 Hello there. It's Sandy Allnock and we're going to have a little discussion about practice while I play with some watercolor and pen and ink. This paper that I'm using is by Speedball. It's called Fluid 100. I used it in a recent video and in that video I discovered some things about the paper that I wasn't a fan of. It did things like lifting color when I wasn't expecting it to. It piled up really quickly on the surface of the paper. These are things that other papers will do if you overwork them and stuff. Part of it may have been user error, but also part of it was the paper. There are papers that are better and worse than others for particular techniques. I am a believer that if a paper is on the market for a number of years and people are still using it and buying it and creating things with it, there must be a sweet spot for it. There must be something that it's good for, even if it's not something I want to do. There must be some reason that it's out there. I hate dissing on any kind of art supply because there's somebody that's going to love it. If you are somebody who uses this Fluid 100 paper, please link me to your paintings. I want to see what you're doing with it. Because I discovered through practice in the last week that I could not seem to come up with a painting style that was going to work well with this particular paper. I tried landscapes, I tried just different things, and it was not making me particularly happy. However, I decided at one point I was going to use this as a color test on this particular day. So instead of trying to paint something, I just focused on how I was applying the color to the paper. That was my goal here, was to take New Gamboge and Moonglow and see how few times I could touch the surface of the paper and get a beautiful blend of colors. Would this paper blend the colors this way? Because when I had tried to paint a thing and put colors down next to each other, expecting them to blend and they didn't, I would get frustrated. So I wanted to see, is it me and the way that I was applying it? Was it the amount of water I was using? Like what exactly was going on there? And when I did this exercise, I went straight from the palette onto the paper with very little water. I used a brush that doesn't hold much water in it, that Mottler brush. And that meant that I was just putting on not entirely solid paint, but a lot of paint in the mixture and wanted to see what would happen. And I got beautiful blends. Like this paper actually worked the way watercolor paper does, like the way that pigments move together and get soft edges. And that, of course, was a new revelation because I hadn't found that in my other paintings that I had done. That doesn't mean that I am going to become someone who can paint a landscape in 14 strokes. I really wish I was. It would be nice to paint that loose and fresh. I don't know if that's in the cards for me. I'm going to keep trying as long as I have a few more sheets of this paper left. But for this particular one, I'm just going to use my fountain pen. This is a fountain pen. This is a Twizby Eco with a medium nib to go over the edges of all of these shapes that are created by the watercolor and then use that as doodling practice as well. Now, I wanted to talk a bit about practice because as I've been posting these paintings on my second Instagram channel and I will link you down below if you want to go see those. As I was doing those, I noticed a lot of people said, oh, I bought that pad too and it was terrible. I hated it. So now it's just practice paper. And I thought it would be a good discussion to have to talk about how to practice and what you're practicing on, especially when you're using terrible paper. And like I said, it may not be terrible paper. There are some people who are going to love this. It's just not right for me. It's not what I want. So what do I do with this paper? How do I use this paper that I've paid money for to practice something that's going to help me as an artist? Now, when people say they're going to practice on it, I don't know how many people are like me, but when I get a pad and I say, oh, this is just going to be practice paper because this sketchbook or whatever has terrible paper in it, I sit it on the shelf and then I hardly ever touch it because who wants to sit down with terrible paper when you finally have time to sit in the studio? Nobody. So there's that as one issue when you relegate something to a practice paper status that it just might not get touched and then you're getting nothing for the value of the money that you spent on the art supply. But if you're trying to say, okay, I'm going to practice and then say you're trying to learn how to paint better trees, I'm going to fill this whole sketchbook with trees, whatever this is. What you're doing when you use paper that's not the paper you want to paint on eventually is you're teaching yourself to adapt to this other paper. You might be teaching yourself to use more brush strokes or less brush strokes or to use a different brush or a different mix of pigments like the water and the pigment mixture is going to be different because of the performance of the paper itself. And when you do that, while it's going to be great to learn how to paint on that terrible paper, you're not practicing what you need in order to paint on the paper that you love, that you want to do a real painting on because now you've taught your brain and your hand and that whole hand I coordination thing, you've taught yourself how to paint on this terrible paper. And that's something you're going to have to unlearn when you go back to the good paper. Now you will experience some delight when you go back to the good paper. However, it's not a good thing to teach your brain how to do something in a different environment. It's like practicing jogging when you're on the moon as opposed to practicing jogging when you're on earth. There's a whole different set of skills you need and whole different set of muscles you'll need on the moon than in your neighborhood. So then what do you do when you're practicing on practice paper? Well, I would recommend doing other kinds of studies like here I was doing a color study. I wanted to see what would happen with New Gamboge and Moonglow. I normally use New Gamboge with other colors and Moonglow is normally paired in my life with Yellow Ochre because I like the way the two of them play together. I had no idea what I was going to come up with. What were the colors that these two were going to mix to become if I used them together? And that was a great use for terrible paper because the goal here was not practicing a skill that I'm going to need when I start painting on the good paper. But I'm just doing a color test to see what would happen and then I still came out with a lovely abstract with my doodling on it that is in my shop. If you're interested in seeing what this paper is, if you've never touched some 300 pound you might want to check it out. And I came out with something that I was happy with in the long run anyway because I was not trying to make the paper perform like my good paper. I was using the paper to learn something else about my art that I don't have to unlearn at some point. So that's my little recommendation. Be careful what you use your practice paper for because you really don't want to end up teaching yourself things that you're going to have to unlearn. So leave me a comment and let me know what you're trying to learn right now. What are you practicing? Is it a medium? A style? A technique? The kind of thing are you practicing and what paper are you practicing it on? I will see you again in another video very, very soon. In the meantime, get out there and create something every day. Take care. Bye-bye.