Golden Absorbent Ground, JoSonya's Acrylic Sealer: Watercolors and Altered Books

I have been experimenting again...! I recently ordered and recieved some Golden Absorbent Ground and wanted to play with it to see how it worked in my altered books. I had a book that had decent pages, but they were really old paper, and I was afraid that watercolors would wrinkle the paper too much with pretty much any amount of water. So, after a little "Googling", I ordered some of this product and finally tried it today. I LOVE it! It worked really well and a tip for keeping the page from wrinkling with watercolors is first of all don't use too much water, and also, I use a blow-dryer to dry the pages as soon as I am through painting. I had an old blow-dryer that was a small, cheap one from Wal-Mart or somewhere, and it works great. I can't believe I went so long without it and cheap hairspray in my studio!
(The hairspray is a great, CHEAP fixative for pastel chalks and mediums like that, if you didn't already know...)I think the trick was drying the page so fast that it didn't have time to wrinkle, but the absorbent Ground worked wonderful as well!

Search Amazon.com for jo sonja's all purpose sealerSearch Amazon.com for jo sonja's all purpose sealer

Another fantastic product I have found for using to protect text from coming off of the page along with masking fluids is JoSonja's All Purpose Sealer. Now this is a fantastic, thin product, originally made to use on wood and things of that nature for decorative painting, but I had some left over from a project, and it works fantastic as a base coat for your altered pages of text. It protects your text and found poetry on old pages from lifting and ruining all of your hard work! It is also less expensive than the Golden products such as the Matte Medium and other things of that nature. It dries to a satiny, ultra smooth and clear finish and takes acrylics, markers, Sharpie's, colored pencils, and other mediums really well. Of course, acrylics work the best on it,
because that is primarily what it was made for, I believe.

Ok, just wanted to share these two results with you, and hope they work out well for you! Let me know any results you get with these as I love seeing your work also! Happy arting!