Usually while using water on paper, the paper get's crinkled because of the cellulose tubes in paper. When water is added to paper, the tubes expand but then when the water dries and the tubes compress again, they don't get into the same position as before, creating bumps and crinkles. While painting, having the paper crinkled affects your artwork and so this is a technique for keeping the paper away from crinkles.
How do we stretch paper?
There are different steps for stretching paper.
The first step to stretching paper is to get a drawing board, or any flat hard surface, to use as the base where the watercolor paper will be stretched. Then, you place the watercolor paper onto the board as shown in picture 2. Next you get four pieces of gum strips, which are used for stretching paper as when they're wet, they become sticky which can then be used for stretching the paper. As shown in picture 3, the gumstrips need to be cut in 4 pieces, one for each side of the paper. While cutting, it is important to make sure that the gum strips are slightly longer than the length or width of the paper. After this you proceed to wetting the gumstrip in water one at a time, which you can use a bucket or any other equipment, and while wetting it you simply have to dip it in the water and bring it back up. Then, you start sticking the gumstrips onto the board and paper. While sticking, you need to make sure that you are sticking the sides which are next to each other. For example, you can't stick the top horizontal side of the paper and then the bottom horizontal, you need to stick the top and then either the left or right side, and then the bottom.
Toning using charcoal and chalk
This was a task where we focused on structure specifically. We chose a scenery we wanted to draw and positioned ourself so that we can see the view properly. We got a piece of sugar paper, a piece of charcoal and chalk. I first outlined the mountains and the tree on the bottom left and then started outlining the darker areas which in real life where darker rocks or layers on the mountain. It was a bit difficult as the scenery in real life was using different colors for the different parts of the mountains and so it visualize it in black and white and get the shading right was a bit hard. However, the purpose of this was to, as said earlier, focus on structure and so this exercise helped us focus more on the structure by adding emphasis onto some areas while not as much to others.