everyone who makes a painting immediately gravitates towards one of these here you got your completely useless most of the time canvas boards classic wood panel and of course most well-known the stretched canvas and while all of these can be great options usually they tend to come with some major downsides that can completely ruin the experience of creating a work of art whether it's the fact that some of these are so incredible ibly slippery that you can't paint on them or so absorbent that they completely suck out all the colors and life out of your paintings and turn them into a muddy mess but there is a painting surface that I want to show you that almost got it all and that would be this incredibly unspectacular and unassuming looking thing here you can create soft gradients on this you can create sharp lines smooth transitions you can have intense vibrant colors to the point where your painting looks like it has its own light source and to top it all off you can change the size of your painting pretty much whenever you want so no idea why this thing has fallen out of fashion it used to be one of the great painting surfaces that everybody used pretty much during the entirety of the last cent Century but these days you hardly see it and yeah I believe it's wildly criminally underrated so let me show you why this thing is one of the best things you can paint on and my or one of my personal favorite painting surfaces [Music] hello [Music] children I have absolutely no idea why you don't see this more often and why hardly anybody is doing this but one of my personal favorite painting surfaces to paint on with oil paint is watercolor paper literally watercolor paper I know it's sounds super counterintuitive but trust me this is one of the best painting surfaces you can create and it's not only incredibly satisfying to paint on but it's also super cheap and affordable the only caveat is that you have to use super super heavy watercolor paper it doesn't even need to be watercolor paper to be honest that's just what I like to use and you can't use it right away you have to put in some time and effort and you have to prepare it but it really doesn't take too much and I guarantee you it's 100% worth the effort I'm using super heavy watercolor paper here something like 600 G per square meter so pretty much one of the heaviest things you can get but again it doesn't even need to be watercolor paper you just need some heavy paper that holds up to the whole treatment with waterbased gesso or primer and all the subsequent paint layers [Music] next I want to thin it down a bit with water just a tiny bit so it's easier to spread on or to brush on by the way you see this thing here this is 15 years of mixing primer to prepare painting surfaces once you got it thinned down to workable consistency so basically something like heavy cream it shouldn't be too runny but it also should flow basically you're pretty much good to go and you can start applying your first thin layer once you've applied your first thin layer you let it dry for I would say say 15 to 20 minutes and then you come back and you apply a second coat so what I like to do is at the very least two coats but preferably three to four coats and once you've done that you are left with a beautiful painting surface that is almost like a mixture between paper canvas and a wood panel it has some texture to it the surface isn't 100% smooth smooth but it's also not slippery like some wood panels tend to be or some even smoother surfaces like metal or plastic to me this kind of combines the best of all worlds and it's incredibly satisfying to work with especially considering that you can now cut it into all kinds of different shapes you can decide on which size you want to have your painting Surface after the fact and yeah to me this comes with a lot of freedom and a lot of up sides I like to scand the last layer because I really want to make sure that it's not too rough as these paper surfaces and pretty much all like natural surfaces like Fabric or wood panels tend to be after priming but once you've done that you could technically get started right away but I personally like to add one more step to this prep part to really make sure sure that I end up with the best painting surface possible so once I got my drawing and my outlines finished what I like to do is I like to apply some sort of sealer or spray varnish to first of all make sure that I don't lose my outlines and my drawing when I start painting but also to make sure that my painting surface is as well prepared as it can be and protected you don't want to run into any issues later on where the oil from your oil paint gets absorbed by the paper because you haven't prepared it well enough so this is just like an additional step to really make sure that the surface is as good as it can be basically after applying this protective coat you're technically good to go and everything else from here on is purely optional but in many cases what I like to do with these sorts of painting surfaces is add another additional layer of acrylic paint before getting started and this really does two things on the one side this is just another protective barrier between the painting surface and the oil paint so making sure that the surface the paper is as well protected from all the oil and the oil paint as it can be but maybe even more importantly in this case it's a creative decision the moment I start with some color and some texture I set the tone for the entire painting and this way I can make sure that it turns out as interesting as it can it also helps with tying all the different colors together and creating some interesting looking effects but really it's about making sure that I'm able to create the best painting I can now if you want to hear more about the process I highly encourage you to head over to patreon there's going to be a commentary video where I go a bit more indepth on the technical aspects of painting and creating an image like this and also this painting once the video comes out will be available in my shop for a change again you might have to be quick but by the time the video comes out it will be up in my webshop and it will be available but the painting surface itself don't get me wrong there is nothing nothing inherently magical or special about this you can create a great painting surface with a piece of wood or cardboard or cloth fabric technically theoretically all of that is possible it's just the fact that most of these painting surfaces end up with wildly different properties and depending on what you want to do and how experienced and advanced you are as a painter this could make a difference between a completely frustrating and annoying painting experience and a painting experience that's actually Pleasant and fun when you paint a very small painting for example something like this here and you have a fabric or a painting surface with some heavy heavy texture you will have a incredibly frustratingly hard time creating sharp lines fine details sharp edges all of that does not go well with small size paintings or painting surfaces that have super heavy texture that's just the way it is and on the flip side if you've ever tried to create a smooth gradient on a large sized smooth canvas or a smooth painting surface you know what frustration means and depending on which kind of primer you then use on top of these surfaces you can even amplify some of the Properties or completely destroy them making a painting making a good painting is not as simple as just grabbing a canvas and then going for it it really makes a difference what kind of painting surface you use and depending on which one you pick you might end up with a dramatically different end result unfortunately the truth is the ideal painting surface doesn't exist but this one here this sort of hybrid paper painting surface kind of manages to have a bit of everything you can still create somewhat smooth transitions but it also has enough tooth through it that you can paint without the paint just sliding around constantly all the skin tones that I painted here is a combination of color blocks so different shapes that have very clear and defined outlines but then also some super soft and smooth Transitions and that in combination with Captain HS or Dustin Hoffman's very very sharp features kind of creates a beautiful illusion of skin and human flesh and it's something that is not very easy to do when you just have a canvas and also not particularly easy when you're painting on a wood panel the painting surface should ideally allow you to not only apply thick paint but to also create very thin and transparent layers of paint and play around with textures let you decide where you want to use more texture and where you maybe don't want to have any texture at all and usually with traditional canvas ports wood panels stretched canvases you don't really have that freedom and flexibility these kinds of paper and cardboard painting surfaces are obviously nothing new it's just that most of the time this is something that illustrators will gravitate towards and it's not really something that you see very often in the world of fine art or traditional painting but if you think about it that also kind of makes sense an illustrator needs to work very quickly it's got to be efficient it's got to be fast but it also has to be very good it can't be bad quality so illustrators are typically very good at finding super smart cheap and cost effective solutions to problems and the problem of a painting surface that sort of combines the best of all worlds is right here it's of course not without its downsides I mean creating a large painting a very large painting with this is pretty much impossible and also hanging something like this is definitely not as easy and straightforward as it is with the stretched canvas I mean you just take the stretched canvas and hang it on your wall with something like this a flat sheet of paper you have to prepare it or frame it in a certain way before you can even hang it so certainly not without its downsides but just from a technical perspective just from the point of view of an artist creating a work of art the beauty of the transitions the brush marks and brush Strokes the way that they stand on top of the painting surface whenever you want the smooth transitions the intensity and vibrancy of the color I'm not really sure if the final image shows it or if the camera is even able to capture it but it it all just looks very much alive and vibrant and almost tangible in a way where you feel like you can touch it and move it around almost as if it's not a painting but a sculpture out of paint if that makes sense I don't know how else to describe it but I really really hope that once the tape comes off the final result will speak for itself and you'll be able to see for yourself why this forgotten painting surface definitely needs to make a comeback [Music] [Music]