As seen in the SAA 'Paint Magazine September 2014...
I was recently sent some
samples of the SAA’s very popular watercolour ‘practice paper’ to try. The SAA
have upgraded and improved their previous product and I was given the
opportunity to try it out for myself. This is a product that I have been
familiar with for many years, very economical and good quality, I recommend it
to all my beginner students. When you are starting out the last thing you want
to worry about is ruining an expensive sheet of hand made paper! I also use this
paper in my demonstration workshops and put little squares of it out in all my
classes for students to try their colours on.
The first thing I noticed is
that the new paper is whiter than the previous one, something that is quite
important to me. As always I stretched the paper onto board before using, and
left it until the next day when it was flat and dry. Stretching is not hard to
do and will hugely improve the working surface of any paper.
I decided to do a little
sample painting of the peach coloured poppies in my garden. Wanting to try a
range of watercolour media I used a combination of my favorite Talens paints,
as well as some excellent SAA watercolours, watercolour pencils and even some
‘Brusho’ pigment powder.
As with the previous practice
paper this one is fairly smooth, being close to a ‘hot press’ surface in some
other ranges. The advantage with smooth paper is that you can get more accuracy;
the disadvantage is that it can be harder to control washes. However, the paper
took wet into wet techniques well and was equally responsive to flat washes and
some of the mixed media I applied. The brightness of the paper shone through
the pink flowers and I was very happy with the result. Due to its smooth
surface beginners will find it easy to put an initial drawing down, this paper
would also be very suitable for other techniques such as pen and wash, mixed
media and collage.
I had hoped that the new
paper would be as good as the previous one; I was relieved to find that it is
far better!
The finished painting "Peach Poppies"...
No comments:
Post a Comment