I usually paint with watercolors, and my main item of expenditure is paper.
Last week I bought a relatively cheap spiral pad to try out, and it turned out to be amazing for its price. The pad was manufactured by the company SM.LT, I’d never even heard of.
Where is the Product from?
According to the information from the firm’s website, ‘SM’ is the first two letters of the name JSC ‘SMILTAINIS IR KO’, and ‘LT’ means ‘Lithuania’. The brand was created in 2013.
‘SMILTAINIS IR KO’ is considered to be one of the leaders in the industry sector in the Baltic states.
The company supplies its products mainly in Switzerland, Norway and the countries of East Europe.
Some Technical Details
My Watercolor Pad isn’t big (the size A4), but it has lots of pages (35). I like their rough cold press texture. Practice shows that such texture provides the best color lifting abilities for liquid water-soluble paints.
The pad’s quite heavy: that’s not surprising, because its density is 280 gsm.
It is 100% cotton watercolor paper. The feature is a sign of the artist’s quality: affordable pads for students are usually made from wood pulp or a combination of cotton and some other cellulose fibers.
Sheets might be torn out with ease – the top part of each page is perforated.
Hardcover lets me use the paper in the open air without an easel.
‘SMILTAINIS IR KO’ also manufactured pads for:
- sketching;
- drawing;
- oil painting;
- acrylic painting;
- using mixed media.
They are widely different from each other (A5, A4, A3; with white, cream, brown paper etc.).
It would be interesting to try Authentic Black, which is said to be suited for colored pencils. Authentic Black’s paper is rough too, but less thick.
I’ve found a nice video file about pads SM.LT. Here the file is.
I am telling you about the pad with the blue cover and a cute house on it.
A woman mixed yellow and orange colors on its sheet. Notice how much water she used! The wet surface almost doesn’t crumble.
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