Why I Finally Stopped Blaming Myself and Started Blaming My Paper

I’ve been painting with watercolour for about three years. For most of that time I’ve been using student-grade paper — the kind that comes in large pads at a reasonable price and is perfectly adequate for practice. I’d been told by various online tutorials and fellow painters that the paper matters, that professional paper behaves differently, that I should try Arches at some point. I’d nodded along and continued buying the student paper because it seemed wasteful to spend more on paper when my technique was still developing.

I was wrong about that. The Arches Cold Pressed 300 GSM A3 Watercolour Pad changed my understanding of what watercolour can do, and it changed it immediately — on the first sheet.

The Problem With Student Paper

Student watercolour paper is typically made from wood pulp rather than cotton. It’s sized differently, it absorbs water differently, and it behaves unpredictably when wet — it buckles, it absorbs paint too quickly, and it doesn’t allow the kind of wet-on-wet blending that makes watercolour so distinctive and beautiful. I’d been struggling with all of these things for three years and attributing them to my technique.

The specific problems I’d been having were: washes that dried with hard edges where I didn’t want them, wet-on-wet blooms that appeared in the wrong places, and paper that buckled so badly when wet that the paint pooled in the valleys and dried unevenly. I’d been working around these problems rather than solving them, and my paintings showed it.

Why I Finally Chose Arches

The Arches Watercolour Pad Cold Pressed 300 GSM A3 is the paper that professional watercolourists consistently recommend above all others. Arches has been making watercolour paper since 1492 — it’s 100% cotton rag, which means it handles water completely differently from wood pulp paper. The 300 GSM weight is heavy enough that it doesn’t require stretching before use, which had been another frustration with lighter papers. And the cold pressed surface has a slight texture that holds paint beautifully while still allowing smooth washes.

I chose the A3 size because I’d been finding my A4 paintings too small — I wanted more space to work with looser, more expressive brushwork. The 12-sheet pad gave me enough paper to work through a proper project without running out immediately.

The First Sheet — An Immediate Revelation

I painted a simple landscape on the first sheet — a sky wash, some distant hills, a foreground. The kind of painting I’d done dozens of times on student paper with mixed results. The difference was immediate and significant.

The sky wash stayed open for much longer than I was used to — the cotton paper absorbs water more slowly and releases it more evenly, which means you have more time to work into a wet wash before it starts to dry. The wet-on-wet blooms I added to the clouds appeared exactly where I put them and spread in the way I intended rather than racing across the paper unpredictably. The paper didn’t buckle at all, even with a very wet wash, which meant the paint dried evenly across the whole surface.

The painting looked better than anything I’d produced in three years of practice. Not because my technique had suddenly improved — it hadn’t — but because the paper was finally letting me do what I’d been trying to do all along.

What Changes With Professional Paper

The specific differences I’ve noticed after working through several sheets are: washes stay wet longer and dry more evenly; wet-on-wet work is predictable and controllable; lifting paint (removing wet or dry paint with a brush or tissue) works much more effectively; the paper doesn’t buckle even with very wet techniques; and the dried surface has a luminosity that student paper simply doesn’t have — the white of the cotton shows through the paint in a way that makes colours look more vibrant.

That last point is the one that surprised me most. The same pigments I’d been using on student paper look noticeably more vivid on Arches. The paper itself is contributing to the quality of the colour, which is something I hadn’t understood before I experienced it.

The Cost Question

Arches is significantly more expensive than student paper, and I understand why that’s a barrier. My honest view is that the cost is justified even for developing painters, because the paper is teaching you what watercolour actually does rather than what watercolour does on inadequate paper. Three years of practising on student paper taught me to work around the paper’s limitations. One pad of Arches has started teaching me to work with the medium properly.

The 12 sheets in the A3 pad are enough for a substantial body of work if you’re painting at a reasonable size. I’ve been treating each sheet as something worth taking seriously, which has also improved my preparation and intention before I start painting.

Where to Find It

The Arches Watercolour Pad Cold Pressed 300 GSM A3 is available in the Drawing & Painting Paper and Art & Craft Paper collections, within the broader Arts & Crafts and Arts & Entertainment ranges.

If you’ve been painting with watercolour for a while and feeling frustrated that your results don’t match what you’re trying to achieve, I’d strongly suggest trying professional paper before concluding that the problem is your technique. It might be your paper. It was mine.

— Ruth Calloway, three-year watercolourist, former blamer of her own technique, and now a person who understands that the paper is doing at least half the work