I’ve been messing around with watercolours a reasonable amount since doing the summer school course on them but mainly using bits of paper I had lying around. Yesterday I decided that it was time to get some proper watercolour paper and Jane and I took a trip to the local branch of Hobbycraft; probably not the cheapest but a good range of options and also a fun place to browse.

Watercolour pads turn out to be fairly pricy – £6 for a twelve sheet A4 pad was about the best price I found (300 gram cold-pressed paper). However, I discovered that £12 would get me five A1 sheets in a large plastic sleeve with carrying handle. You can get 2 A2, 4 A3 or 8 A4 sheets from a piece of A1, so that yields the equivalent of 40 A4 pages compared to the 24 I would have got buying two of the equivalent pads. A worthwhile saving – and it means I can try larger pieces or ones designed to fit spare frames.

Anyway, nice paper – and I’ve now done a bit of messing round including the important task of trying out all my colours to see how they work on this surface.