Watercolor paper buckles

What is wrong with the classical technique of gluing the edges with brown paper adhesive tape? It works fine, as long as you use the type of paper tape with adhesive you have to wet. Masking tape won't work. Use wood substrates, shellac it if you need to avoid staining from the wood.

That's a horrible technique. Adhesive sprays will do nasty things to the paper, and make it deteriorate more rapidly. I have been experimenting with removable adhesives for sticking paper to a substrate, as part of an obscure printing process. I have made dozens of experiments, and all of them are basically failures. The best results so far came from drymounting paper to formica. The problem is that you need a drymount press to adhere the paper, and drymount presses just don't come in huge sizes (and the smaller ones are extremely expensive). Sometimes waxy residue gets on the front of the paper which won't do much good for watercolors. And then there's the problem of removing the paper from the backing board when the work is finished, which requires another application of heat in the drymount press. And after all this, you're left with a piece of paper that is partly permeated with waxy drymount residue. My framer asserts that drymount isn't archival, and my prints are archival, so I abandoned this method. There were a lot of other problems with this process that I won't go into, so just don't even bother with this technique unless you like repeating a failed experiment. But if you DO manage to get this to work, you must tell me how.

No, it certainly isn't good for your health. Read the label, or ask 3M for a Material Safety Data Sheet. That stuff will give you liver cancer, its extremely carcinogenic.

Use the old tried and true methods. Glue the edges with paper tape. The paper has to be wet when it is glued, because it shrinks when it dries. That will help eliminate buckling.

1. Have you tried using many small map pins to pin down the wc paper on gesso-coated fibre board? 2. After the painting is done, try wetting the back of it lightly and pressing it between large sheets of blotting paper. 3. What's so wrong with a few buckles anyway? once the painting is attached to a backing with museum tape, it stays pretty flat. Or if you are still into mats, the mat holds it flat in the frame.

How can artists prevent watercolour paper from buckling?

I tried tacking the edges of the watercolor paper to a hard surface with large thumbtacks, as suggested by a pro and a painting book, but that doesn't help enough, because the paper buckles up over the entire surface area, and eventually even buckles where the tacks are too.

I tried gessoing the back of the paper to prevent buckling, as suggested by the experts, but that doesn't seem to help much, or not enough.

I tried gluing a sheet of watercolor paper to a piece of gessoed art board, but after applying a lot of water to the paper, this sandwich curved like a bow. Same thing happened when I glued watercolor board to gessoed art board.

So I invented my own method, which was to temporarily bond the paper onto a sheet of corrugated plastic with 3M 77 Adhesive Spray. But after I resumed painting, the paper lifted off again. So I sprayed both surfaces with the spray according to the can's instructions for a permanent bond, applying heavy weights to the sandwich and waiting several hours to allow better bonding. This time, the adhering worked better, but the paper is gradually coming off again as I paint more washes.

Also, I've had a headache all day

Hi! In early December someone else asked the same question and for what it's worth, I posted the following reply : ..... I try and avoid using sheets of watercolour paper and whenever possible use watercolour 'blocks' which means that when the work is dry, I simply insert a knife and cut off a perfectly stretched piece, ready for framing .... Shortly after posting the above, I closed down my computer for the dreaded period and never saw a reply so hope that it was of some use to someone somewhere! Cheers!

says...

What everyone so far who has replied seems to have missed is the fact that you say nothing about having soaked the paper before tacking it down. That is the entire secret to keeping paper from buckling. I argued in the recent thread until I got tired of everyone telling me I knew not what I was talking about.

All I can tell those doubting Thomases is that success is its own reward. And as Eicher suggests, I use the traditional method of taping my already saturated paper to a stiff board. I end up with a piece of 140 lb paper that is tight as a snare drum head, and stays that way until I am finished with the painting, soak the paper tape to remove it, and end up with a clean white border all around the edge of my painting.

Yes, I believe I specifically mentioned soaking the paper.

Lots of my printmaker friends dry their prints by stretching the damp paper on boards with glued paper tape. They just cut the paper inside the taped edges. Of course you have to plan for a little extra margin, because you lose an inch or 2 under the tape..

I just received an email from someone asking me detailed questions about why printmakers would tape down paper, as I alluded to in my previous message. But this person did something really stupid, emailing me asking for a response but

I took the time to write a detailed answer, and only upon receiving a bounce message did I discover the invalid address. I could easily post those remarks here on usenet, they would have been of great interest as it contained studio methods from some of the greatest printmaking atelier in the US. However, I'm not going to because you pissed me off.

Listen here, Mr. Dont try to email me, you're a total idiot and you wasted my time. Don't expect any answers when you abuse people in this manner..

Thanks, Charles. I didn't know about that technique. I'll shop for the tape.

Yikes! I don't want to use it regularly in that case!

Of course I did read the label. It would certainly be foolish to apply a chemical to one's artwork without reading the label!

The label says to spray in a well ventilated area. It doesn't say that the spray is still evaporating toxic fumes several hours after spraying. (I moved the painting back into my studio about an hour after spraying, but apparently that wasn't long enough for most of the fumes to evaporate. I couldn't smell the fumes, so I assumed

I'm think that by fibre board, you mean artboard, which is masonite panels. I pinned the paper with pins or tacks to corrugated cardboard and, for the latest one, corrugated plastic. I thought the masonite would be too hard to stick the pins into.

Okay; I've noted that.

The paint runs down from the high parts of the paper and pools in the low areas, even pooling in low areas that I hadn't pre-wetted. The buckling causes me to lose control over where I want the paint to go. I know that some looseness of the paint flow is to be expected with fluid acrylics, but with the buckling, there's too much looseness, and I can't control the paint flow enough.

Thanks, Marilyn.

The watercolor blocks may be good for some of my paintings. But their size is limited; the biggest one I can find is 18 by 24 inches. The last painting I painted was 29 inches long.

Do these 'blocks' not need to be pre-soaked and taped with brown tape, as described by others in this chain?

Have you ever tried using alligator board? (or has any one else reading this ng?) Some people swear by it...

I solved all those problems by soaking the paper, and then stapling it to 1/2 in GATORBOARD. It dries flat as a drum and I can work it wet until the painting is done. I can have the GATORBOARD cut to any size I want.
I also plywood if I can't find the board. The backing has to be porous and allow for evaporation!
Nothing else works for me.
Good luck

beatrice del perugia that's great advice But, Gator Board is flexible and bends... didn't you experience any problems with that?

In my experience, if you tape, or staple the wetted down paper to a backing, the paper will shrink and sometimes the backing will bend.

This can be annoying when working on a table vs. an easel, but the paper surface itself will be flat...

(the paper contracting pulls on the board and makes it bend - the paper itself ends up tightly stretched over a little gap of air inbetween the two...)

In art school we had 3/4'' wood panels to work on made by a carpenter several years ago, don't know where one would buy them though (they were made like door).

Scrap plywood has worked for me so far, but with what i know about glue and artwork now*, I think i would lacquer or gesso the board before using it as a work surface...
or maybe look for a nice piece of acrylic (if only it would stay shiny forever )



*plywood sticks together through some kind of glue, if this gets transferred to the paper, the acid in the glue will turn the paper yellow and break down your colors on a molecular level, changing them slowly to yellow - not to worry the artistic paper tape is acid free - because it is meant to be used on artwork.

it doesn' bend if you use at least 1/2 in gaterboard, available to framers.

good thought about plywood and molecular transfer. Gesso should solve it.
there are several specialized boards sold just for this purpose. Dick Blick has them: the incredible art board and also a wooden version. The incredible art board is 1/2 in gator board and will not warp.. I haven't tried the other but I ordered it.
Using this method, I can buy watercolor rolls instead of blocks. The disadvantage of blocks is that they are too small and dictate the size I can work in.
This way, I can work as big as the roll of paper!4da61

I use plexiglass sheets as a backer. They don't stain, inexpensive and long lasting. You can get them cut whatever size you want at industrial plastic places. Then I use butcher tape. The trick is to soak the paper around 10min. I precut my tape at that time, since you have to wet down butchers tape to get it to stick. Also you cut the tape with a razor type craft knife when your paintings finished. DO NOT pull. If you really want stability I sometimes add clips too. Also the buckling is worse with certain papers.

you have to use 1/2 in gator board. Look on line. the thinner kind does bend.

Thank you,Iam a newbie,and this helps a lot!!