Ha, I was so wrong. It did snow. It’s not lasting long but we did get snow. This means two things. One. Coming to work on a motorbike during snow is entertaining and two I’ve not been able to bring my A2 size block of paper back to work. Thus the planned picture for this week has been put on hold.
Instead I’m going to do a more experimental picture from one of my many art books (Watercolor for the fun of it). It’s more experimental due to it being mainly bleeding washes – something I don’t do as a sytle very often as I prefere more detailed work than letting colours blend. However colour running is one of the many benefits of using watercolours – a fact I can hardly ignore.
This is a no pencil work picture – don’t realy need any to be honest. I’ve also not used any masking fluid – just left the gaps where I need white. Blended the majority of the picture on Monday and finshed it off today.
It’s a little different than my other works, but I actually quite like it.
What I don’t like is the paper – its a Daler Rowney “pre-stretched” paper that’s glued on 4 sides. I say “pre-stretched” in quotes as it’s clearly not streatched or it’s not stretched properly. As soon as you soak the paper it ripples and rises. When it dries the glued edges bring it all back flat.When you stretch paper, you soak it then gluethe edges to a board when it’s wet.As itdries out it stretches the paper fibre. When youfully soak it again it returns to the soak position without rippling or rising, giving you a real nice flatsurface to run the paint around. This stuff is not pre-stretched. Looks like I’ll have to hunt out myglue tape.

