Once you’ve got you patch applied and your piece of board laying flat on top of it, you need to place a weight of some description on top of that to keep everything is position and to make sure a good bond is formed between the patch and the original canvas. Once you’ve done that you need to let the PVA dry for at least 24 hours before doing anything else.

Once the glue had dried and you’ve removed the piece of hardboard and the weight your repair should look something like this.

The new canvas patch should be glued to the original canvas right up to the edges. If it isn’t, and the edges of the patch can still be lifted up, you’ll need to work a little more PVA glue under the unglued edges with match stick (or something similar), replace the board and weight onto the back of the painting, and wait another 24 hours for that to dry.

This is what the front of my painting looks like after the patch repair has been made to the rear.

If you look closely you can see my repair was very successful. The canvas is even and flat once again, and all the edges are lined up well. You can however see that there are some stray/loose fibres, that’s not a problem, we’ll sort that out next.

To paint over the repaired area I mix a little Liquin Oleopasto medium into the paint that I use. Liquin is a medium that artists can add to oil paint and is mainly used to speed up drying times in every day oil paining, Oleopasto is just a much thicker form of this medium and helps to fill in any indentations in the repaired area as I repaint.

One of the keys to repainting a canvas like this is to repaint more than just the repaired area. Like with all painting, looseness/tightness of brushwork should match that of the rest of the painting, in my case other parts of my painting are painted with quite thick loose paint, namely the foreground wall and rocks, so this new more thickly painted area doesn’t stand out. You can see I continued repainting across the horizon line so that it all matched the newly repaired area – you might say the repair is hidden in plain sight. I used a palette knife to mix the new paint/oleopasto mix, and put the paint on quite thickly and deliberately uneven.

The final result; a permanent repair and will last as long as the rest of the painting, and one that is unnoticeable unless one looks at the back of the painting.

See the framed repaired canvas painting here

Read this post if you just want to get a dent out of a painting canvas.

If you have any questions get in touch.

Chris