My first canvas
There! I finished my first little canvas.
Three layers of Gerstaeker’s gesso later I started working with the watercolor paint. Woooow, that was a bit different. The surface was rough and the paint seemed to be drying a bit pixelated.
I also immediately wanted to be much too detailed and covered every inch of the canvas.
Attempt 1 was unsuccessful, but I had read somewhere that it was quite easy to remove the painted surface from your canvas with water, as long as the painting was not yet “sealed”, in other words provided with a “lacquer layer” (more on this later in a future blogpost). That was almost right.
Some color remained, but not disturbing and could definitely be covered up again with another layer of gesso, after I had sanded the canvas a bit.
I was already convinced that this would work, be special and fun to do, so I’ve bought a jar of transparent watercolour ground and smeared it on the canvas as the fifth layer.
And now be a little more careful, let the water and the pigments do their job.
A suggestion of a path in a park is also a path in a park. With watercolor paint you have to work a lot in layers: first apply the global color areas and then layer by layer of details, starting with light and working towards the dark. But, on canvas it works very differently. Every time I want to put a new layer on it, the layer below comes back to life. It’s a less absorbent surface after all; the paint stays on top, as it were.
Yet I managed to apply several layers by using thicker paint each time (less water) and only going over it once. Brush stroke and done! Do not touch again until it is dry.
There are also advantages to activating the underlayer again: if you don’t like something, you can correct it again.
Yes, this works very differently from watercolor paper, but this is so cool!
I’ll be working on this further!