It was like pealing a Band-aid that didn't want to come off

Okay so let me tell you about my editorial project on sleep trouble. We have to create an illustration for an article about the sleep number bed and how many people have trouble sleeping and people who sleep on awful mattresses. I am painting it in watercolor and I was off to a great start. I have the drawing on the watercolor paper which is smooth and not as thick as most watercolor paper. Tuck that fact in the back of your mind that the paper was not thick...

So I started the illustration by brushing on a watercolor masking fluid. The masking fluid is for masking areas that you want to remain white. After its dry, you take a rubber cement pad and rub off the the masking fluid after its dry. I used it before early this week and had no problems. So I brushed it on my illustration and let it dry. 

After it dried I painted the table, curtains, lamp, dresser, and picture frames. and then used a hair dryer to make the paint dry faster. Hair dryers are so so helpful! Once that dried I painted a blue wash over the whole thing. The masking fluid did its job by resisting all the paint that was brushed on. 

So everything was going well until...I decided to remove the mask. *sigh* So I took the rubber cement pad and began to rub it away and when I started to peal it away, the masking fluid took the top layer of the paper with it!! I felt my eyes grow wide and my jaw just fall as I just watched myself destroy my painting...It was like trying to peal a Band-aid that didn't want to come off...

This is what it looked like:

See all the little bits of paper?! I can't paint over that because it will look like garbage. And I did try to paint over it and it looked like, well, garbage. So...I had to start alllllllllllllll over from the beginning. But the good news is that I think its looking a lot better the second time around. I just decided to paint all around the spots I wanted to remain white which is a pain in the butt.

I looked on the back of the bottle of the masking fluid and its not for thin paper...lesson learned. You can see all my process work for this project here