Day 69- Hot Press paper!!

Despite its deceptive appearance of luscious soft finish I DO NOT like hot press paper.  Its very unforgiving.  Once the paint is on its not going anywhere.  I cant do Charles Reid style loosing edges and watery textures of water color doing its watercolory thing on hot press.....the paint just sits there and says here I am and here I will stay!! 

As I have said before I have a lovely journal FULL of Fabriano hot press...fun for playing on but NOT for painting cats.  While I like this cat painting, I have done alot better...I may repaint him on Kilimanjaro aka COLD PRESS paper!!

The final Tom HP which stands for Tom Hot Press

This is the initial sketch with a 4H Pencil

This is an early pic of Tom HP.  I like to take pics in progress to see where I need to work on it...Sorry it's a little blurry...you can't go back to retake!! It didn't matter if it was blurry until I decided to use it on my blog post today!! I will do better!!

I kept having to intensify the darks to make the cat recede under the quilt and make his chin recede...as well as his nostrils.  Painted them over and over again just a touch darker because this paper was NOT going to let you lighten it if you got to dark!!

I had to paint him in layers...runny stuff was NOT an option...I like him...but really wanted to do him runny ...I guess I will get some of the watercolor books out and READ about that darn hotpress paper now!! Report soon.  I have a masters in Library and Information Science so I am a PRO at research!! :)

Thanks goodness for mr. clean eraser sponges...those meant for the walls...a couple of times I looked at parts of it and thought OH NO its ruined but Mr. Clean to the rescue...I always did like Mr. Clean on the ads!!

This is how I set up to splatter Tom.  I laid strips of paper towel around the edges and a wad in the middle to cover Tom.   I didn't want to get splatter on the cat nor did I want to get it on the white margins which really didn't matter since I had already smeared red paint on them!! OH well...something else to improve on!!

Thanks for looking!!