Watercolor Painting for Dummies Read Online Free PDF Page B

paper is a student grade and is rather thin. It buckles when wet and can’t endure much scrubbing for changes.
    140-pound paper is probably the most popular choice. It’s fairly stout, can be stretched to avoid buckling when wet, dries quickly, and is medium price. (See the upcoming “Stretching before you paint” section for info on stretching.)
    300-pound paper is like a board. It doesn’t require stretching, costs double what 140-pound paper costs, and takes longer to dry.
    You can judge the other weights available in comparison with these weights.
    Each paper weight has its advantages, and which weight you choose depends on what you want to accomplish. For the projects in this book, I recommend 140-pound cold-press, 100 percent cotton rag acid-free paper in any brand.
    In addition to the various weights of paper, you can use
watercolor board,
which is paper adhered to illustration board. It doesn’t buckle when wet and is available in 20-x-30-inch pieces or by the case.
    Touching on texture
    Texture
describes the surface finish on paper. The type of paper you choose gives you different effects with the paint. You may want a smooth paper for lots of detail or a textured surface to make sparkling reflections on water. You can choose from three main surface textures:
    Hot press: This texture is even and smooth, and makes a nice surface for prints and drawings. The paper has a slicker finish that you can use to create some interesting results. It’s more difficult to make soft transitions when using this paper, so you may have more hard edges than you want. I explain more about hard and soft edges in Chapter 3.
    Cold press: This slightly bumpy texture is the most popular texture for watercolorists. The texture allows paint to settle into the texture pockets or sit on top and skip over the pockets, creating some different technique options. I go into some of these techniques in Chapters 3 and 4.
    Rough: Rough texture has an even bumpier surface than cold press. This surface is good for exaggerated rough texture techniques, which I illustrate in Chapter 3.

Don’t forget the paint (er, coloring pigment)
    Paint is made up of a couple of elements.
Pigment
is either chemical or natural coloring that has been ground to a fine powder. The powder is added to a
binder
that makes it sticky and allows it to be used as paint. The binder for oil paint is oil. The binder for milk paint is milk. Now, what’s the binder for watercolor? That’s right, it’s gum arabic! Okay, it was a trick question.
    Gum arabic
is a water-soluble, sticky, clear goo that when added to pigment makes watercolor. Powdered pigment can’t be used without a binder, which is already in the paint when you buy it. Most watercolorists just use plain water to dilute their paints and for cleanup, but you can purchase a little jar of gum arabic and use it to thin your paint if you want. It makes the paint shiny and makes it flow nicely.

    The words
pigment
and
paint
are used interchangeably in this chapter and, indeed, throughout this book.
    Grading pigments
    You can purchase pigment in two grades:
    Student-grade paint has less pigment and more filler and is easily identified by its lower cost. You can still produce a nice painting using it, so I recommend starting with this grade if you’re on a budget.

    One disadvantage of cheaper paint is its lack of
lightfastness,
meaning the color can fade.
    Professional-grade paint costs about twice that of student-grade because it has a higher quality of pigment, finer grinding, and less filler.
    Does the grade make a difference in the painting? Yes, so upgrade to professional paint when you’re ready. How can you tell the difference between student-grade and professional-grade paint? Price. A tube of student-grade paint ranges in price from $1 to $5 per tube. Professional-grade paint ranges from $9 to $30 per tube.
    Higher grades of paint are usually more permanent or lightfast.
Permanent,
as applied to pigment, means