The KEBAartmate is a wonderful piece of equipment from the Swedish company Keba. It was designed along with English watercolourist Ben Haslam, who distributes it in the UK.
Stretching your paper is one of the main bugbears for all artists and if you’re like me, you begin your painting with enthusiasm, moving on to applying the watercolours with a “can’t wait to stretch it and come back to it later, I’ll just carry on and hope it’s okay” type attitude. But it never works, does it? You’re just getting stuck in when the papers starts to curl, and although there are ways to rectify the situation later, it’s always just a bit too late when you realise you would have been better stretching your paper first. But it’s a bother isn’t it, or at least it has been up to now.
The KEBAartmate consists of a backing board with a neat aluminium frame which is adjustable and able to offer flexibility in the amount of tension you apply, it can accept all types of paper and it does the work for you so much more neatly and simply than old-fashioned stretching techniques, and you don’t end up with a thin line of gumed brown paper edging all your work.
It really is very easy to use, first the paper is put onto the baseboard and water applied, then the aluminium sides are closed down and you turn the key at the corners to increase the tension until the paper is as flat as you want it to be. You can adjust the tension according to the needs of the paper you’ve chosen. Then just allow the paper to dry and you can begin painting. You don’t need to open the frame until your painting is finished.
The KEBAartmate comes with a booklet containing instructions and, as a bonus, you will find instructions on how to remove the backing board so that you can use the stretcher to hold embroidery or silk, and then of course you could work from both sides if you wanted to.
The only disadvantage I could think of is if you’re one of those artists who likes to work on more than one painting at a time, as you may find you need to buy more than one which could turn out to be quite expensive. But there is a possibility that you could pre-stretch your paper and then when it’s dry take it out of the KEBAartmate and use it as you would normally. The full imperial size costs in the region of £92, it’s £72 for the half imperial size and £59 for the quarter imperial size. I can see this clever gadget being added to a lot of artists wish lists in the next few months.
New Options now added to Kebaartmate!
Kebaartmate have started to market an Upgrade Kit which consists of two long half lengths and a 1/2 baseboard.
This added to the pieces of existing 1/4 Kebaartmate enables the owner to make a complete 1/2 kebaartmate (15×22″) plus a bonus Panorama shape from their collection ( the panorama has to be used without the baseboard). The upgrade kit ultimately saves you £29 than if you were to purchase a complete 1/2 kebaartmate.
Confused? You simply take the 1/4 to pieces, swap the lengths around to make the different shapes rather like a train set.
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