it into an easel, certain difficulties will arise, because... some critical parts of the “sovtripods” were molded from fragile thin silumin. First of all, you need to unscrew the head tilt handle, drill out the counter thread in its socket, file the former threaded part along the length as far as possible (shown by the red arrow in item 1 of the next figure) and fix the tilt of the head with a wing nut screwed onto the now protruding shank tilt handle (green arrow). Without this, many Soviet tripods would not hold the Zenit-E with the Helios-40 portrait camera: either the camera would nod off, or the threads on the silumin would lick off, or it would burst. An unmodified old tripod is unlikely to hold a 40x60 cm plywood tablet in the desired position, and the canvas will definitely turn down all the way.

Further, the tripod platform of old tripods is not removable. Therefore, we remove the standard adapter screw from 3/8" (old tripod thread) to 1/4" (green arrow on item 2. The 3/8" screw is also captive and seems to be held only by a PCB cover (item 3) or thin steel with a radial cut, but it is impossible to remove the screw: its head rests on a non-separable silumin support, which, by the way, also often burst and had to be repaired in all sorts of different ways, as can be seen in item 4. But the screw is 3/8 "still could not be removed, unless the support would need to be broken completely. No, it is not necessary. You need to use side cutters No. 4 (or No. 2 - No. 3, who have hook hands) to carefully bite the shaped getinax head of the 3/8" screw (red arrow on pos. 4), and then its brass core “with skipping” was pulled out. Into the design! Purely Soviet in the worst sense. Well, after that you can put the support platform under the tablet or canvas on a tripod as described above.

You became interested in painting and drawing, after which you began to think about equipping your own artist’s workspace at home. Where to begin? From the easel, of course! Why not try making a painting easel yourself, while saving money?

In this material we will tell you how to quickly and easily make an easel for painting with your own hands.

Materials for creating a painting easel

pine slats 4.5×2 cm, 3 m long - 3 pcs.
self-tapping screws 34×2.9 mm - 6 pcs.
self-tapping screws 16.5×2.7 mm - 4 pcs.
nails without heads 2 cm - 4 pcs.
furniture screws with washers and wing nuts 72×5.2 mm - 2 pcs.
hanging hook, 13 cm - 1 pc.
door hinge, 2 cm - 1 pc.
wood glue
sandpaper (100–120)
emery wheel (100–120) - 1 pc.

Tools for making an easel

Sander
jigsaw
wood hacksaw
pair of construction gloves
meter and ruler
crosshead screwdriver
construction pencil
hammer
drill with 6 and 8 mm drill bits
electric screwdriver

How to make an easel with your own hands

We cut the bars to size:

1 PC. - 146 cm, 1 pc. - 154 cm, 2 pcs. - 168 cm, 1 pc. - 39 cm, 1 pc. - 53 cm.

We sand the bars with an electric sander and sand the ends with sandpaper. I used pine. It has a lot of knots, so you need to choose suitable slats. Pine “flakes” when processed manually, so you need to use a power tool. The main advantage of this type of wood for work is the low cost of the material.

After all the bars are sanded, we begin to assemble the frame of our easel. To do this as accurately and evenly as possible, we use a tiled floor: right angles between the tiles serve as a guide for aligning the slats.

We start the assembly with the central rail - 146 cm, we place it parallel to the seam on the tiled floor. If you don't have the option to use a tile floor, you can draw a line on the regular floor or make a temporary line out of duct tape. This will create the axis of our future easel, and the assembly will proceed relative to it.

We assemble two supports - 168 cm each, overlap the slats of 39 and 53 cm. To fasten the slats together, we pre-drill holes using a drill d = 6mm, coat the joints with wood glue, fix the slats relative to each other, secure the joints with self-tapping screws.

Using a loop, we attach a 154 cm rear support to the 39 cm rear rail in the center. We adjust it in length. For fastening I also use a drill d=6 mm.

Arranging a shelf for the subframe: we need a platband 5 cm wide and 60 cm long. There are only 3 of these pieces. Using a drill d=8 mm, we make two holes at a distance of 15 cm from the edge. Using a hammer and nails, we fasten the two planks together at an angle of 90 degrees, so that they form a shelf. The back bar will be the holder of this shelf.

Let the glue dry and the next day we finish assembling the easel: put it in a horizontal position, install a shelf for the stretcher. We adjust it in height. We attach the hinged hook that secures the rear support. You can choose a clear varnish, stain or paint to suit your taste. Now your easel is completely ready!