If you’re going to play around with mixed media I encourage you to seek out toned papers. The strokes and values you achieve on the toned background make a fun departure from white paper.
This sketch of an Earth’s World Fairgoer (who was wearing black lipstick) is in a hand bound journal I made with the old Annigoni Designo paper.
I used a Staedtler Pigment Liner .3 and picked up a rotating selection of dry media listed on the recto page: some color pencils and some NeoColor II that were used dry and not wetted with a brush. Towards the end I added some strokes of orange gouache which was leftover and sitting a palette at my side.
This sketch is from earlier this year when I was doing a lot of dry-media exploration and working out how messy I could go and still enjoy form.
The shirt was painted after the background had been softened a little with water. I put my dirty green brush dirty brush into some leftover orange paint to get that lovely greeny-brown.
There’s one point where I was so tired and distracted (I did this just before bedtime) that I picked up a Sakura Pigma Professional brush pen to restate some lines, then snapped out of it and picked up the correct pen. And stopped restating lines…
I hope you get some experiments in this week.
Commercially Bound Toned Paper Journals
If you’re not a book binder here are some commercially bound journals with toned papers and suggestions for toned paper loose sheets.
Strathmore 400 Series Toned Mixed media journals. I like the 7.75 x 9.75 inch portrait format softcover journals which come in grey and tan paper. They also make hardcover versions.
Strathmore’s toned mixed media papers also come in pads. The great thing about the pads is that they have a blue-toned paper that is delightful. (Don’t know why they don’t put that in a book!) You can see some live chicken sketches I made on the grey toned paper in a gallery at the base of this linked blog post.
Here’s a gouache portrait on the Strathmore grey toned mixed media paper in book form.
Hahnemühle Toned Watercolor Book (in Beige and Grey [which actually looks more periwinkle to me]). This paper also comes in pads if you prefer to work on loose sheets. My review of the paper is in this post. That post includes a video of me painting a portrait. I routinely use the beige or gray SQUARE book of this paper for my purse journal. The square books are about 5.75 inches square so they are perfect for that. (If you like landscape books those are available too.)
You can see a gallery of snow pile sketches I made in one of the 5.75 inch square grey paper Hahnemühle books here. Scroll down to the bottom of that post for a gallery where there are about 15 sketches from one snowy season in Minnesota.
Stonehenge Drawing and Printmaking paper comes in a variety of colors. It comes in pads. It used to come in small square and large rectangular kraft board-wire bound journals, but I don’t see that online anywhere today. I used one of those journals for this sketch in gouache. If you don’t mind working on loose sheets this drawing and printing paper can actually be very fun for gouache painting (keep low water amounts) and dry mixed media products. You can buy it in sheets and tear it down to a size you like to work with if you can’t find it in a pad size you enjoy.
Toned Non-Art Papers Useful for Wet and Dry Media
You can see a portrait I did for my 2017 International Fake Journal Month Journal on tan Speckletone at the start of this section.
This was paper I had leftover from a rubberstamp project. I had just enough for my 30-day Fake Journal project.
I sketched each day with a color pencil—typically a red raspberry one.
Then I painted with watercolor and a little bit of white gouache on the paper.
Why bring this up in a post about dry mixed media on toned paper?
Well sometimes you want to use a little bit of wet media on toned paper (my first piece, at the start of this post has some leftover gouache in it after all). But beyond that you need to know that there are hundreds of toned papers made for printing that can be purchased for your art projects whether you want to use rubberstamps, watercolor, gouache, wax pastels, or color pencil.
You can read about Speckletone here. It isn’t available in all the colors it once was, but I can tell you that of the remaining colors Kraft, Cream, Oatmeal, and Natural Cardstock are all fun colors to work with. Be sure you get the cardstock weight. Check out the other brown/kraft colors of paper they sell from different product lines on their site as well. And find paper shops selling cut paper for printing jobs for still more useful papers.
Happy hunting and experimenting.
