if you watched my last vlog, you already know what this is about.
i just felt like doing something quick and fun, and i
decided to use up a little bit of this montreal canal paper
which i think is more of a very heavyweight cotton rag
drawing paper - sounds kind of weird, but i knew that it doesn't really look that
good, but when i started with the watercolor,
it looked worse than ever. there's no way that it
could have been this bad!
the water went in, but the color didn't really flow together that well,
and it looked immediately really really splotchy and speckled looking.
um it does this anyway, but this was way worse
than i was expecting, even after it was dry.
it still looked really patchy and speckly. you can see
every brush stroke pretty much. so what the heck happened here?
with a sneaking suspicion i turned it over
and i played with watercolor on the other side.
and it wasn't good, but it looked more like watercolour.
that's when i realized that i had forgotten
which side was up, and i started drawing and painting on the wrong side
of the paper. don't do this! some papers are only meant
to be used on one side, so all i could do is start over.
i'm using my very last sheet of fabriano studio,
which i also don't like, but it at least
is meant for watercolor. i went through my whole pad of papers and
i marked in pencil the back of every sheet so that this will never happen to
me again. because this often happens where i
just get confused, i don't know which side i'm supposed to paint on,
and then i try it and then i ruin it, and it's
a gigantic waste of time and paper. so that's my tip for you. when you get
some papers, make sure you mark which side
seems intended to be the front, just in case.
just in case it matters a lot. now, what am i doing?
i've been doing a lot of sketching lately, and when i want to fill
a sketchbook really fast, i have been practicing a little bit of
word art - not really calligraphy, not
really typography, it's just playing with words in an illustrative
way. and i really liked one of the ones that
was in the book. it looked kind of neat. it's just this house that i drew
just because i was illustrating the line, "it creeps all over the house"
which is a line from a short story i was reading:
"the yellow wallpaper" i think it was? and i thought that it kind of looked
like a movie poster or a book cover or something.
in between doing a commission or meaningful work, not really knowing
what to do, i decided just to play with this
and practice something that i wouldn't normally do. and one thing about using
papers that don't react the way that i want them to
is that it forces me to accommodate it in unique ways. when i started painting
the house and everything was melding together and
nothing was really working properly, and i will always find
myself adding more and more layers to strengthen that color
without making any progress. it just gets more and more opaque and not really
richer or darker in any way. in this case, i took a more drippy kind
of feel, sticking with this red-violet
yellow-green color scheme that i was going for. everything is cohesive in that
way. and i think all of the last resort
dripping textures added quite a lot to this.
and i'm really glad that that happened, and i'm not sure that
i would have done that if the watercolor paper was actually
behaving as i was expecting it to you know? so sometimes
good things come from unfortunate
situations.