The Wonders of Watercolor Paper

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Reported by Amy Westerman

Many stampers enjoy using the watercolor technique for their handmade stamped cards. It’s a technique that adds beautiful, serene-like images to a card, each one itself a piece of treasured artwork.

What makes this technique even more beautiful is using paper designed specifically for use with water. Sure, you can use plain card stock. But watercolor paper creates a beauty that is unattainable with regular card stock!

Watercolor paper comes in three surfaces; Rough, Hot-pressed (HP), or Cold-pressed (CP). Rough watercolor paper is just that, rough. It has prominent indentations in the paper that allow colored water to pool in its crevices. Using a rough paper will result in a totally different look than painting on a smooth card stock surface will. Hot-pressed watercolor paper has a very fine, smooth surface with almost no “tooth” (texture) and paint will dry very quickly on it. Cold-pressed watercolor paper has a slightly textured surface, somewhere in-between Rough and Hot Pressed. Cold-pressed paper is the paper most often used with serious watercolor artists.

The thickness of the paper is indicated by its weight. The standard watercolor weights are 90lb, 140lb, 260lb, and 300lb (these weights represent what 500 pieces of each paper thickness would weigh). Obviously, the 90lb paper is very thin, the 300lb paper, very thick). Manufacturers recommend that any paper less than 300lbs be “stretched” to avoid buckling of the paper, but for our purposes, merely laying your dried water colored image under a book for several hours would do the trick to cure the buckling! Serious watercolor artists wet and stretch their paper on fancy mechanisms designed to take the buckle out of the paper prior to painting. For stamping purposes though, the 140lb paper works just fine!

There are many manufacturers of watercolor paper, so for this article, I am not focusing on any one maker of watercolor paper, only on the different surfaces available. I went to Michael’s and purchased a watercolor paper sampler pad on sale for $10.50. It contains 13 sheets of watercolor paper, sized 10.5 x 14.5. It’s a big pad of paper! There were 6 different types of watercolor paper in the pad, from rough to smooth, from 80lbs to 140lbs.

For this experiment, I stamped the same beach image on all four different surfaced papers; rough, cold-pressed, hot-pressed, and regular card stock. The images are stamped with black StazOn, and were painted with my aqua painter pen and various colored inks. Once I was finished painting the images, I spritzed water all over the paper to blend the colors together. (Note: I am NOT a professional watercolor artist, so my painting might be lacking slightly!). At this point, each of the papers immediately buckled because they became wet (by buckling, I mean the middle rises up so the paper looks arched), or, in the case of the regular card stock, became wavy all over. They all took only 10-20 minutes to dry, and by the time they were dry, all but the regular card stock laid flat!

I have to say, the images that were stamped and colored on any of the three watercolor surfaces have a quality and a depth about them that is absent on the regular card stock. I think my favorite results were found using the rough watercolor paper.

The colors have a very translucent and dreamy effect too them. Both the hotpressed and coldpressed watercolor papers produced acceptable results as well.



Least impressive results were achieved using the regular card stock. There is no depth to the image whatsoever, and it lacks the dreamy quality effect so noticeable with the watercolor paper.

In conclusion, if you are planning on doing lots of water coloring on your cards in the near future, I would highly recommend investing in a good pad of watercolor paper. It outperforms regular card stock by miles. It’s relatively inexpensive, but will make your artwork look like a million bucks!