Hard Board

I finally got around to buying some "hard board" at Lowes the other day. This stuff is like masonite, but it's sort of finished on both sides instead of just one like the old sort of masonite. I will probably need to sand it a bit and put gesso on it since the stuff I got is brown like normal masonite. They did have some white panelling board near where I bought this but that was about $16.00 per sheet. This stuff was about $7 or $8 a sheet. I had the guys at lowes use their awesome saw thingy to cut it down in to a bunch of 7 1/2" strips. I'll later go with a saw at home and cut off little 5 1/2 inch strips to use for paintings or color pencil drawings. I think for pastels, real masonite with the fuzzy back would be a nice support. For color pencils though, this stuff with a maybe gesso on it after I sand it down to rough up the surface a little might do nice. It got me a whole bunch of potential paintings that can be 5x7 " or so (plus 1/2 inch for borders in case I put the paintings in a 5"x7" photo frame eventually or scan it and crop it down for use on postcards on cafepress.com or lulu.com)... will be an interesting experiement. The board was 8'x4' orignally... so you get a lot of board for your money.