I am not too fussy about watercolour paper,
since when you paint on nautical charts, the paper quality is atrocious and I tend to use a transparent surface primer to make it halfway acceptable. For sketchbooks, I’ll often pick up something from Hahnemühler, so I was interested to see their new line of papers with a more sustainable selection of fibres than the typical water-hungry cotton.
I picked up a tiny 8×10.5cm pad of Agave paper to test. The fibre content is 70% Agave fibre, 30% cotton rag, and its petite size was perfect for a few quick studies of the late autumn UK hedgerow bounty. The rosehips got turned into a rather delicious apple & rosehip jam for a winter supply of vitamin C!
This paper handled pen really well. One of my favourite ink pens is the Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pen, which picked up some of the texture of the paper for a nice warm finish to the linework that I really enjoy. The Agave paper is cold press, so has some tooth to it, but the surface felt even enough to use with fineliners and other ink media.
The colours came out vibrant and rich – no complaints there! But I did find layering pigment caused the paper to pill slightly, which surprised me with these small studies using relatively little water. Some of the individual fibres also seemed to stain darker with paint than others, giving a slightly blotchy look (Schmincke Horadem series watercolour). This isn’t a paper I’d chose for big washes, repeated glazing or lots of wet-on-wet watercolour, but coped just fine for these little sketches.