Painting Four, Step One
Preparation...
At this point I have no idea what subject I am about to paint. All I know is I will do a painting. So, material preparation is my first step.
Materials:
I prefer to paint on stretched paper with a hard supporting surface. The back board is 34"x 26" plywood which I painted gray using exterior latex house paint (perhaps my own idosyncrisy) so that it does not compete with color to come. I paint the backboard so that the wood does not suck as much moisture from wet paper and pigments. Notice how close together the staples are.
| The watercolor paper is "Arches," a French made paper available in most art supply stores and online. I use "cold-press" which means it has some texture. The paper I soaked in my bathtub where it expanded. While wet, I stapled the paper to the back board and it has dried (and contracted) to a tight smooth painting surface. Surface tension is strong and the reason for the quantity of staples.
Paper soaking time for me is by "feel." I remove and mount a sheet of paper when I bend a corner and it does not flop back to its original position in the water. I also try to remove the wet paper before the fold lies flat against itself too wet to pop back - optimum seems to be when the wet paper in water holds a right angle soft fold. Don't stress out here...I don't think it's all that critical. |
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| After the paper has dried on the back board, I use masking tape to define the outer limits of the painting. Many painters don't do this. I just like the neatness of the finished painting with all its fairly clean edges. I will leave the tape on |  |
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| during the painting process and peel it off once the painting is complete leaving fairly crisp clean edges to my picture.
And finally, I do not do one surface at a time. I find preparing surfaces for watercolor painting tedious and normally do the boring job six at a time. The extra five surfaces, I store flat to wait for their painting turns. |
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