Step one on the collage round robin
April 23rd, 2006Last week we bought the 140lb Arches watercolour paper, 22″ x 30″. We also bought a few acrylic brushes and a cool bamboo wrap for them, the the brushes will be coming to my art class on Wednesday with me 
This week there were loads of posts about soaking and stretching the paper Vs. gessoing both sides. I finally got my hands on an issue of CPS yesterday and managed to read through THE article today. It says to gesso both sides of the watercolour paper, and I think it is only necessary to soak and stretch the paper if peparing it to receive watercolour paints.
Anyway, we soaked the paper in a oval-shaped bucket (as we don’t have a bath) and then stretched it using gum tape, attached to my standing frame. After the paper was dry and Miles cut it in half for me, today I decided to gesso both sides of the sheet anyway. With paintbrush in hand I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do for the background so I read and re-read the 2 articles in CPS and gathered a dozen or so of my Golden’s heavey bodied acrylics around me. In the end I went for the fluid acrylic in transparent red iron oxide and just went for it! I kept watering down the paint on my pallet and painting on and dabbing it off with a kitchen towel. When I had finished opainting I felt quite elated, like I was on a high or something. I can’t remember feeling quite like that even after finishing other pieces that I have really liked. Perhaps it was about working on a different surface or something. I just felt really liberated! I thought about adding more to it or layering anoother colour, but then realised that I actually liked it just the way it was It is difficult to see on the image because it is a lot lighter in colour than the paper is IRL, but it has lots of dept and texture. The texture is uneven, not just because of the paint effect but because I used clear gesso there were bits I missed and bits I went over a couple of times and have more gesso and more/less texture than the rest of the paper.
