Adventures In Watercolor 6

It’s been a while since I posted my watercolor paintings, and the truth is that it’s been a while since I painted too – it’s the end of the semester, so I’ve been too busy with work. Luckily, I still have some paintings that I haven’t posted, so here goes.

These paintings are a little special – the story is, before I moved home from LA, I bought a pad of watercolor paper from Michael’s with the intention of practicing on it. Flash forward 6 years, the pad has been forgotten in the back of my desk drawer until I started taking watercolor classes and finally remembered it. However, by this time, it has gone moldy and absorbed water too quickly, so the paint can’t spread like it should. Being the cheapskate that I am, I refused to give them up, so I looked up ways to salvage them. I didn’t find any straight answers, but I did find some instructions for making your own watercolor paper, in which you can use gelatin to “size” the paper (i.e. coat it to make it less absorbent). I decided to give it a try.

The result was… OK. I didn’t get my paper back to how it was, but at least I can paint with it now. It doesn’t take well to wet-on-wet, so I mostly use it for still life and food painting. It allows me to understand watercolor a bit more (I never knew about sizing paper before) and gives me a chance to practice different techniques, which is fun.

These are supposed to be eggs but I got impatient with shading each individual one…

 

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