Basic Breakdown

What Works On Khadi

Basic Breakdown: What Works On Khadi
The Perfect Paper Company know that I'm a total paper geek and I love experimenting with different materials, so it was only natural that they asked me to try the Khadi Papers Hardback Sketchbook and jot down my musings. I did, read on to find out what materials work best on this Khadi Sketchbook.
 

Fineliners & Promarkers:  The paper works brilliantly with the Promarkers allowing blending and lots of development.  In the image below, I used a very loose fineliner sketch to start me off, the fineliners work perfectly well with the paper but attempts at cross hatching and traditional comic inking using these pens has shown that the paper is simply too dense and fineliners perform much better on smoother paper.

Khadi Sketchbook with promarkers and watercolours

 

Watercolour/Watercolour Pencil Crayons: The pad is superb for this kind of work, whether you’re using traditional watercolour pans, paints, or pencil crayons. The paper will happily accept the water and even working wet on wet proved to be fine – with the caveat that like all papers it will distort if soaked.

Khadi Sketchbook and Inktense Pencil Crayons

In this piece I started with heavy ink line and then coloured using Inktense pencil crayons, a second set of washes was applied then before over-working with dry pencil crayons and splatting.  

 

Biro: I often produce very rough sketches in biro, whether they be drafts or underdrawings for a more developed colour piece.  As you can see the tonal range is still there and while you must work a little harder than on a cheaper pad it’s totally fine.  The only thing is that the quality of the pad means that you simply won’t want to produce roughs and throw away sketches because it feels like sacrilege.

Khadi Sketchbook and Biro Pen

 

 

Pencil: These pads are fine for pencil but they’re not into excessive erasing (who is) and you will have to work harder for tones than with a smoother paper. 

Khadi Sketchbook and Pencils

This fella was created using a 2b, 4B, 6B and finished with undiluted ink.

 

Acrylics: You can use acrylics, but I wouldn’t recommend it, without being able to tape down the edges the paper struggles with such a heavy medium. I tend to build colour using washes and to be frank it was hard work; I wasn’t convinced the paper was going to stand up to further work so I abandoned play. However, having given the paper time to dry it had no problems accepting further washes and some biro to tighten my image. In short: you can but I wouldn’t.

Khadi Sketchbook and Acrylics

 

In conclusion the pad was a real joy to use and would make the perfect gift for the artist in your life, especially if that artist happens to be you, anyway I’ve finished this one I’m going to nip off and grab a fresh one from the Perfect Paper Company!

 

Click Here to view our entire Khadi Papers range.