From the Aquarellista Headquarters 1

Today I started with a new portrait commission and as I am creating a ‘Making of’ book anyway I thought it would be a nice idea to use my writings to keep you posted on how it goes, the  materials, the details, the challenges and things I learn on the way…

After  sketching, studying, discussing and taking a lot of pictures (spread out over several days) I started with choosing my paper.

In this case (the protrait is head to feet and pretty big, hard to stretch on a board) I chose a sheet of heavy Arches paper, 640 grams rough grain Torchon, with those wonderful ‘bords frangés’ that only hand made paper has. And a beautiful watermark on all corners.

And then work on the perfect basic drawing – important because using transparent aquarelle watercolours makes it very hard to repair mistakes…