How To Pack A Wet Oil Painting For Travel

I’m in that situation right now, hi my name is Jacqueline Coates.

I’m just finishing my season at French Art School and I’ve actually got a trip tour I’m working on, so I’ve already packed two, two pieces, they’re 1 meter square, haven’t quite finished working on them in France so I’m taking them home to my studio in Kapunda the Barossa Valley, South Australia and I’m gonna work on them there where I’ve got more time because my time is a bit limited when I’m in France and I’ve got plenty of time back home.

So these two were okay but this one actually, but all that beautiful oils out and unfortunately I have to say goodbye to these oils and go back to my studio in Australia and work on this one. So I started reworking in this area, only yesterday and then we got a bit caught up and we’ve been having a great time, I’ve done some other things and I’ve also been relaxing, so I thought that’s okay I’m gonna take the paintings home and carry them.

So how do I stop this part being messed up? Well what I’m doing is I’m putting some sponges on the corner to create about almost an inch or about an inch of extra height, I’m putting that on the sides as well. It’s much easy to fix along the corners, I like it a lot better because you can wrap right around and actually keep them in place for the sides. Then I’m going to place these, let’s pop these down, then I’m going to pop this face down on my other canvass, so before I do that I just put these two face-to-face, wouldn’t mind having something that support this, now hold on a tick, I’ll just get a piece of cardboard.

It will increase the weight just a tiny bit so the bank updates from my art so they’re always getting things in and they always need to get rid of them tools because I’m packing things inside them, so now we put it face down to rest on top of the other ones and I’ll get this to sit, I’ll actually cut, scour this and get it to go right down but as you can see there’s a good half to one inch space in between so nothing’s going to be rubbing against the painting it’s gonna be safe in transit then we’re gonna bubble wrap it up, I’m going to add shoulder straps to this and they’ve got ratchets so I put two and then I tie them at the top and I simply carry it over my shoulder. I’ll be towing one case and I’ll have my paintings over my shoulder and there I go.

International traveling artists you can do it too if you need to. So just make sure you put a space between your paintings when you need to travel with them, as you can see it’s like an extra layer that allows for air in between so it’s as simple as that.

I hope you found this useful, it’ll take us too long and you’ll be bored watching us actually doing this packing but you get the concept, create air between the paintings, trim everything, tie it all down with tape, triple bubble wrap it so you can almost bounce a thing and you’re ready to go and put your address on it and your phone number and your country, who you’re flying with on what day from where to where. So that way it’s easier to track and if you can find your flight numbers even better, hope you found that useful.