Watercolor Painting on Yupo Paper With Wax Resist

Follow along to use oil pastel when watercolor painting on yupo paper!

What you’ll need:

• yupo paper
• watercolor paint (I recommend using no more that 10 colors, and try to mix all your colors from them)
• oil pastels or wax crayons
• alcohol
• a soft cloth
• a few brushes
• watercolor palette

Step 1:

Clean the yupo paper. (Any fingerprint will show and repel the paint.)

For this, you can use a soft cloth and alcohol.

Note: I selected a few colors of oil pastels. If you don’t want your outline to show, you can use a white oil pastel instead.

Step 2:

Draw the outline of your subject with oil pastels. If you make a mistake, you can take off some of the pastel with alcohol sprayed on the soft cloth.

This technique works better with simple designs, such as these flowers.

Step 3:

Select your paints. (I selected a palette of seven colors: Phtalo Blue, Payne’s Gray, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Lemon Yellow, Permanent Red Violet, Madder Lake Light and Permanent Red.)

Tip: A watercolor palette allows you to mix the colors you need in the bigger wells from the colors you selected.

Step 4:

Start painting! The lines you traced with oil pastels will keep the paint from spreading all over the paper and give you a bit more control on the paint. I am not trying to stay totally inside the lines in this example –I think a bit of the flower color mixing with the background is also nice.

To paint lighter areas, you can take off a bit of paint with a thirsty brush.

Here you can see I am letting a bit of orange mix with pink on the paper.

When the flowers are painted they look like this. I worked on the flowers before working on the background, but you could paint the elements of your painting in whatever order you feel comfortable with.

If you find you added too much paint in an area, like the background in this case, which I find too dark, you can take off the wet paint with a piece tissue paper.

You can also re-wet any area you want to rework, as I am doing here with the background.

Here is the finished painting. As the watercolor pigments are just sitting on the surface of this very smooth paper, they could be lifted off by scratching or by contact with water, so the painting will need to be framed.