A Hahnemühle Harmony Journal Review

 

Slowly over the course of the next year I will be moving tutorials and reviews over from the old website. Today's post is one of those. I want to show you what I did with a pad of Harmony Hot Pressed Watercolor paper from Hahnemühle and a whole lot of product. I love it!

The Harmony is a natural white paper designed to work with all wet-painting techniques. 'Acid-free, light-resistant, extreme longevity, excellent colors, natural brilliance' are just some of the descriptors found on their website. I want to show you what I worked on and share my impressions of this paper. And yes, this is going to be a super duper photo-loaded art-a-palooza kind of post!

I began by removing four sheets of Harmony from the block and cutting them into 4.5" x 6" sections. This gave me a total of sixteen sheets to work with. Then I used my trusty little hole puncher from Create 365 The Happy Planner and punched holes along one side of each page. Those cool little pink circlets are called discs and they serve to hold the book together. In artsy terms this is called a disc-bound journal. 

A piece of tangled acetate worked well for my cover and I sacrificed one page of the Harmony to undercoat the design. I popped in the remaining fifteen pages behind that. There will be a video flip-through at the end of the post that will show you how easy it is to add and remove these pages. 

I used so much product in this book, but this page is my favorite. Peerless watercolors made up all that yummy color! Peerless are swatches of highly concentrated color. You literally just use a water brush to pick up the color and transfer it to your paper. Once this piece was dry, I added the tangles and white highlights. On this page you can see the punched holes along the left side. The pink discs sit inside the larger portion of the hole. This is the only page I used Peerless on and they worked exceptionally well. I did not use a lot of water.  

Next I brought out my favorite Schmincke watercolor pans and made color backgrounds on three surfaces. In this photo you get an idea how the pages interact with the discs.

For this particular page, I worked mostly wet onto dry. I put the color on, then blended it around with the water brush and let the edges of color flow into each other. Tangling worked great! The paper surface stayed smooth and I had literally no warping or dimpling of the paper itself. Harmony is 140 lbs. and it can handle the wet.

These next two pages were done with the wet into wet technique alaAlice. That means: slop a ton of water onto the page and swirl some beautiful colors into it. That may also mean spraying and spritzing more water here and there to help push color where I want it to go.

Both pages handled loads of 'wet' with no problem. I had a little bend to the paper, but an overnight under my iPad took care of that completely. No pilling, no issues and smooth tangling!

This particular type of journal makes the pages really easy to work on. You just pull the pages off those  discs, work on them, then pop them back in. Easy peasy. And the Harmony handled all that off and on stuff very well. 

For this page I used Winsor & Newton watercolor tubes. They worked great!

Continuing to work wet into wet, I brought out some QoR Watercolor tubes and made a couple  backgrounds. 

Once they were dry, I added tangles, highlights and shading. All worked super duper on the Harmony! 

I won't bore you with before and after on all the pieces, I just thought these were pretty both ways. With and without tangling. 

Still using the QoR tubes here. Lots and lots of water with a water brush and spray bottle, and the Harmony held up great! I did have a little warping, but again - a night under the weight of my iPad and it was all wonderful the next morning.

A different type of watercolor on these two - Cosmic Iridescent Shimmering Watercolor from Joggles.

These pigment watercolor cakes have bits of mica to give shimmery highlights. Hard to photograph but they are there! Mostly I sprayed the paper first, then used a water brush to pick up and dispense the cosmic colors. So pretty! And absolutely no warping of page, no pilling, no issues. On the pages where I used  graphite to add shading - I had no problems with the paper. I wasn't sure what to expect when I shaded and  blended on top of color, on top of paper. But it all worked fine.

Watercolor worked great! And it should because the Harmony is made for watercolor. So I thought, let's try something else. Because that is what I do. I pulled out some bottles of Daler Rowney Liquid Acrylics. Still wet media. I tend to use these as if they were watercolors, so I began with a layer of water . . .

. . . . . . that I added the liquid acrylics to with an eyedropper. I used a heat gun to push the color and dry. These colors are so bright and beautiful! For this little page, I went with a mixed media idea. Bits of magazine collage were added with Dina Wakley's clear gesso. I also used Jane Davenport's mermaid markers for some extra color, some stencils from Joggles, Posca Paint Pens and a couple gelly roll pens. There is a lot more that could be done with this mixed media page - at a later time.

Still using the Daler Rowney Liquid Acrylics with a whole lot!!! of water!

I liked the results so much I had to make a couple more pages. For this one I just sprayed the page first, then added the color.

And then the tangles. Love, love, love how this turned out!

And one last Daler Rowney page. I mostly put color along one horizontal edge, and tilted the page to let the color run down. Awesome! Harmony and Daler Rowney - a perfect match!

Moving on, I changed to Golden High Flow Acrylics. I put down a layer of water first, then mixed the Golden color into the water and moved it around by tilting and tipping.

It was fun to tangle on and I can not tell a bit of change in this page texture-wise or surface-wise. It feels just like it did before I added color.

Just because Harmony is a watercolor paper does not mean that is all you can use it for. On this page I was trying out some Hi-Tec-C Maica pens from Pilot. They showed up in the mail from out of the blue when I was making this journal. So I had to play with them, right?

This last batch of pages are all related. I used Tombow dual brush pens as a watercolor. Such a fun technique! I have a quick YouTube tutorial here.

This technique gives such beautiful results . . . every single time!

I guess you can tell which colors I like best. Hahahaha!

And those are the last couple pages that I haven't tangled yet. I began by saying this journal has sixteen pages - that is actually thirty-two work surfaces. So many beautiful pages to create art on!

So. What do I think about the Harmony Hot Pressed Watercolor Paper from Hahnemühle? I love it! The block comes with twelve sheets. Just four pages gave me this sixteen page book with thirty-two work surfaces. That's a lot of bang for your buck! 

If you are not familiar with these blocks, they are glued on all four sides. The purpose of that is so your paper dries flat. If you use a load of water like I do, that is a really marvelous feature. I just let the page totally dry, then slip a metal palette knife inside the one little open slot they leave you, and gently slide the edge around all four sides which removes the page from the block. Easy peasy. Just be sure it is totally dry first. The paper took all the media I threw at it. Like a boss! No problems at all. What little warping I got  with the wettest pages was easily remedied with an overnight under my iPad. All these pages flattened out easily. With all the water, rubbing, scrubbing, heating, blowing, pushing and pulling - I had no pilling anywhere, no feathering, no damage of any kind to the paper.

So do I want you to have some awesome Hahnemühle Harmony Hot Pressed Watercolor Paper? Of course I do! Where can you get some?  You can purchase some by clicking here. And as promised, here is a flip through of my journal. About half way through you will see how  to remove these pages and put them back in.

Harmony Hot Pressed Watercolor Paper can be purchased by clicking here.