Artist's Loft Watercolor Pad
I have just been getting started with watercolors. I wanted to find a pad of paper that was inexpensive and also good quality. I didn't want to get frustrated and stop doing it because the paper was awful. I also didn't want to pay a lot for highest-end paper, in case I found I just wasn't that interested in watercoloring.
I was lucky in that I found the Artist's Loft Watercolor Paper at Michaels, because I always have coupons for Michaels. In this case I had a 20% off coupon that I could use across the various things I was buying - the watercolors themselves in a variety of forms, plus some inexpensive t-shirts to do fabric painting with. The list price for the 12" x 9" 25-sheet pad was $4.99, and with my discount that brought it down to $4.00. That is 16 cents a sheet.
It's a bit of a waste, because I've been using this to make notecards. I need the cards to fit into a traditionally sized envelope, so I've been trimming this paper down to 8.5" x 11", cutting it in half, and then painting those two notecard sheets. Still, I then paint the "end remnants" with colors to make them into bookmarks.
I've enjoyed the paper immensely. I've been trying various techniques, from using wet paint to mostly dry paint, and all levels in between. The paper is holding up well. I do want to note that I remove my paper fully from the pad before I work on it, because of the way I'm cutting it down. I have the small notecard-sized piece of paper on the table before me when I start to paint. So I haven't painted anything while the paper is still in the pad. I don't know if the water would soak through the top layer and onto the second layer.
At least in my experience so far, I recommend this paper. It works just right for what I want.
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