Review | Fabriano Watercolor Pad
HANGING PLANS | A few months ago May looked a lot different in my mind. I was looking forward to doing my first ever landscape workshop and driving cross country on another monster road trip out west…boy is it funny how plans can change in an instant. Instead of going off on some grand adventure and flexing my muscles with teaching in a new format, I’m having to rethink not just the next month, but also quite possibly the rest of the year.
Meanwhile it’s officially starting to feel a lot like groundhog day or some strange twilight zone around here. Days and nights merge seamlessly into one another and each day slips to the next with barely the blink of an eye, sometimes it seems like the only thing that changes is the weather. Some days it feels like I’ve accomplished a lot and other days little. Between the studio, tending to the garden, wrapping up spring classes and making sure 20+ mouths get fed at the homestead on the regular, I’ve got a lot keeping me busy, but regardless of all the distractions I still started getting a certain kind of stir crazy this week. Not because of lack of things to do, but because I have a lot of weird energy that just hasn’t been able to get out.
My creative energy at it’s worst comes out as borderline obsessive (big surprise right?) and the only way to temper it is to put my hands to work, basically making things is how I survive and keep sane. Big projects and long drawings usually help me fill that space, because I can easily pick back up where I left off and find something to work on even when feeling a bit scatterbrained, but I simply haven’t been feeling them lately. Recently though I’ve been craving a slightly more intimate and immediate type of work, something that can materialize in a week or two instead of a couple months. Something that requires a little less planning and is a little more reactive to whatever mood I’m in that day. A few weeks ago I ordered some stuff for the studio on a whim and one of them turned out to possibly be an answer to this dilemma, so read on to see how I got on with testing out a new paper and what my big plans are for it.
Fabriano Studio Watercolor Pad | 140lb. | 25% Cotton Rag | Acid Free, Archival & Chlorine Free. | Available here.
FABRIANO STUDIO WATERCOLOR PAD | I knew Fabriano made pads of drawing paper and sketchbooks, but it wasn’t until recently I realized they had a pad of 140lb Studio Watercolor Paper in their line up too. Now this got me super excited considering Fabriano has been my paper of choice for a little over 10 years now and I’m always looking for more student friendly options to use in my classes + workshops.
For me watercolor paper in pad form isn’t my top choice because it usually has a very low or almost non-existent cotton content, meaning it doesn’t work as well with wet on wet or soft bleed washes and warps super easily. I usually keep a few pads of Canson XL Watercolor pads around and while they really aren’t bad, they just have a bit more tooth than I like for drawing and have no similarities to the paper surface I would typically work on.
I wasn’t too optimistic, but I ordered it anyways since I enjoy working with their other paper and was curious to see how the 140lb. Studio variation held up under washes and heavy mixed media use. Besides it’s always nice to have a cheaper paper around the studio that performs similar to what I use in my larger mixed media work.
Fabriano Studio Watercolor Wash Test | Here you can see the edges of the paper curling up slightly. Not a big deal to me and easy to fix.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS | For the past week or two the pad has been begging for attention from the middle of the giant work table in my studio, so a few days ago I finally picked it up and just started to play. First few sheets I decided to do some tests to see how I liked the surface and how some of the techniques I use on a regular basis would work on it. Worked with some fairly heavy wet grounds to test out how much water it could actually take and to my surprise it was a lot more than I anticipated, especially considering the low amount of cotton rag in the paper. While I still wouldn’t completely douse it in water, this paper actually held up well to some pooling and flattened back out pretty well. There are one or two sheets where I went really heavy that will definitely need to be weighted, but for the most part (under what I would consider a normal amount of water) there was only a slight curl on the ends of the rest should go away with a coat or two of matte media to no problem.
Next up I decided to test out how receptive the surface was to pencil demarcations. Had a few photos from an old burned out house site that will be turned into a larger work later this summer, so figured I’d sketch out those references for my test images. Overall I found the hot press surface to be a hard, but silky finish that the graphite glides effortlessly across and was quite beautiful for pencil work. It’s . It also erases very well and because it’s a hard surface, would take a lot of extremely heavy pressure to cause indentations, etc. Consider me impressed so far on those two fronts, but I’m gonna continue putting it through the ringer over the next two weeks so I’ll update ya’ll on how I get on with it in a month or two as I delve into more heavy layering.
Fabriano Studio Watercolor Texture Test | I was happy with how well the brushstrokes, splatters and other techniques created beautiful surface effects.
PROS | Here are some of the things I’ve enjoyed so far about this paper:
Price | I purchased the 11x14” size from Jerry’s Artarama and got 50 sheets of 140lb. hot press watercolor paper for $25.12, which breaks down to .50 cents per sheet. Considering I pay anywhere between $5.00-11.00 for a standard 22x30lb. sheet, that’s a pretty good price for some quality study paper.
Surface Variety | If you’re not a hot press devotee like me, they also offer cold press as well. It’s not often that you even get a surface choice when buy watercolor paper in a pad, so this is a nice option.
Longevity | It ticks all of the acid free, lignan free, archival and chlorine free boxes, which means that it will stand up to the test of time. I’ll talk a lot more in depth about why these things are important coming up in a post devoted solely to paper.
Environmental Considerations | The pulp content of this paper is made up 100% of E.C.F. lignan free pulp (Elemental Chlorine Free) from responsibly managed forests, is FSC certified and is produced using hydropower. You can read more about Fabriano’s long standing environmental initiatives here.
Contains Cotton Rag | Most watercolor paper you buy in a pad is pulp based and doesn’t contain any cotton rag whatsoever. The fact that this does have some in the mix helps with the strength, absorbency and helps keep warping down with heavy water application.
CONS | Here are some things I’m not quite sold on and a few that the jury is still out on:
Not 100% Cotton Rag | Since it’s only 25% cotton rag and usually any form of sizing isn’t ideal for heavy water media application, now that being said you would be hard pressed to find any 100% cotton rag paper of quality at this price point.
Thin | In comparison to other 140lb. watercolor paper pads I have these sheets are noticeably a bit thinner, now this could be due to the mix of cotton rag and pulp, but I do wish they were a bit more substantial to the touch. Personally I like the thickness of the Canson Watercolor Paper pads, but can’t stand drawing on the heavily textured surface.
Not Great for Wet on Wet | Because of the water limitations wet on wet techniques are harder to achieve because of the lower cotton content. This takes away some of the softness you can typically achieve with watercolor, but I did find that putting down a thin wash of water first and then applying the pigment did help with this.
Buckles | This is a paper I would stick to only thin washes on or letting it dry completely between layers. The corners and edges turned up on almost every page I used and the two that I did very heavy washes on where I let lots of water pool have some pretty heavy warps in the middle. That being said for the most part the warping is fairly mild, the corners can easily be fixed with some weighting and a little patience or by using a coat or two of acrylic matte media in the drawing process to weight the paper back down if you’re going the mixed media route.
Fabriano Studio Watercolor Drawing Test | Using a Staedtler Lumograph 2H pencil, I laid out three different demarcations testing the surface responsiveness. The graphite went on smooth and responds very well to the hot press surface.
WHAT ARE MY PLANS FOR IT? | After playing around with a few sheets and seeing how nice and easy the surface was to work with, my mind started going a little crazy with possibilities. I also started to realize that this pad of paper might just give me the spring board for the kind of project my restless mind needed - one that had a lot of variety, yet at the same time remained small enough scale wise and and had just enough structure that it wasn’t completely insane, so….
I have a ton of reference images I’ve taken over the years that don’t always make their way into my larger work, so I figure in some capacity or another that I might as well try my best to fill the pages using those long neglected images and see where I end up by the end of next month. It could either be a rolling disaster or I’ll have a ton of things to pull from heading into making new large work again in June. Either way while it’s definitely not the craziest thing I’ve ever done and maybe it’ll get me back into the spirit of adventure I’ve been missing.
All I know is that heading into May I needed something to set my mind to that would give all of this pent up creative energy an outlet that didn’t involve tearing up my front porch or another small scale structure build like last year. So yeah, for the next month I’m going to try fill up this pad of paper and after that I’ll report back with some final thoughts on the paper itself and a more in depth review of what I found worked well with it and what didn’t. Above is a sneak peak at the first three drawings and I’ll be posting more over on Instagram, so be sure to keep tabs on that space to see how they evolve!