How to rescue bad watercolor paper

Hi friends! Have you ever started to paint on a beautiful sheet of watercolor paper only to find your washes look splotchy as the paint sinks into your paper and won’t blend? If so then you have been the victim of bad sizing. Sizing is an ingredient added to paper paper to keep ink and paint from bleeding and feathering. Quality watercolor paper is usually internally (the sizing is added to the pulp when the paper is formed) and externally (the sizing is applied to the surface of the dry paper) sized so the paper can withstand the techniques a painter wants to use. Sizing is often made from gelatin or it may be synthetic. Different manufacturers use different amounts of sizing. A paper with a lot of sizing (hard sized) will allow the paint and water to stand on the surface longer allowing more time for blending and it gives granulating paints a longer time to separate and settle yielding a more dramatic effect. Other papers may have less sizing (soft sized) for artists who may work with less water and appreciate faster drying times. I prefer a harder-sized paper but all artists are different.

Over the years paper manufacturers seem to be using less sizing on their papers. This may be because artists don’t stretch their papers as often as they used to. Stretching paper is a process where you soak your watercolor paper and then tape or staple it to a board while it is still wet so when it dries it is tight as a drum and wonderful to paint on. Or maybe it was a way to save money. Whatever the reason I find my newer watercolor paper not holding up as well as papers in my stash that are 20 years old. I had some watercolor sketchbooks where the sizing was starting to go bad so I decided to see if there was anything I could do to save them. I tried a few different DIY methods, none of which worked great and then I found a product by Holbein called Multi Sizing that was made for this exact purpose.

It was a bit pricy for a tiny bottle but I decided to take one for the team and you can see how it works in today’s video!

I found Holbein Multi Sizing worked great at restoring my paper. The folks at Blick say to dilute it at a 1:1 ratio with water but it didn’t work as well for me as full strength did. I wonder if Holbein may have changed the formulation because it says to use it at full strength on the bottle. If you have this in your stash I would read the directions just in case it changed. Mine is brand new.

Don’t fret if you have paper whose sizing has gone bad. You can restore it or you can use it with dry media or gouache as is. Also, it doesn’t matter if sizing breaks down after you have painted on watercolor paper. It won’t affect your painting at all. The sizing just needs to be there when you paint on it so you can manipulate the paint the way you want so please do not worry about anything you have already painted going bad. This was a long post but I hope it inspires you to use your paper and not hoard it and if your collection outpaces your painting a bit and your paper does go off you know how to fix it. Happy crafting!