Aaah paper. Glorious paper. 

Ok let’s just get down to it. The most important things for you to know when picking papers are texture, weight, and color. Every paper you buy at a proper art store should be acid free, but I would check anyways.

Texture. Basically there are smooth and rough papers with every level in between. There are two main names for this: Smooth = Cold Pressed and Rough = Hot Pressed.

Think of Hot Pressed as having a hot iron taken to it. Cold Pressed looks like this when painted on:

And Hot Pressed is all smooth.

There are many other kinds of paper that don’t say Hot or Cold Pressed on them. For example, one of my favorite papers called Bristol:

Bristol paper is smooth and fabulous. My friend did his entire comic book on Bristol paper. It’s great with ink. It’s great with everything but really wet paints.

Another of my favorite papers is Arches 88. It’s called a silk screen paper but it’s great for everything I’ve come across. It’s really nice for artist book making, and collage, and drawing. And it’s soooo soft and wonderful. Oh I love it.

Weight. This is how thick the paper is. Normal paper for your home printer is about 20lbs and looks like this:

Then there’s Bristol paper which is another good thickness to keep in mind as you shop. The one I use is a simple 100lbs:

Color. For most things Mi-Teintes does the job great. Here I used some for a framed piece of work by Lou:

Then there’s a million other things you can learn about paper, but for now I will add a couple more bits of information. This is a deckled edge:

And if you want to do watercolor or some other kind of wet work on paper you need to prime your paper. This takes some work, so for beginners I would just get a watercolor block which already has the paper stretched out. Water warps the paper making it lumpy. But if you have a lot of time on your hands and want to stretch it yourself I’ll do a tutorial shortly (this is a good description for now though.)

The first picture in this post is of a watermark. Most good papers have this. You hold it up to the light and it shows you the correct side to use. Make sure the watermark text is readable and not backwards.

Some more paper links:

Arches is awesome. Blocks, paper, everything. (Blocks being the already primed paper. You insert a butterknife or something like that to seperate the pages)

Yupo crazy tech paper – I havn’t tried this, but it looks interesting!

Rice Paper – Thin, fun to check out. Nice with inks.

Oh there is so much more….but this is a nice start.