New Page 1

All members of the St. Catharines Art Association

are invited to submit your Tips & Tricks

Click to submit your "Tip & Trick" by email

Index

(click on topic)

Masking straight lines

Packaging paintings for shipment

Watercolour paint dryness

Watercolour tool box

Giclee, a French word that means "spray of ink", is a revolutionary new printing process that uses digital technology to create fine art prints with the colour saturation and continuous tone look of an original work of art. Printed on the highest quality acid-free watercolour paper using pigmented light-fast inks, giclees produce extraordinarily accurate reproductions. These high fidelity images have amazing detail and stunning colour.

Try Grumbacher "Misket" available from the Hobby Shop in St. Catharines. It flows on smoother, covers better, and its orangey/pink colour makes it much more visible.

Try regular 1/2" masking tape. If you want the Cadillac of masking tapes guaranteed to hold a razor sharp edge use auto body vinyl masking take. It's about 8 times the price but we are talking about perfection here. Incidentally, the adhesive on the auto body tape is less aggressive eliminating the risk of damaging the surface fibers of watercolour papers.

Buy vinyl film masking from a sign making shop. Overlay it with your traced design, cut with an Xacto knife and peel off.

Keep a damp sponge in your watercolour palette to keep paint from getting too dry between working times.

In teaching for beginners one of the things that seems to occur in composition problems is getting the main image in the right place. Dead centre is the worst place. There are lots of ways to explain the golden mean and division of space. Probably the easiest is, divide a piece of writing paper into thirds with horizontal and vertical lines and draw a big circle around where the lines intersect. You will have four circles. Using this as a reference, choose one of these to place your main interest on, e.g. one large open flower (with other connecting shapes of flowers playing minor roles), or a barn in a landscape, etc. Horizon lines also look better above or below the halfway point and if you are drawing something like a boat on the water make sure you break the halfway mark in height as well. Or, in simpler words, make it BIG and off centre! Then you don't have to crop most of your paper to save that painting of a little vase of flowers floating in empty space!

Walmart sells a great metallic toolbox with adjustable compartments that will hold all your watercolour brushes, tools and supplies and you can fit a rectangular palette inside.

Wrap the painting carefully in blister pack. Layer it between two pieces of cardboard. Pack in a cardboard box (stuff with paper to fill spaces).