what a difference card makes

This week saw another thread on docrafts forum about stamping & colouring ability or more to the point lack of. So having a pad of my new smooth wc paper (I used to use hubbys bockingford but it's a bit too textured for highly detailed stamps) at hand I thought it might be interesting to show the difference between a really good quality watercolour paper and a really good quality white cardstock.

In the interest of fairness I used the same image, same brush & coloured each image simultaneously. TH distress inks in tumbled glass, walnut stain, tattered rose, victorian velvet & milled lavender. I'll freely admit I'm not that great when it comes to where shadows and highlights belong and I'm just about average at colouring in so if anyone's thinking I can colour better than that I'd probably agree with you lol.


This one is using Annamarie designs 300gsm white card. Pricewise it isnt bad, about £10 for 100 sheets although I got mine on a bogof at a show last year. I use it for most of my base cards and tags. It's my preferred card when using distress inks with blending foam as it really takes ink well.

Watercolouring with it was a different story though. As the brush hit the paper the majority of the paint stuck in one tiny dot and it was incredibly difficult to blend the colour outwards. You can really see this around the arm area where in real life it's quite blotchy. The cheeks were next to impossible to blend in and if you look closely you can see where the card has started to bobble. It does suit how I colour hair (tiny flicks of the brush) but in the main the only way I could blend was to use quite a watered down wash then add in layers of darker colour while still wet. That's not easy if you want to add detail to small areas though.


This is using Langton hot pressed extra smooth graine satine watercolour paper by Daler & Rowney bought from a local artists supply shop. It wasnt cheap, about £7 for 12 sheets of 10*7

Blending with it was a dream and the colour flowed out with the brush. Admittedly I wasnt colouring for long but I was able to go back in and blend over dried areas. This was really noticeable around the cheek area, under normal circumstances I'd have dropped in the velvet while the rose was still wet and blending would have occured pretty much without any help.



This is one of the occasions where my camera has taken a better pic than real life as it's hiding quite a lot of the blotches on the card tilda. Both images side by side which makes it a bit easier to see the difference. The difference of depth of colour is quite striking, the langton is more of an milk white than the pure white of the annamarie. Not sure if that's why there's a difference or not but the annamarie one is quite flat and dull looking around the hair.









I hope if anyone's got to the end of this post that it's going to leave them realising that just buying expensive pens, pencils & markers isnt the only way to get better colouring.. it's changing the paper or card you're colouring on. I'm sat here wishing I'd found the langton paper some 14 years ago when I decided hubbys "cheap" Derwent watercolour pencils were "rubbish" and disliked stamping for another 12 years before spending a fortune on copics, albrecht drurer pencils & polychromos and pinching hubbies bockingford wc paper.