Cut a fresh sheet of Fabriano on the wrong side and only noticed at the third wash

I have been painting the same Rosa canina sprig for four days, which is longer than it warrants, and this afternoon I discovered I had cut the sheet from the wrong side. The felt mark runs underneath and the sizing is subtly different. You would not see it in the finished painting, but I can feel it. The washes sit a fraction differently and I have been quietly blaming my own handling since Monday.

I am going to finish it. Throwing away four days of work over a mis-cut sheet would be a poor sort of discipline, and the specimen itself is a good one. But I have written the correct side in pencil on the pad cover now, which I should have done years ago and did not because I was certain I would remember.

Does anyone else keep making the same small, entirely avoidable mistake on the grounds that they are too experienced to need a note?

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Dimitra Vasilakis·1d

The blaming-your-handling part is the real damage, not the sheet. Four days of thinking your touch went wrong when it was the paper the whole time, that poisons the work more than a felt mark ever could.

I work in mosaic so it's a bit different, but I know the version of this: you spend a week fighting a section and it turns out the batch of smalti is a shade off, or the substrate wasn't flat. And once you know, you can't un-know it. You just have to keep going and let the finished thing be right anyway.

Finishing it is the correct call. The specimen doesn't care which side you cut from.

Niall Doherty·1d

Ah now, "you just have to keep going and let the finished thing be right anyway" is the whole trade in one line and I don't think people who've never worked a material get it at all.

The smalti shade being off is a great one because it's the exact same trap. I've had it with lino where a batch was a hair softer than the last and I was carving like a butcher for a fortnight convinced I'd lost the hands, when the truth was the stuff was just giving way under me. Same four days of blaming yourself, except you can't return the block and say sorry lads, it's your rubber's fault.

I came up through labouring before I ever sold a print and the one thing that stuck was the aul fella on the site saying a bad workman blames his tools. Sound man, but he was wrong about that one thing. Sometimes it is the tools. Knowing the difference is most of the job.

And the specimen not caring which side you cut from, that's your Rosa canina told straight. It'll be grand.

Margaret HsuOP·1d

The lino is the better example, I think. A softer batch and your hand goes looking for the resistance that isn't there, so you press harder, and by the end of the fortnight you have decided you have lost your touch. The material set the trap and you took the blame for it.

I did some of my early training on stone, and the fault lines in a litho stone will do the same thing to you. You learn eventually to test before you commit, not after. I did not test this sheet. Four days in, which is its own sort of lesson.

It is finished now, incidentally. The felt mark is doing something under the left-hand leaf that no one will ever see, and I have decided I rather like knowing it is there.

Margaret HsuOP·1d

The smalti comparison is a good one, and I suspect it is worse than my situation. A mis-cut sheet is at least consistent in its wrongness. A shade off in one batch means the error is sitting in a section of the work, not under all of it, and by the time you notice you have already built the surrounding colour around it. Do you pull the section out, or do you adjust everything after it to absorb the difference?

I have decided I prefer my version. The sheet is uniformly wrong. I know exactly what I am fighting for the rest of the week, and it does not change from Tuesday to Thursday.

The specimen genuinely does not care. You are right about that, and it is the reason I am still going. I cut another sheet this morning, right side up, and pencilled the words FELT SIDE on the wrapper like a woman who has learned something. She has learned nothing. She will do it again in a year.

Tomáš Havel·1d

The felt mark you will never see. The sizing you can feel through your brush for the rest of the session, that is the thing. I have spent weeks of my life fighting material that was quietly working against me and blaming my own hands, and it is a special kind of lonely, because there is nothing to point at. Good that you wrote it on the block in pencil. I still have a tin of screws sorted by decade for the same reason.

Finish it. The specimen earned the four days even if the sheet did not.

Ramesh Jha·1d

The blaming-your-own-hand part is what I recognise, ji. For years we had no mill paper at all, we made our own from old cotton and the sizing depended on the day, and there were sheets where the colour would drink in wrong. My mother would say nothing and I would think, my hand has gone. Then she would take the same brush and paint on it and it would go wrong for her also. Only then I would know it was the sheet.

Your tin of screws sorted by decade made me laugh. Myself I keep every failed sheet, tied with thread, because the mistake is also teaching something.

Finish the sprig. And write on that pencil line the month also, so next year you will know how long the lesson took.

Margaret HsuOP·1d

Your mother painting on the same sheet and having it go wrong for her too is the only test that ever settles it, and it took me a shamefully long time to learn to run it. I would rather suspect my own hand for a week than admit the material has opinions.

The failed sheets tied with thread I understand completely. Mine go in a drawer with the date and what went wrong written on the back. Most of them are not failures at all in hindsight, just records of a day I was not paying attention.

I have finished the sprig. It is not the painting it would have been on the other side of the sheet, but it is honest, and I have written the correct side on the tin lid in pencil so this does not happen to me twice.

Margaret HsuOP·1d

The tin of screws sorted by decade is the most reassuring thing anyone has said to me all week. I keep a drawer of paper corners annotated with mill, date and sizing, and I had always assumed it was a private eccentricity.

You are right that the consistency of the error is a small mercy and I should not complain. A mis-cut sheet behaves the same way every time, so at least the problem is a fixed quantity. Sizing that varies with the day is a different order of difficulty. You never learn the material, only the batch, and then the batch is gone.

I did finish it. The felt mark sits under the leaf where nothing shows, and the washes are a fraction more granulating than I would have chosen, which on a rose hip is not altogether a fault. It goes in the drawer marked for the classes, as an example of what the paper is doing rather than what the painter is doing. That seems the honest place for it.