Hi, everyone…
This is driving me nuts, so I am pleading for help. I’m getting these bleeding edges on my paintings and I need to know why.
Here’s what I’ve done to get to this point…
- Arches 140# cold press paper
- Drew a pencil line drawing on the paper
- Wet the paper and stretched it on gator board
- Masked the foreground image area using Pebeo liquid mask
- Lightened the pencil marks with a kneaded eraser and Skum-X dry cleaning pad (a drafting tool)
- Wet the entire paper and painted the background
- Removed the mask and pre-wet the underlay areas and then dropped in the underlay colors (the light blue in the pic)
- Pre-wet the sections of the image where the dark colors go and then dropped in the darker blue
Now honestly, I’ve been VERY careful about pre-wetting for both the light blue and the dark blue. I’ve used a tiny brush as necessary in some cases to make certain the water stays within the lines. Except where the area has been pre-wetted inside the lines, the paper is DRY.
I will confess that my eyes are getting old and I am having some trouble seeing, but I have been monitoring the pre-wetting process carefully to keep it inside the lines, and I still get this bleeding.
I am wondering if this could be a sizing issue — perhaps I have inadvertently damaged or deleted the sizing on my paper, as I don’t really know what that would look like or what issues that may present. Or, any other ideas?
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