Review: Ohuhu Cotton-top Watercolour Pad

Review sample provided by Ohuhu

Ohuhu has just introduced an interesting watercolour paper with cotton top and non-cotton bottom.

Watercolour pad sizes are A4 and 9 x 12 inch. Each pad has either 20 or 30 sheets, priced at USD 20 and 26 respectively.

Surfaces available are hotpress and coldpress, but I only have hotpress to test. Paper weight is 300 gsm.

The pad is not gummed on the sides.

I'm not sure how the cotton and non-cotton paper are joined but it looks just like a single sheet of paper. Colour of the paper is slightly off white.

The paper handles ink well without feathering.

The wet on wet test unfortunately isn't good. The horizontal painted lines are still obvious and did not blend much into the wet surface. This performance is quite similar to cellulose watercolour paper.

For this test, I have two colours painted with much on each end of the rectangle, and tilted the paper to let the colours blend. The colours are able to blend but the 100% cotton paper seem to perform better as there is more blending and moving into each colour. Paint on Ohuhu's paper seem to want to stay within its area.

The 300gsm paper buckles slightly with heavy washes but it's not a big issue.

Good quality watercolour paper is a mix of cotton content and how it's sized to handle water. In fact, sizing may be more important than the cotton content because I have used 60% cotton watercolour paper that worked great for wet on wet techniques.

Colours do look vibrant enough on the paper.

There's no doubt the paper can be used with watercolour. It just seems like the paint would mostly want to sink in and not move.

I painted the sky with horizontal strokes and I needed additional strokes to move the paint to help it blend rather than let water do its work.

The paper should work well with flat-style colouring without much blending. However the fun of watercolour is with the blending though.

I don't think this paper is that great for watercolour. The performance with wet on wet techniques looks very similar to wood pulp or cellulose paper. This paper could be used for mixed media work though.