Watercolour resists - seeking alternatives to masking fluid

Seeking tips and tricks to help preserve the white of the paper when using watercolour paint.

I didn't use my masking fluid often enough and it dried in the bottle.  The mostly full bottle.  It feels very wasteful to just buy another, and expencive as it's not the most affordable art supply.  Also, it smells bad.  So I've been trying to figure out some alternatives.  

Masking fluid is a fancy latex paint that we apply to the paper first.  When it is dry, we can paint our little hearts out.  And when the paint is dry, we can rub off the dry masking fluid latex stuff and where it was, the paper is white again.

Masking fluid is very useful for watercolours and ink painting as we usually don't have a white paint and we have to use the whiteness of the paper as a substitute for white paint.

Of course, we can always use gouache or white markers, but this has a different look.

Another alternative is to just not paint where we want it to stay white, but.... it's never really that simple.

I've tried painting without masking fluid for a few months now, and alas, I miss it.  Or, more specifically, I miss the results it gives.  Here begins a quest to find an alternative t masking fluid.

But  also, each paper and painter is unique, so if one idea doesn't work for me, it might work for others.

Crayola crayon

I got a set of mostly broken crayons in the thriftshop for a dollar.   I only wanted the white one so I feel like I overpaid horribly.

Wax resists (a reaist being a substance added on top of the paper to make it resist accepting the paint) are very traditional.   In theory, it makes a barrier where the water cannot get at the paper, so the watercolour cannot get there either.  Draw rhe crayon where we want it to stay white, paint, and the crayon will repell the water.

In theory.

I had to apply it very thick and it worked okay-ish on regular watercolour paper.  But it was shiny and obviously wax.  Not like the 'white of the paper'.  

When I used it on a paper with internal sizing like khadi, it looked good at first, then a few seconds later, the colour absorbed under the wax and it looked silly.

On both papers, the more I moved the paint, the less good the wax was...almost like it was desolving.

That's too bad as I had high hopes for crayon.  Back to the drawing board.

This webpage may prove useful - no idea really, watercolours are outside my experience, but I'm one of those folks who have to "know".
https://www.kerriewoodhouse.com/blog/watercolour-masking-fluid-alternatives
Having read through it, I'd suggest using a cotton bud (tip?) for mopping up operations rather than a paper towel.  
At least there are some ideas to try.  Best of luck.

Thanks for the lijk.

Jill Dyer wrote:
Having read through it, I'd suggest using a cotton bud (tip?) for mopping up operations rather than a paper towel.  
At least there are some ideas to try.  Best of luck.

That sounds more like a lifting/blotting technique where we apply the paint, then lift it (either when the paint is still wet or later by rewetting the paint,  usually both are called lifting,  but the article seems to call them different names).  This is a wonderful technique for the toolbox, but doesn't achieve the same results as a resist.  For starters, it only works with non-staining pigments and to find one that doesn't leave any colour behind when lifted is difficult.  It is also rather difficult to be precise and get the hard edges a resist can offer.

As the link described, lifting also works best when very little water is applied, so it doesn't work for a very lush wet wash (which is exactly the technique I want to use for this specific painting that started this rabbit hole).  

But lifting does create some awesome effects and it's a mighty powerful tool.

When I was very young, we used masking tape a lot in the past.

Masking tape is excellent for blocking off large areas.  But also, has the major disadvantage that the better quality the paper, the more it damages the paper when lifting and more bleeding of colour under the tape edge.

So, for example, we used it to mask off the hills, when we were doing a sky wash.

With my style as an adult, I kind of like letting sky and land blend together.   I also don't find it a challenge to avoid larger areas.  It's smaller and medium details that I used masking fluid on.

In the back of my mind (my, it's cluttered in there) I seem to remember that there is a removable sticky tape (3M or Scotch maybe) that might do the trick.  Approx. 1cm wide.  

Painters masking tape tends to be the kindest on paper that I've tried so far.  Some people use the wall tape but I like the masking tape made for watercolour as it comes in various widths from 1/8in to 4in

We can put the sticky side on our clothes first to put some lint on it to make it less sticky, so it won't rip the paper.  But it also makes the edge less good at stopping the paint.

I hugely recommend testing on the same type of paper first as the paper has strong opinions about tape and if it will rip.

Washi tape is another really popular one, but either i got poor quality tape or it's just not a good match for the papers i use.

Here is a very good comparison of wax resists.  Everything from candles, to crayon, to use specific wax sticks, to all sorts of wax sources one might find around the home.



They has significantly better luck with crayons than I did.

There are some things I learned that are pretty universal:

The wax does not come off! Ever!
Wax bits get everywhere.
The resist is very hard to see.
You get soft, natural looking lines.
There needs to be contrast – darker paint shows more of the wax resist.
The paper matters a lot – the amount of texture will affect how much of a wax resist effect you get.
You can’t erase pencil lines that are under the wax.
If you apply the wax over ink, even waterproof ink might smear.
Even the mediums that need the least pressure, still need quite a bit to work the wax into the paper
Applying enough pressure is hard on the hand!
Paraffin wax will yellow in sunlight – it needs the same storage as any watercolor painting.
If you sharpen these mediums separately, you can use the peelings for wax resists. Or heck, mix them up and see what happens!

Bold mine.

This could be where I went wrong.  I tested on some extremely cheap multimedia paper and some of my fanciest paper.  Not in-between quality paper.

I also didn't put as much pressure as they described.