Watercolor Duck Painting: Supplies overview for wildlife painting

I found this wonderful reference photo on Morgue Files free stock photos and thought he would make for a lovely watercolor painting. I decided to paint the duck first then I will mask him out around the edges to do a wet-on-wet background. Here is my progress so far. I am using Holbein Watercolor paints but I am not happy with the watercolor paper I am using. It does not handle many layers well. I will be going back to Arches for my next creation.

I used Stonehedge Aqua cold press 140 lb paper and I have had many issues with the pigment lifting up too easily. This is better suited to a 1 layer paper. The painting took twice as long as it should have due to these issues. It also did not handle masking fluid very well as once I removed the masking around my duck it ripped my paper in some areas #badword# so I had to do damage control. Lesson learned I will be using only arches watercolor paper from now on when I have multi-layer projects.

Aqua Elite Brushes pack: https://amzn.to/3pMaypx

Neptune Watercolor Brush pack: https://amzn.to/349qycR

Princeton Black Velvet series brushes: https://amzn.to/33MzDbk

Holbein Watercolor Kits:

12 5 ml tubes: https://amzn.to/3Frc31L

18 5 ml tubes: https://amzn.to/3qlUY32

24 5 ml tubes: https://amzn.to/3Eqfy7t

Arches 140 cold-pressed: 9x12 https://amzn.to/3z0dhP3