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My First Attempt

These flowers were painted on 140 lb. watercolor paper stretched over an 8 x 10 canvas.  (An artist friend, Ona Kingdon, put how to do this step by step on her blog.  To see it, go to www.emotiveexpressions.blogspot.com and scroll down to the October 8th entry.)  Painting on the stretched paper was a joy and painting the sides was not as hard as I thought it would be.

Finishing

You can see the nice effects of the salt I put in the background wash while wet.  When I use salt, I spray the finished painting with a special spray to neutralize the pH.  Next, I sprayed it with a fixative for watercolors.  Now I’m going to varnish it and frame it like an oil.  (Used: Archival Mist, Aquarell-Fixativ)

Problems

Stretching my paper over an 8 x 10 canvas was easier than varnishing the stretcher bars and cutting a backboard, but the bulk of the paper and the canvas made it too thick to fit in a standard frame.  So much for shortcuts.