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Friday, May 15, 2009

Some Good Support

My bank card got swallowed by an ATM today, fantastic!

Anyway here's a little story about paper. This is the paper I used to paint on:

















Daler Rowney have fairly recently changed the smoothness of this paper (and the weight). It's now just cold pressed but it used to be so shmooth. The advantages of the old stuff were several fold: a paper capable of taking ink and watercolour; good for glazing techniques; readily available in big newsagents; affordable enough that you can just muck around on them and not feel like everything you do on it has to be a masterpiece.

Now that it's just cold pressed like every other pad of watercolour paper next to it on the shelves it's lost the first two qualities.

Here's some stuff from 2006 on the old paper:




























The paintings in my first post were also painted on this stuff.

I was trying out some Arches Hot pressed and these were the results:


































This paper's a lot pricier, but I got this block for free from my wonderful and kind Stephen. It is really, really nice, but it doesn't handle the dip pens as well as the old Daler Rowney Aquarelle.

DR Aquarelle:















Arches hot pressed:













These are the exact same zoom and size. But it is VERY zoomed in. It's more something you notice when your drawing.

Well, I've yet to test out every other hot pressed paper under the sun and that is fairly probable.

2 comments:

Stephen Mooney said...

Wow, informative. I feel your pain Lisa, they got rid of the brand of Bristol board I was using for years, and I had to change over to the Daler-Rowney.
Its good, but not AS good. Sigh.
Lovely pieces as usual.

Lisa said...

The lesson is if you find something you like buy a lifetime supply of it before they stop producing it. It doesn't work too well with foodstuff though.