@kdfrawg Estate taxes, families dying out or losing interest. Things change. It’s just that passing something off as the original when it’s now part of a huge conglomerate seems tacky to me.
@kdfrawg It doesn’t have the same sizing as watercolour paper, and isn’t quite as thick, so it wouldn’t be great with lots of wet washes, but other than that it should be fine.
@kdfrawg The big paint producers all put pigment numbers on the tubes, and because lots of people use them, there are real world reports of how they perform. The small ones are more of a gamble, though they might provide information if you ask.
For work that’s to be photographed, or that will live in a sketchbook, the lightfastness doesn’t matter, but it does for work that will be on display. I don’t need mine to last for hundreds of years, but if I like something, I’d hope to be able to keep it stable for my lifetime, which might reasonably be several decades.
// @streakmachine
@kdfrawg I really like their watercolour paper. Arches may have the edge on printmaking paper, but even the everyday watercolour paper from Cuthbert’s Mill is very nice.
@kdfrawg It does! Most of it is cotton, but there are a few cotton/linen mix sheets.
@kdfrawg There are a few small makers of watercolour paints, though I think there are only a handful of pigment suppliers for the processed colours — more for the ground up rock colours, I suppose — so they’re all getting their ingredients from the same people. The smaller producers are often not very forthcoming about which pigments they use, so you have no idea if it will all have faded away after a year or two on the wall.
// @streakmachine
@kdfrawg The four on the bottom are from St Cuthbert’s Mill in Wells. As far as I can tell, they’re still who they claim to be. The rest are Arches. Nice paper, but the parentage does cool the nice warm feelings!
@kdfrawg They’ve owned W&N since 1990, so they seem to want to actually run it as a business. Just not as the business it looks like.
// @streakmachine
@kdfrawg Certainly the blurb and the small print don’t convey the same flavour.
// @streakmachine