Last week was a very productive week for my students and myself as we watched and worked with so many new materials. We had the chance to watch a demo by Steve Puttrich who after the demo gave me a sheet of Shizen watercolor paper, which I demonstrated on last Saturday. I also had the chance to work on 3 different types of Yupo papers. 

 

I thought I would give you my findings and thoughts on these papers.

I did 3 paintings on Yupo, one on a thick sheet of Yupo, thin sheet of Yupo and a Translucent sheet of Yupo. Then I did one on a quarter sheet of Shizen watercolor paper.

 

Paintings and findings printed under each painting below.

 

First up is the Thin Yupo which is pictured above.
I worked on the thin Yupo paper with Holbein Transparent Watercolors. I also used masking fluid to cover-up all the flowers. I proceeded to cover the entire paper with water and then float pigment in the water. This wet-into-wet technique works great on Yupo since it is a plastic type paper that keeps all the pigment on the surface and nothing seeps into the paper. Takes quite a while to dry if you use as much water as I do when floating my pigment. I then took off the Masking Fluid when it was dry and the dried masking fluid came off real easy.
When I worked the white flowers it was very hard to get a soft edge so you have to be okay with not getting soft edges. The greatest thing about Yupo is that when you use it with watercolor you can easily scrub off the watercolor to go back to a white area, which I did several times to get the stems and leaves painted. 
The thin Yupo did not buckle one bit, stayed flat the whole time.

 

The Second paper is the thick Yupo which is pictured next below.

Working on this Yupo sheet was identical to working on the thin Yupo sheet.
On this sheet I used more of the Holbein watercolors that had white in them, like Lavender.

The third paper I used (below) was Translucent Yupo and it was as thin as the regular thin Yupo. 
This paper was very interesting because I had to make sure that my backing was pure white that the sheet rested on because you can see through this paper. On this Yupo I used Holbein Acrylic Inks because I wanted to see how a different kind of medium worked on Yupo. I also masked out the flowers with masking fluid.

The ink worked just the same as the watercolor as it floated in the wet-into-wet wash. The difference was that it didn't mix like watercolor because it was more of a thin ink so the colors stayed vibrant and shiny when dry.
I also painted a dark blue on the backside of the paper on the bottom of each flower. You can see below that the bottom of each flower has a light grey-blue cast this is caused by the dark blue painted on the back of the paper.
I also painted lines with a rigger brush.