Plastic Paper

When I use the pen plotter for more detailed illustrations the pen and ink can cause the paper to roughen and deteriorate. It's not so bad with the fineliner style pens, but I use Rotring isographs more now because they're more consistent, but are a bit… scratchy.

I saw on Mastodon someone post about this and that they'd tried Yupo paper and it had solved it for them. Ooh, I think, a new thing to play with. So I look it up and it's plastic. Right. Not sure about that. But… it's not like it's some single use thing, it's going to end up (hopefully) on my wall or (maybe) in a drawer somewhere. Jackson's Art do little sample sheets, like A8 size, so tiny. I got some heavy, medium and translucent.

The shield bug drawing above is on the translucent variety and I'm holding it so it's backlit by the sun. It's nice.

They advertise it as allowing you to mix watercolours without degrading the paper surface. And because it's plastic you can wash it off if you don't like it. Kinda weird. Online I see that people were using it with alcohol inks and getting the same benefit. I have a whole load of alcohol based markers and wanted to see what kinds of effects I could get, and try this whole 'wipe clean' thing.

You definitely can blend the colours easily, it was pretty good fun. I had to wipe the markers off quite a bit because they'd pick up all the other colours (more than with paper) but that wasn't much of a problem.

I did notice that you get more pooling at the points you lift the pen, so you'd get a line with a darker dot at the end. Again, you get that a little bit with paper, but with the plastic it seems unavoidable. I ended up going with it and making it a feature, drawing pointillist-style for the shield bug above.

But… I mentioned the wipe-clean feature. Yeah. It really does! On a different sheet I drew some stuff with the alcohol markers and wiped it with a cloth, not a mark. But what happens when you don't want to wipe it clean? The ink dries, but is not fixed to the surface, so you can easily smudge it.

Answer: varnish!

I looked online and everyone was recommending Kamar varnish. So I got some and tried that. It… was not what I expected. I think because I'd used such a lot of ink, it took a lot more coats of varnish and a lot more time to fix it. I gently touched the drawing after 3 coats and 2 days drying time, and still had some ink on my finger (thankfully it didn't smudge the drawing). After a couple more coats and a week it seemed stable. The varnish has caused the paper to curl though, so maybe if I did a coat on the other side it might pull it flat again.

I did try drawing on a sheet with just Rotring pens and while that does wipe off a bit you end up with a ghost of what you'd drawn. I think I could do some guilloché illustrations on this paper and it'd fix with a couple of coats of varnish and be nice. It's very smooth and the translucent sheets are beautiful when you use colour and backlight them.

So, interesting. Something to use sparingly, but pretty good.