Unexpected Bleeding

[Larry Jenks]

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…

1. Arches 140# cold press paper
2. Drew a pencil line drawing on the paper
3. Wet the paper and stretched it on gator board
4. Masked the foreground image area using Pebeo liquid mask
5. Lightened the pencil marks with a kneaded eraser and Skum-X dry cleaning pad (a drafting tool)
6. Wet the entire paper and painted the background
7. Removed the mask and pre-wet the underlay areas and then dropped in the underlay colors (the light blue in the pic)
8. 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?.

[Author]

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