My class last week had gone over the very basics of painting with watercolours and materials. I felt I learned a few things though hope the next classes will be more advanced.

For instance, the teacher recommended that we do not put the tube paints into slots and let them dry out but rather to use the paints from the tubes fresh. This will admittedly increase my cost price more than I would like, but the pan paints were specifically designed to dry out and re-wet, whereas the tube paints were not.

I also learned certain paints would stain the paper more, like pthalo blue, unlike ultramarine blue. The paint called “chinese white” (which I bought when I was first starting out and hardly ever used after again) is mainly used for pastel colours.

Also, the taping of paper apparently is a big debate in watercolour. However, in the event that you want to keep the painting to the edge, you can paint larger and then cut the painting out later. This never occurred to me.

I was glad to learn that my painting sizes seemed to make sense and would work with frames, so my 9 x 12 could work with a 11 x 14 mat when there is a white border edge to it because of the taping down of the paper. It seems that taping the edge would make it a lot easier, so perhaps I will return to doing that. It does not exactly make my prints easier to size (a thing I have still been somewhat struggling to figure out) but I still have a number of weeks to my Queen West Art Crawl exhibit Sept 23-24.