The Wrong Stuff

When my friends and I do our Zoom sketch/paint sessions, 99% of the time I choose to do watercolor or ink and watercolor on my favorite paper -- Arches 140lb cold press.  It's the go-to paper for watercolor, no question.

Well, a month or so ago I ran out of it, and swore that before spending more $$, I would use up more of the supplies already languishing in the art closet first.  TONS of supplies, just going to waste. Surely I could sketch and paint on something other than Arches 140lb cold press paper, right?

I had colored pencil paper (and colored pencils).  I had oodles of canvases, and acrylic and oil paints.  And I had 140lb hot press paper for ink and watercolor efforts.  No problem!  

Harrumph.  Yes, problem.  Very much problem -- and many many frustrating sessions later, I caved and spent $$ on more Arches 140lb cold press paper.  Sigh.  

You see, cold press paper has a texture which is designed to absorb watercolor nicely and to allow for wonderful wet-in-wet work, while hot press paper is smooth and the paint just sits on it and dries almost immediately, hardly allowing any blending at all.  It's great for ink work and light paint washes but not for anything interesting, in my opinion.  I HATED working on it!

Here, for example, is one of the pics we chose last week, of a colorful nudibranch (underwater soft-bellied crustacean critter):

Painting the body on hot press wasn't too difficult, but that background has lots of texture, and trying to get the colors to blend was horribly hard.  Eventually I resorted to adding salt to the paint, a trick that can add nice textural elements.  

Next, I worked on this extremely challenging pic of an aurora borealis:

This time I had found an old pad of Winsor & Newton cold press paper buried in the closet, and decided to use it, much to my regret.  I quickly discovered why it was buried -- it had some sort of wretched sizing that made the paint bead up a lot.  With a great deal of teeth-gnashing, I somehow managed to get colors to blend, but working on that paper was so torturous that I threw the rest of the pad away.

You may also have noticed a certain lack of blueness in my painting.  That's because I don't have a good aqua/teal blue in my watercolor palette.  I've tried a gazillion different mixes of the blues I do have with the greens I have but nothing gives me the right aqua/teal color that I want.  I could NOT mix the color of that aurora picture, and I also did not have a blue like the one which can be seen in the water of our next lovely photo:

And again, this picture demanded lots of good wet-in-wet blending, and all I had was the dreaded hot press paper with its impossibly smooth surface, where the paint kept drying too quickly.  So again, I struggled mightily to produce something halfway decent, and with the help of a lot of white gouache paint, I got this:

Gah.  It's not too shabby but the BLUE is WRONG.  And I HATED working on that paper!!!!

I have learned my lesson.  Creating art just isn't much fun when you are using the Wrong Stuff.  Thus, after just one month of trying to use up supplies before ordering new ones, I threw in the towel.  

I am now anxiously awaiting the arrival of a whole lot of Arches 140lb cold press watercolor paper, and a tube of Daniel Smith's Cobalt Teal blue watercolor paint.

Sigh.

That was pretty much my week -- being frustrated over art.  Otherwise, I worked on the needlepoint project, stayed home in the cold weather, and tried to keep the Hounds suitably entertained.  One day I decided to take them in the car for a spin, just randomly for about 20 minutes, just to get out a bit.  As I was tootling out in the research district, whose buildings are interspersed with wide swaths of scrubland, I noticed a few magpies flying about, and a crow or two.  It was overcast and the light was terrible and all the birds looked dark.  Then I caught a split-second view of another dark bird as it flitted from the top of one short tree to the next.  In the space of that split-second, my birding brain said Much smaller than a magpie, not flying the way a crow does, acting more like a raptor, could it be a kestrel...?

I pulled over and got out the bins, and on close-up view, I could see the tell-tale markings and enough color, and yes, indeed, it WAS an American Kestrel:

Huzzah!

It felt great to know that my birding skills, while certainly rusty, are still functioning at times.  It made me want to go look for more birds, but alas, it was 34 degrees out.  No thank you.

Soon, though, it will warm up enough to get out for long birding walks, and I'm eager to get back to it.

That's all for now.  May you all have lovely weeks that avoid frustration!