Mods to the French Easel, #1 . . .

I'm all about the mod. Anything that can get me set up and painting more quickly once I'm out of the car is a "good thing" -- to steal a phrase from the quintessential queen of crafts, Martha Stewart. Yesterday, I did a nifty mod to my French easel.

I like to use a French Mistress when painting en plein air. Hey, it ain't what you think! I don't have some demure ingenue handing me brushes and tubes of paint as I need them, massaging my brow during the most troublesome passages, making me feel -- well, I'd better stop here and just move on before I get myself into trouble.

My French Mistress is a folding palette which rests on the drawer of my portable easel. I'll explain why I use a French Mistress, instead of the stock palette, in another post. You can see my French Mistress in the last image in this post if you don't know what one is.

So to keep 'splaining . . .

My first French easel broke down last October in Big Sur for good. It lasted for 26 years and I consider that decent value. For a while I thought I'd make it through my entire painting career with the same one, like a high school kid who manages to make a single peechee last all four years. My easel has suffered a world of hurt over those years. It has been dropped, dragged, bumped, and even soaked a couple of times in two different rivers  -- but it still did the job of holding my canvases, and carrying my gear. Until last October, that is. The last ten years I've been screwing, drilling, punching, gluing, and tying that box back together until it looks like something out of a low budget monster movie.

However, the wood finally gave out. There is no more triage to attempt. It's D.O.A. Nothing left to put back together.

I though I'd try one of these new-fangled easels everyone keeps going on about. The Easy-L, the Open-M, the Soltek, and so forth. And they do look pretty nifty online and after much deliberation I settled on the Easy-L as a replacement. When it arrived I made two piles of gear: one with the Easy-L, accompanied by its requisite tripod, and all my paints and other accouterments. And then I added the assorted containers and bins I'd have to use to carry everything in. In pile number two I put my old French Easel, my Mistress, and all the same paint and stuff that normally gets carried inside the easel itself. (Long ago I fitted that easel with back straps and a waist belt, which left my hand empty for carrying optional things like water and food.) Hmmmm. Guess which pile turned out to be the smallest and most efficiently packable? Pile number two with the French easel. So the Easy-L went back to the manufacturer and I ordered another French easel from the art store. A beechwood Mabef. The  exact same one I bought a quarter century ago. Apparently I hate change. I switched the backpack straps to my new easel and voila! Back in business.

Then I started obsessing about the wasted space you can find inside a French easel. Been thinking about it a long time, actually. There is almost 40% of unusable volume within the box, located between the palette and lid when the box is closed. (Sure, that space is there to accommodate the paint left out on the palette, but hear me out. Remember the French Mistress?)

So how could I exploit that wasted space for more storage? It was driving me crazy.

I found the answer at the Container Store.

Below is a Expand-A-Drawer® Cutlery Tray from the Container Store: 


 

The tray is 12"- 24" x 18" x 2-1/4", Meaning it is 18 inches long and expands from 12 to 24 inches wide. And it is is 2-1/4 inches deep. Ignore the expansion capability. We don't need it. Throw the side parts away. Or recycle them if you can. They are plastic.

With a few mods, the center part of the silverware tray fits perfectly into my Mabef French easel drawer. After you pull out the rinky-dink stock aluminum compartmental divides, the space measures 11.5 x 18. 125 inches.

With these simple mods, the center tray, minus the pull-out sides, fits perfectly into the pullout drawer of the Maybef easel. Perfectly. Almost too tightly. Apparently the bottom of the tray is exactly 11.5 inches, not 12 inches!

Here are the mods:

NOTE: I also swapped out the wooden sliders you find inside the lid for some smaller, hard rubber bushings. They grip just as well as the wooden ones and they have a lower profile that clear the edges of the plastic tray when the easel lid is closed. Those wood sliders (now bushings) are what clamp the lower rail to the easel box as you raise and lower your canvas. Swapping the wood sliders for bushings still permits me to carry any size canvas I want on the French easel, as it was originally designed. I'll keep the wooden sliders because I can easily re-attach them hould I ever want to go back to the original design. So no permanent mods have been made to the French easel itself! Only to the cheap plastic tray.

Here is the tray in place once the easel has been set up and opened:

With the lid closed, the plastic tray almost touches against the inside of the wooden top, leaving less than a 1/8 inch gap. So the easel lid itself keeps all my paint and gear in their respective places. No need to use a loose palette as a cover. (Remember the French Mistress? That's my palette.)

In fact, I in figuring this out I ran into an unexpected bonus! I can now set up my easel, and pull out the plastic tray with all the stuff neatly laid out in it, and lay the tray on the ground at my feet. Normally, I grab all the stuff and throw it down helter-sketer, like a game of pixie-sticks, and rummaging through it to find what I want. Now the paint and gear stays nice and arranged, and because the tray is plastic dew, dirt and mud is no longer an issue.

My set up, all ready to go:

Oh, and the French Mistress? It's getting late. Perhaps we'll cover that in another post . . .

Adieu,

Thomas