Review: Strathmore Watercolor Postcards

I've finally gotten around to reviewing the Strathmore Watercolor Postcards after receiving them in several months ago.

These postcards come in a pad of 15. The paper is coldpress 300gsm watercolour paper.

Strathmore usually labels their paper from 100-500 series where 500 represents the best. There aren't such labels for this postcard pad though.

I've seen somewhere that there's an alternative packaging that uses a green cover instead. The barcode on the cover is the same so it's probably the same product but with different packaging.

There's no mention of the cotton content though. So chances are there's no cotton because usually manufacturers will highlight that as a selling point.

Pen, ink and watercolour works well on the paper. The paper sizing is good and holds the paint and water well on the surfaces. When dry, the colours retain the vibrancy nicely.

This is a watercolour sketch with coloured pencils. The paper does not buckle that much because it's thick and it's not really a big piece of paper.

There's some back-run on the ground because I used the paper flat on the surface and the water flowed upwards. To prevent this, just be careful with how much water you use, or you can tilt the paper surface.

Here I've tried two techniques with coloured pencils. On the left, the background is coloured in with sharp pointed coloured pencils and they are able to get into the tooth of the paper. However, some white of the paper still shows through. On the right side, the coloured pencils are blunt and you can see more white of the paper.

Shown above are Derwent Inktense pencils when dissolved with water. At the bottom, I wet the paper before drawing on it with the Inktense pencils to get the bright vibrant colours.

This is a sketch with ink. Copic markers and brush pens. Markers would nicely too and blend well. There's no bleed through although you can see a slight impression of the artwork from the opposite. With brush pens, if you draw fast, you're going to get the textured brush look. If you go slow, you can get sharp edges.

For this, I wet the paper first before charging in with watercolour, then tilted the paper to move it around. As I go over the paper several times with water, I feel that the paper is quite durable. At least there's no paper fiber coming out so that's a good thing. It feels quite similar to the paper from the Strathmore 400 series watercolour journal.

Conclusion

It's definitely a good product. The size is quite convenient to carry around. Perhaps you can use it to draw on location and send the postcards as gifts. Or maybe use them as gift cards to draw on at comic conventions.

It works well with different medium so it can be a good mixed media paper. The small size of the paper allows you to hold it in one hand to draw. However the small size also means you have to think more about what details you want to fit in because you don't have a lot of space to work on.

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