Prevent watercolor paper from buckling WITHOUT stretching your paper

Working on paper that is saturated from the back is a method for preventing your paper from buckling while you work that does not involve stretching it. Finally, I found a way to do it that I'm gives good results without a lot of finicky monitoring as it dries, so I'm sharing it with you :)

Puppy-training pads are available from pet supply stores. Any brand works fine.

The spritz technique for trees can be found here:    • Видео   (around timestamp 8:50)

If you want to see how to stretch watercolor paper on stretcher bars (my usual method), you can find that here:    • Видео  

I published a video as part of my free Skies and Clouds workshop that talks about working on saturated paper to practice wet-into-wet techniques. This is different! Here, you wet the paper only from the back. The front surface of the paper still behaves like dry paper, except that washes dry much more slowly. You have extra working time to soften edges or lay washes over larger areas (big help in dry climates!). I never used to use this method for completed paintings because I had a hard time getting it to dry (mostly) flat between working sessions, and sometimes got blooms around the edges as it dried. Then I discovered a simple trick that solves those problems--yay!--so I'm sharing the whole method with you here.

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