Saunders Waterford 300gms cold pressed paper

Saunders Waterford papers have been made in England, in Somerset, at St Cuthbert's Mill since the 1700's.

It is said to be recommended for watercolours, gouache, acrylic, pastel, pen and ink, charcoal and pencil, so I thought I'd give it a whirl and see how it performed with coloured pencils.

I would normally use hot pressed paper as it is smoother than cold pressed but I decided to try the cold pressed type.

The paper is an off-white, cream colour, 300gms weight and 100% cotton. It is acid free, archival, sized with gelatin externally and internally. It is a thick paper, but flexible, and the surface feels soft to draw on. Each side has a different feel, the "right" side is rougher than the opposite side, which looks and feels smoother.

I used both sides of the paper for the comparisons and used the pencil from the brands I use most often, Faber-Castell Polychromos, and Caran d'Ache Pablo and Luminance.

This is the right side of the paper with 1-3 layers of pencil. here is fairly good coverage of the aper for each brand and lines are quite good.

This is the other side of the paper, which is smoother, drawn in similar fashion,

As you can see, the smoother side of the paper doesn't give as good coverage, due to less tooth.

I then did a drawing using both sides of the paper and identical pencils,all from the Polychromos range.

This is the "right"side, I labelled the petals with the number of pancil layers I used, and did one full petal with 5 layers of all colours. 5 layers gives reasonable coverage, but there is still plenty of tooth left to add more layers and compleltely cover the surface and leave no gaps.

This is the other side of the paper, the smoother side, done is similar fashion. As with the initial test strips you can see that coverage isn't as good as on the "right" side as most of the tooth is covered with 5 layers.

I really enjoyed using this paper and thought it handled coloured pencils well. One drawback I encountered was when I tested if for erasure and neither side worked well. Both sides looked similar, see below, and left a lot of colour on the paper despite how hard I tried to remove it. This factor would prevent me from using it as a regular paper for commissions. Like anyone, I make mistakes, and I need to be able to correct them easily.

That said, I think this is a very nice paper with superb handling and quality build, and I would use it for other drawings.

It is available in blocks, sheets and pads. It can be fairly pricey,depending on your location. I paid $80 Australian dollars for a pad with 12 sheets of 16 x 12 inches [410 x 310 mm]. By comparison a pad of Pastelmat, 30 x 40mm and 12 pages, cost me around $80-100 Australian dollars depending on the retailer.

The pad sizes are,

10 x 7 inches [260 x 180 mm]

12 x 9 inches [310 x 230 mm]

14 x 10 inches [360 x 260 mm]

16 x 12 inches [410 x 310 mm]

20 x 14 inches [510 x 360 mm]

The sheets come in the following sizes,

A full sheet 22 x 30 inches [560 x 760 mm]

A half sheet 21 x 15 inches [530 x 380 mm]

The rolls come in 1.5 metres x 10 metres are ary in price, but I couldn't find one less than $400-$450 Australian dollars.

At the time of writing 1 Australian dollar is worth 66 US cents.

Latest Painting

I decided to try another bird painting and chose a photo of a couple of parrots.

I used my preferred paper, Clairefontaine Pastelmat,and my usual range of pencils, Faber Castell Polychromos, Caran D'Ache Luminance and Pablos, plus some Holbein and a few others.

I struggled with feather details and am not entirely happy with the result, and think I should stick with animals! The painting is in the Bird Gallery, but this is it.

Conlcusions about Canson Mi-Teintes Velvet paper

I finished the drawing of the dog on this paper.

So Who Has My Bone?

Thanks again go to Maddin_1983-7205842, of Pixaaby for the image

My final thoughts about using it with coloured pencils are mixed. I tried pastel pencils and it's extremely good, which is great since that is what it was designed for!

I found while doing this drawing that it performs quite well with soft coloured pencils, such as Caran D'Ache Luminance, Holbein, and various Derwent pencils, but wasn't so good with the harder brands such as Faber-Castell Polychromos and Pablos pencils.

The harder pencils didn't lay down as well as the softer ones and it took a lot of work to get the paper covered. Pastelmat works well with all the pencil brands I've used, soft and hard,including Verithin too, probably the hardest of all.

On balance I think I prefer Pastelmat, and will have to accept the surface artifacts that seem to have appeared over time.