This paper comes in a rainbow of colours, choose a bright red or bright orange as a base to bring vibrance to a drawing. The paper is made from 45% cotton fibres, which gives it durability, allowing artists to layer and rework sections of pastel. Murano paper is inexpensive, but also acid-free, making it the perfect choice for professional work if you choose. Create wonderful blends with hard pastel, soft pastel, charcoal, pencil and even acrylic or gouache. What makes a good pastel paper?

I might stop doing pastels if I couldn’t get at least one of the papers above or something just like them. I don’t like the traditional papers or any of the other non sanded offerings out there. In another post, I described 6 basics of drawing paper, including the most commonly used papers for colored pencil. A subsequent article listed 3 non-paper, non-traditional drawing surfaces for colored pencil. One of them was sandpaper. I found that a detailed drawing is unnecessary with this paper because of the difficulty of transferring an image by traditional means. So I sketched a basic landscape and then began shading the shapes, working throughout the composition to build color. Larger makes bigger prints. I don’t recommend making prints any larger than the artwork, even if you take a photo with a camera that gets a huge file size. Artwork doesn’t looks good blown up larger. If your artwork is larger, you can print large or small and the prints will look good. Smaller art limits your print size.

Ingres Pastel Paper

Now that I’ve created several pieces on sanded art papers, it’s time to share with you what I’ve learned. Both good and bad. 5 Differences Between Sanded Art Paper and Drawing Paper Of the two, the Art Paper was definitely the easiest to work with. At 9″ X 12″ it can even be cut in half or in quarters for small practice session, or cards or just about anything. There’s a total of six colors, so I might just wait a few more days before buying anything more expensive. :thumbsup: Touch has a ‘micro-abrasive’ texture of screen-printed sanded primer, but with a less regular pattern on its surface than Colourfix. The coating is only resistant to very small amounts of water or alcohol, providing you do not scrub its surface. It’s also suited to chalk and neat acrylic paint, sanguine and charcoal, and great for layering colour.

And just in case you’ve heard the rumors about pigment dust when you draw on sanded papers, it’s true. But you probably haven’t heard that you can use a bristle brush to push that dust into the tooth of the paper so it’s not wasted!

Gum Tragacanth

The other point I have about papers is that every paper has its favorite pastels. Every pastel has its favorite papers. just to get that much more complicated, which ones they are vary with your hand and can change or expand with time and new skills at new textures!