How to use Absorbent Ground with watercolours

Go beyond paper! You can use Golden Absorbent Ground with any water media to paint onto many different surfaces. I’ve used it to paint watercolour onto wood as well as turning a regular sketchbook page into a watercolour page.

Overall, I think absorbent ground is a great product. It’s a useful medium for both hobby and professional artists – anyone who wants to use watercolours on a non-traditional surface. 

I think it works best when using a wet-on-wet method of watercolour application, because of the way water sits on top for some time. However, because it does change how the watercolour paint sits on the surface and appears as a final product, I wouldn’t recommend thinking of it as a replacement for regular watercolour paper.

How to use

Watch me demonstrate how to use absorbent ground.

1. Start by choosing your surface. You can use this on pretty much anything that can be gessoed, so wood, paper, canvas and more. I’m using an inexpensive wood panel in my example. 
2. Gesso the surface according to the instructions. I applied two layers of Liquitex white gesso. If you want a smoother surface, you’ll want to make sure you’re using a brush that applies paint fairly smoothly. You can try using a sponge roller as well. 
3. Once the gesso has fully dried, you can move onto applying the absorbent ground. Again, use a nice soft wide brush or roller to reduce your brush marks. Or if you want to have brush marks show in your final work, go right ahead and be creative with your brush marks.
   1. Start by applying the absorbent ground straight from the container at full strength. Now you have two choices at this point. You can continue applying it at full strength until the surface is covered or you can add a bit of water to help level it out and reduce how many brush strokes show in the ground. You can add up to 25% water to the ground. Whichever you choose, now ensure you have enough to do a layer.
   2. Let that layer dry then do at least one more layer until your surface is well covered.

Keep in mind

• Don’t think of it like using watercolour paper. It works differently and you may not be able to get the same effects as you’re used to. It doesn’t absorb water into the surface in the same way that paper does.
• It’s much toothier than watercolour paper. It was really rough on the nib when I inked with a pen. 
• I found that Micron pens, which are usually waterfast on paper, sometimes ran when I applied water to them.
• The paint colours are weaker than when painting on paper so expect to apply multiple layers.
• You might run into issues if you use masking fluid since the watercolour paint sits on top of the surface for some time. Surface tension can cause it to “cling” to the masking fluid, leading to darker paint spots.

Buy your own

Absorbent ground is available from many art stores and Amazon:

US: Absorbent ground

Canada: Absorbent ground