Paper & Sketchbooks
Mould-made cotton, printmaking sheets, pastel grounds and the sketchbooks we bind upstairs.
We stock roughly forty papers. These are the six that cover most of what walks through the door, with the numbers that actually decide the choice.
The mould-made cotton paper most watercolourists settle on and stop looking. Sized in the gelatine bath rather than sprayed, so it takes lifting and scrubbing without pilling, and holds a wet-in-wet wash where it is put. The cold-pressed sheet is the one we sell most of; the rough is worth a try if you paint large and want the tooth to break the stroke.
Max sheet size (cm)
56×76
Weight (gsm)
300
Finish
Cold pressed
Paper tone
Natural white
Texture
Medium grain
Cotton, acid free, and a touch smoother than the Arches, which makes it the better sheet for detail and for botanical work. The extra white version has no optical brighteners, so what you scan is what you painted. It buckles less than its weight suggests, and it is the sheet we recommend to anyone moving up from a pad for the first time.
Max sheet size (cm)
56×76
Weight (gsm)
300
Finish
Hot pressed
Paper tone
Extra white
Texture
Smooth
A heavy mould-made printmaking sheet with a felt-marked surface that takes an etching beautifully and, damp, pulls a clean plate tone. Printmakers buy it for intaglio; illustrators buy it because it prints a giclée with a texture that reads as handmade. It is a robust paper — it handles soaking, blotting and mounting without complaint.
Max sheet size (cm)
78×109
Weight (gsm)
310
Finish
Matte
Paper tone
Warm white
Texture
High texture
The pastel sheet, and the reason the pastel wall in the shop is next to the paper wall. Two usable sides — a honeycomb face that grips a lot of pigment and a finer reverse for careful work — in fifty colours, which matters more than it sounds when the ground is doing half the drawing for you.
Max sheet size (cm)
50×65
Weight (gsm)
160
Finish
Honeycomb
Paper tone
50 colours
Texture
Two sided
The workhorse pad. Not a fine art sheet and not sold as one — it is the paper for the fifty drawings you make to get to the one, and we keep the margin low on it for exactly that reason. Takes graphite, charcoal and ink without feathering, and the tape binding pulls clean if you want the sheet off the pad.
Max sheet size (cm)
46×61
Weight (gsm)
130
Finish
Vellum
Paper tone
Bright white
Texture
Light tooth
Bound upstairs, in the bookbinding station, in batches of forty. Coptic stitched so it opens flat on the table and stays there, with a Fabriano Accademia block inside and a board cover we cut from the offcuts of the framing bench. We make them in three sizes. When a batch sells out it is out until the next one is sewn.
Sizes
A6 · A5 · A4
Weight (gsm)
200
Finish
Coptic stitched
Paper tone
Natural white
Texture
Light grain
Bring the work, or a photograph of it, and we will pull three sheets and let you draw on all of them at the side table. Sample sheets are free and always have been.