Which watercolour paper should I buy?

Paper is the one thing in watercolour where the money genuinely changes the result, more than the paint and far more than the brushes. It is also where beginners economise, which is why so many people conclude that watercolour is difficult when what they have actually discovered is that cheap paper is difficult.

Step by step

1. Decide cotton or wood pulp first.Cotton rag paper holds pigment near the surface, stays workable longer, lets you lift and correct, and does not disintegrate when rewetted. Wood-pulp or cellulose paper absorbs pigment into the fibre, dries flatter and duller, and gives you far less time to work. Everything else is secondary to this choice.
2. Choose the surface from the work you do.Cold-pressed, also called NOT, has a moderate texture and is the general-purpose surface — most people should start here. Rough has pronounced texture, breaks the brushstroke up and suits loose landscape and sparkle on water. Hot-pressed is smooth, suits fine detail, botanical work and pen-and-wash, and is much less forgiving of washes.
3. Pick the weight for how wet you work.190gsm is light and will cockle badly. 300gsm is the standard and handles most work, stretched or not. 425gsm and 640gsm are heavy boards that need no stretching at all and cost accordingly. Weight is about how much water the sheet can take without moving.
4. Check whether it is internally and externally sized.Sizing is what stops paint soaking straight in like blotting paper. Good watercolour paper is sized both in the pulp and on the surface. Unsized or lightly sized papers behave very differently and are a specialist choice.
5. Buy a small pad of good paper rather than a large pad of cheap.This is the single most useful purchase advice in the medium. Ten sheets of cotton paper will teach you more and produce better work than a hundred sheets of student paper.
6. Note the difference between a pad, a block and loose sheets.A pad is glued on one edge and will cockle. A block is glued on all four edges and is stretched for you — expensive per sheet and very convenient. Loose full sheets are the cheapest way to buy good paper and require you to cut and stretch them.
7. Test a few before committing to a brand.Cotton papers from different mills behave noticeably differently in how fast they absorb, how much they granulate and how well they lift. Sample packs exist for exactly this reason.
8. Watch which side you paint on.Most sheets have a slightly different texture on each side and a watermark that reads correctly from the front. Either is usable — but be consistent within a painting, and know that the back is often slightly smoother.

Tips

• Acid-free and archival matter for anything you intend to keep or sell. Cheap paper yellows and becomes brittle within years.
• The same paint can look like a different colour on cotton and on wood pulp, because the amount of light coming back through the pigment from the paper differs. Do not judge a paint until you have used it on the paper you actually work on.
• Rough paper is much harder to work in fine detail on, and much easier to make a lively suggestive mark on. Choose it for what you want to do, not for how it looks in the pad.
• Offcuts from a full sheet make excellent test swatches, and having them beside you when mixing solves the dry-down problem.

Common mistakes

• Learning on the cheapest paper available — The paper is doing half the work in this medium. On poor paper, washes streak, blooms cannot be prevented, and nothing lifts — and beginners reasonably conclude they cannot paint.
• Buying hot-pressed because it looks smooth and neat — Hot-pressed is the least forgiving surface for washes, because paint moves freely across it and dries with hard edges. It is a specialist choice, not a default.
• Assuming heavier always means better — Weight only governs how much water it takes before moving. A 640gsm wood-pulp sheet is still wood-pulp and still behaves badly.

Questions people ask