Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Watercolor Whiteout?

I've painted more since I graduated in December than I ever got to do while in school. As a result, this poor little old lady has tennis elbow. Yep, you can get tennis elbow from painting non stop for eight weeks!  Only, I like to think of it as painters elbow...

As a result, I'm taking a few days off from painting and giving my silly arm a rest. It's hard. I've been doing little busy work projects while I "rest."  Recently, I posted a painting with red paint seeping onto the picture from another page and claimed I knew how to fix that.  Well friends, I decided to put my boast to the test.  

The vermillion paint that seeped onto my lovely, white tree trunks..

Awhile back I bought a product called 'Aquacover Liquid Watercolor Paper' or something close to that. Even though I didn't really mind the red stains, I decided this would be a great place to try the Aquacover out. 

Directly after I applied the Aquacover coat


I let it dry for an hour first. The makers of the product claim you can paint right over it, it won't lift and it will accept a new layer of paint. 

Closeup of the affected area after I tried to paint the details back in



Sadly, it dissolved when I added the new shadows over it and mixed with the paint, making it a milky violet.
The finished result. Not a perfect solution, but it did work to a certain degree. 


However, you can see the red is mostly covered. I wouldn't use it on a real painting, I'm sad to say. I'd love to know what results others have had using the Aquacover. In the meantime, I hope you feel very sorry for me and paint a pile of work in sympathy!  

2 comments:

RH Carpenter said...

So sorry you have painter's elbow! I imagine anything repetitive can cause pains. I tried the Aquacover, too - did not care for it and don't remember why - perhaps I had the same problems you had. Daniel Smith makes something called Watercolor Ground that is supposed to work over things that are not watercolor paper to make them accept watercolor - that might be something to try to fix these things? I really liked it with the red, though :)

Alice Jo Webb said...

I liked the red blots, too. This is what happens when I'm not kept busy, I fiddle with things!

I'll look the watercolor ground up, thanks for the tip.