Using Artist Tape and the Fritch Scrubber

Welcome to Cheap Joe's Test Studio! Today I'd like to show you how I use the Artist Tape and the Fritch Scrubber combined to clean up some dirty areas of watercolor--areas that are dull and need a little lift, a little light brought into them.

First I'm gonna show you the Artist Tape because it's such a handy product. I'm gonna take a little piece and I'm actually gonna put it on my apron right there, and I'm gonna take another little piece and put it on the apron. Now I'm not doing that just for the fun of it because you don't want to go directly from the roll of tape to your painting, you actually do want to put it on your jeans or your shirt or somewhere, and that helps to remove some of the tacks from the tape so that it won't tear when you pull it up from the painting.

I'm gonna put that one right there, this one right here, and I'm gonna take this one and put it right over here on that. Then we'll take the Fritch Scrubber--and this is a size 16 regular oval--wet it really well, I have a couple of tissues in my hand, and I'm gonna wet the area I want to lift. Do the same thing right in here, and right over here do the same thing exactly. What that does is activate that paint in there, and then I come in here and absolutely just scrub. Just what it says, a Fritch Scrubber, and I will blot it. See how I'm blotting that right there? I come back in here and do the same thing. I'm applying a lot of pressure down on it now, and hopefully, it's gonna lighten a lot of this area that otherwise got dull on me, and I simply blot that out just like that. I don't know if it'll work or not, but we're sure gonna try it aren't we? Gonna lift some of this right in here where it got dull and put a little light direction. Now very carefully, we'll remove the tape--look at that!-- It did, it lifted it. We've got some life back in there now from that.

Now we can take the Fritch Scrubber and just dampen part of this pathway leading into that and just kinda be ruthless and scrub it right out. Sometimes you end up with some really neat unexpected things happening when you do this. Look at that--wow! Now if I come back into it and touch it up just a little bit with some darker color, and I'm not gonna worry about what color I'm using, just gonna clean up these edges just a little bit. Maybe, in the same way, put a little darker eave right in there, and perhaps the windows in it. I might come back with a painting that we could salvage, and end up with something pretty neat in there. It's kinda fun to play with it anyhow because it was no good to begin with so if I can salvage something out of it now, I can, and if I can't, I've had fun playing with it and trying.

That's the Fritch Scrubber and the Artist Tape--both very handy to have.