Product review of Daniel Smith's Watercolor Ground

For today's post I'm doing a product review of Daniel Smith's Watercolor ground. This brand new painting ground had my interest as soon as I heard about it because it claims to make it possible to paint watercolors on almost any surface including glass, metal and wood. This sounded pretty exciting to me.

I had an upcoming submission to work on where I had really wanted to submit a watercolor but the show's requirements called for an 8"x8" gallery wrapped canvas. A perfect excuse to buy the ground. I looked for it locally at Opus but they don't stock it. I tried ordering through Daniel Smith but with the cost of customs, tax and the time it would take to ship it, it wasn't worth it. As luck would have it my local art supply store, Pheonix Art Workshop stocks it. Yeah for local!

Here you can see the canvas texture.

8"x8"

The gesso itself is quite thick and is a bit tricky to brush on without it holding the brush strokes. I put it on a pre-primed canvass and I think I should have coated it a couple of times because some of the canvass was more absorbent than other areas. I found that I wasn't able to pool my pigment or drip in concentrated color like I can with paper so it wasn't as satisfying that way. I was able to easily lift my mistakes though with a damp brush. The paint always seemed to stay water-soluable. At $20 for a pint it's fairly expensive but I think it will last a long time. Have you tried this new ground? What things did you discover with it?