Playing With Matboard & Gesso

The finished product consisting of my gessoed matboard and transparent watercolor
A stack of 3/16" matboard and my bottle of acrylic gesso ready to be applied




When I receive an order of precut mats from my online supplier they always include the matboard cutouts or 'centers' and I've accumulated quite a stack of them. Recently I purchased a small bottle of acrylic gesso and decided to give one of Ann Blockley's techniques a try. She uses gessoed mountboard but I wondered if I could use the leftover matboard instead.



I applied the acrylic gesso fairly thick with a brush, then created more texture using a palette knife and let it dry for 24 hours. The matboard buckled slightly at first but as it dried it flattened itself out nicely. Afterwards I had no idea what to paint so I did my version of the painting on her book cover which features dandelions going to seed. I used only transparent watercolor, drying the paint thoroughly after each application. I then scraped out the dandelion fluff and defined the stem with the fine nib of an ink pen. I was both pleased and impressed by the textural element I was able to bring to this painting due largely to the gesso. Also the way the paint moves and reacts on the gessoed surface was new to me.

Check out Ann Blockley's website at http://www.annblockley.com/index.htm