Zed A. Shaw, Painter

I think the combination of transparent watercolor ground with shellac soap really makes watercolor nice to work with. Let me explain a few of the issues with WC then why this combo seems to help:

Water color is transparent, so that means when you put one color down, then another on top, they combine to make a darker merge of the two. It's like if you had a light yellow piece of stained glass and put a blue piece on it, you'd get a dark green.

Since water color is all light passing through nearly pure pigment it tends to be the most chromatic medium. Other mediums the light bounces off an opaque surface with pigment in it rather than passing through, so some of the chroma is reduced by the opacity.

Oil paint is the only one that can also do this transparency, but you have to try to do it. Watercolor is all transparent and very very transparent, so it has a couple things to overcome: 1. You have to paint "negatively" from light to dark. 2. You have to layer paint.

With oil paint, if I want one part to be yellow and another to be green, I just mix those and put them down. Pastel, gouache, all of them are like this. Watercolor I have to put the yellow down lightly, then put blue or green on that, but after it dries, and then...

Watercolor's binder is gum arabic, which is basically a candy that goes from solid to "glue" with water. So you put one layer on and if you're not very soft it can lift the layer under it, and you're screwed. Usually it's not a problem but if your paper sucks it is.

Gouache has a real hard time with multiple layers, and if you use one of those watercolor notebooks from Stillman & Birn, then the paper just can't handle multiple layers of watercolor. It falls apart and lifts too easily. Enter watercolor ground and shellac soap.

Watercolor ground is acrylic with some kind of absorbent stuff in it, usually wood pulp or similar. When the acrylic dries it is a plastic so it seals the paper, but it has pulp so it's absorbent and watercolor binds to it. That lets you layer watercolor AND remove it.

Now, because the ground is a plastic and because it lets you remove easily, it does mean that the under layers of watercolor will lift easier, so it makes the problem of layering worse. Sure, the paper holds up, but now when you paint each layer lifts some of the lower layers.

Enter Shellac Soap: It's shellac varnish, but it's like a soap so it mixing in with water. Shellac is basically bug guts and is water soluble, so put a bit of that in some clean water and you've got yourself a varnish in your binder. Now each layer goes on and stays on.

But, the Shellac isn't ultra permanent like say acrylic is. You can still get it wet and remove it, it's just that *more watercolor* won't take it off. You don't even really notice it's in there, except that the watercolor film is a little waxy and seems to hold better.

THIS then gives me an idea for my next experiment: Watercolors are very delicate, so you have problems shipping them and have to put them under glass making them hard to see. What if! You use the watercolor ground on a piece of aluminum, shellac soap, & varnish with acrylic?