The biter bit.....

You may remember that a week or more ago, a new member - Deidre, I think - asked about watercolour paper sticking to her board when she came to remove it from the gumstrip after it had been stretched and painted on. Never happened to me, I said. Must be something you're doing wrong, I implied. Perhaps, I added, in a fit of jocularity, it'll happen to me next time I stretch paper! Ha ha! Oh Hee. Hee.... Well it didn't happen the next time. It happened the time after that. And as others had surmised, notably Phil Kendall, it was due to a build-up of gum on the board; carelessly positioning the paper, I laid it over a stretch of gumstrip which I'd partially peeled off - had I not bothered to do that, thus exposing the gum to re-wetting, it might not have stuck. But never, ever say something has never happened to you: because you can then be entirely sure it will. Answers to this are threefold: one, don't stretch the damn' paper - buy a heavier weight and hang the expense (on Dave Usher's YouTube channel is a watercolour painting on the exquisitely beautiful Arches paper, which you owe it to yourselves to see - and that's the paper for me next time); two, if you're going to stretch a lighter paper, perhaps don't peel the old gummed paper strip off, or three, ensure you wash every trace of it, and the gum, off: one or the other, don't go half-cock as I did. Oh and four - don't get clever next time: if it happened to one person, of course it can happen to another. Foolish boy. The sheet isn't ruined, but it is a bit thinner in one spot than it was - I may slurp a bit of acrylic varnish over that bit, just to protect the abraded surface.