Basic Breakdown
What Works On Khadi
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.