Another Watercolor Painting

I'm still trying to figure out how to paint with watercolors.  I'm making some progress but I am still needing more practice.

Although I am learning and making some headway after the few paintings I did in the past week or two, I am slowly changing my painting supplies too which also causes a need for adjusting technique.  For instance, I purchased a different brand of warercolor paper, different brushes, and a few other supplies.  Each of these changes requires some practice to get used to the new characteristics of the new supplies.  I seem to be learning fairly quickly though.

Here is my latest painting from yesterday...

I need to start with having a specific plan for each of these paintings.  That is definitely a problem that is making things a bit difficult.  I'm sort of winging each painting with not much of a plan in mind.  Also, I really should be working on just one part of these paintings at a time.  Once I get a handle on each part, then I should attempt a complete painting.  I'm sort of tring to run before learning to walk.

For this painting, I used a new brand of watercolor paper and, honestly, I'm not sure I like it.  I had a very difficult time keeping the paper wet.  Then, when I did get it wet, it seemed to get damaged very easily when brushing on paint.  

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EDIT:  I'm still learning about painting with watercolors and this includes which paper is best.  In short, I used the wrong paper for this painting, above, as well as the previous paintings I did a few days prior to this painting.  

Although Canson does make some very good paper, the paper I purchased was not preferable.  I had purchased Canson XL which is not 100% cotton.  The XL paper is only 60% cotton.  It would have been nice if that info was written somewhere on the pad but it is not.  If it was, I would not have purchased this pad.  I guess this pad of paper will be put with the kids' art supplies.  Or maybe I'll just use it for sketching or blotting or scrap.  Hmmm...  maybe I'll try it with other mediums.

When the paper is not 100% cotton, you do end up with the paper falling apart more quickly and easily.  It frays (which I experienced), it just doesn't absorb the water the way it should.  Pigment absorption is quite different as well and not in a good way.  These character traits of less than 100% cotton paper explains the problems I was experiencing with both of the papers I have on hand and especially this Canon XL paper.  I really thought this Canon XL was better than this.  Actually, I don't think I was aware that Canson had two different lines of paper so I didn't pay close enough attention to what I was purchasing.  

I had purchased this paper at our local Michael's.  The amount of art supplies available at Michael's is seriously lacking.  Even the few aisles of art supplies are poorly stocked and there are many empty areas of the shelves.  Actually, the selection of any type of products at our Michael's is exceptionally poor.  Then again, that doesn't differ much from any other type of stores in our area.  I won't be purchasing art supplies from Michael's anymore though.

Through my research I have found that Canson Heritage paper is 100% cotton and is a better paper than the XL paper I had purchased.  Since experiencing the problems I have experienced, I have done more research on paper.  Arches, Paul Rubens 100% cotton, and Academy Baohong are among the papers I should be purchasing next.  

The actual texture of the paper matters to me as well.  There are some papers that have a very distinct lined texture...  I don't like these papers.  I prefer more of a random flowing texture.

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Compounding this problem with the new paper is the fact that I also used a new set of brushes.  Although these new brushes are far better than the cheap brushes I was using previously, I still had problems with them.  First, they didn't seem to hold enough water and paint.  The other problem was that I was looking for sizes of brushes that were not included in this set.  

On the positive side, I learned quite a bit more during this last painting exercise!

I've once again ordered better brushes.  I did a bit more research and chose some highly recommended brushes (Princeton Aqua Elite).  I purchased only five specific brushes.  If I like them, then I will add more variety to this set.  I'll use the previous set of new brushes I had used for this painting, above, only for other types of paint.  

Anyway, I'm making progress!