Reworking old painting; paper not cooperating

[Perry Lai]

Greetings. I frequently shelve paintings in progress, for various reasons, and return to them months/years later to add this or that. Shelve the painting again, pick it back up, poke at it, prod it, shelve it again. Repeat until somebody takes the painting away from me.

I recently picked up one of these paintings again and the paint/paper was behaving oddly. I was working as I usually do -wet on wet, very light washes- but the paper was absorbing the paint shockingly fast. I stopped working on it and flipped the paper over after it dried, saw the color had soaked clear through the paper and was visible on the other side.

I started another painting using paper from the same block, and the same thing was happening — color setting ultra fast on the side I was painting on, and seeping straight through visible to the back side of the paper.

The paper was from a 20 sheet block of ‘Blick Premier’ Hot Press 140lb. I should note that I’ve never stretched any of my paper before, but also never had an issue working and reworking the paper I’ve used over the years. I have 3 other paintings from this block that I’ve worked on without incident to this point, but now I’m afraid to introduce more watercolor to them.

If anybody has an idea what the problem might be, I would be grateful for the response.

(I tried posting a message earlier with photo’s, but there is no record of it after I hit ‘submit’.  Apologies if it suddenly appears and I’ve double posted)

Thanks, Perry