Experiment with Mineral Paper

 That's right! Mineral paper. Paper made from rocks. No trees were cut down to manufacture this paper. That's cool. 

Oil based mediums can't be used on this paper but everything else can be.  

I used Pan Pastels to create this portrait of my sweet Renard.

While the portrait is fun, and my hand isn't up to its strength, the number of layers I could add was limited. I stopped when I began to see pastels rubbed away. Watercolor paper and pastel papers are my preference for this medium. Now, if I was going to create a pastel study, this paper would be perfect for me.

Next up was the same portrait using watercolor. I began with wet on wet and continued with wet on dry ended with pen and ink. 

While this image is fun, it's not as good as it would gave been on hotpress watercolor paper. I wasn't able to create clean hard edges I could normally create. Paint was too easily moved around and washed away. For simpler watercolor images I believe I would have done better and probably using dry on wet would have more successful. My aim is to use more water not less. I think creating abstract shapes would be fun, as with the area beneath my muse. It seems similar to work I did with acrylic inks.

I'll be trying acrylic inks and pens on this paper sometime in the future but, I won't be using it for watercolor or pastels. 

Click on my watercolor image to watch my YouTube video of this project. 

Here is a link to a YouTube video from the manufacturers of this paper, Yasutomo.