By Donna Schultz Van Fleet, Co-Vice President, WAS-H

YIKES, YUPO!

It can be either frustrating or liberating painting on Yupo paper. Linda Vanek's advice, "Just be ready to play." And what fun WAS-H members had playing vicariously with Linda while she demonstrated painting on Yupo at our September monthly Members Meeting.

Linda is a legend at WAS-H, a former Vice President, President and Past President, an Elite Signature Member and a sought-after teacher of a catalog of classes. As if that isn't impressive enough, she is also a Signature Member of the Louisiana Watercolor Society and currently has a piece in the National Watercolor Society's 2022 International Exhibit.

Linda explained that Yupo is synthetic paper made originally for the printing industry and artists came along later thinking it could be fun to paint on this surface that doesn't behave like normal watercolor paper. To start with, it doesn't absorb. This means colors stay where your brush places them. Put down different colors and you can blend them by picking up and slanting the paper to cause colors to run into one another. Or place the colors abutting and let them run together on their own.

If you don't like the result, you can wipe off the parts you don't like with a tissue, towel, sponge, brush. Or just wash off the whole thing! Unlike conventional watercolor painting where you preserve white spaces from the start, this to add white spaces back in painting and add highlights paint-removal attribute allows you after the fact, to do negative to dark areas.

It takes a long time for paint on Yupo to dry -- at least overnight -- which encourages your imagination to play in the wet paint, to press crinkled plastic wrap, netting, grids, anything! into it to make impressions.

Linda has created award-winning paintings on Yupo, and her captivating demonstration at the Membership Meeting inspires us to let go of our old notions about how to paint with watercolor and learn a fun new way by painting on Yupo.

Thank you, Linda!