Fantasy Watercolour Stage 1

So today I started work on the two watercolours I intend to do. I have not posted anything for the last few days for a couple of reasons as I will explain, the most inconsequential of which was that I was shopping all day yesterday, but I was able to prepare the paper for work so not all was lost. Anyway onto the actual artwork.

 

These two above are attempts at the two watercolours. However these were done on only heavy cartridge paper rather than gummed watercolour paper. This meant that when applying the water and the paint, the paper start falling apart, not good. However I did not have any watercolour paper so I persevered.

Until I found that I did have some from my AS. So I prepared two sheets of that to start afresh on. The preparation consists of soaking the sheets in water for as long as possible, before fixing them to a board using masking tape and leaving them to dry out completely. What this does is it first of all swells the paper while it soaks, and then once it is fixed and it starts drying it stretches the paper. This ensures that when you start applying the water and paint, the paper will not curl or create bumps while drying. Anyway so once that was done I applied the first paint in a wash layer which you can see below.

This is a very simple layer simply to get some colour on the page to cover the white (but it will make a bit of a comeback later). So all is going well so far, though still lots to go.