Paper Mounting
Types of Adhesives For Mounting Heavy, Medium and Light-weight Papers
I often mount papers to panels, especially when I’m painting in gouache.
I do this for a couple reasons, for one, gouache needs to be painted on an absorbent rigid surface otherwise it may crack, flake or chip especially if you paint it fairly thick like I do. If you don’t want to bother with mounting, illustration/multimedia board is a good choice for larger gouache paintings or unmounted thick watercolor paper is fine if it’s small.
Another reason I mount artworks to panels is that I’m not a big fan of traditional framing of gouache/watercolor (mat and frame with glass) so often I like to mount watercolor paper (the absorbent component) to a wood, hardboard or aluminum panel (rigid component) and finish with acrylic varnish so it can be displayed without glass, more like an oil or acrylic painting.
For mounting heavy watercolor paper to board, I usually use Golden Soft Gel Gloss Medium.
I used it to mount this artwork on painted paper to a bass body a while back. After years of a fair amount of use, the paper is still well stuck to the bass body with no signs of coming off anywhere. Seems like a pretty good test to me of how well this mounting technique will hold up.
Here’s a video showing how it’s done if you’d like to try mounting any of your projects. As with anything, practice it with smaller projects before attempting it with a large project. To minimize problems, Golden does a lot to test and update best practices for their products which you can find on their website and you can also contact them for product support if you have questions.
While Soft Gel a great method for thick papers, I find it too hard to mount thin papers such as Xuan (rice paper) with the soft gel medium, the thin paper just gets wrinkled too easily and it’s hard/impossible to fix. I’ve found that double-sided adhesive mounting films are great for thin papers but can be too tricky when it comes to larger sizes so I usually only use larger-size adhesive film for mounting medium weight drawings or prints (such as 90lb-140lb papers).
Grafix Double-Tack Film
Double Sided Adhesive Tape 5″
Another great way to mount thin paper especially when it comes to a larger sizes is heat activated film. It took a bit of practice to be able to do it well without getting wrinkles but overall I tend to like it better than other options as it’s not messy or sticky. I usually mount my paper at the stage where I have a basic art outline done but haven’t done any painting yet. This allows me to trace my sketch for the outline before mounted (Xuan is thin enough for tracing), and then mounting it provides me a rigid painting surface which makes it easier for me to paint on. Mounting at the end once your painting is finished is more traditional. I get supplies for this at Blue Heron Arts (a great place to buy Chinese painting art supplies in general). You can find instructions and a video on how to use it in the product description.
Do you have any favorite mounting materials or questions about mounting that I didn’t cover, feel free to comment below!