Should you use watercolor sheets, pads, blocks, or sketchbooks?

Watercolor paper comes in different dimensions and form factors. Which works best for your process will depend on personal preferences. Of course, as a beginner, it can be hard to know what your preferences are before you’ve tried them all (which can be expensive). Here are some considerations to help guide you to the best choice for you to start with.

Much of this post was originally part of Watercolor Paper 101. I’m splitting it off because it became its own beast.

Sheets

Traditionally, nice watercolor paper comes in full sheets, 22 by 30 inches long. This is still the most common format you’ll find at an in-person art store. It’s stored in huge, flat drawers. If you buy it online, it’s mailed to you in a tube. There are some brands and types of paper you can only get in full sheets.

Some large-format watercolorists paint at this size, but in my experience most people cut these down to two half-sheets (15 by 22 inches), four quarter-sheets (11 by 15 inches), or even smaller (eight 7.5 by 11s, sixteen 5.5 by 7.5s, etc.)

How to Use Loose Sheets

Cut the paper down to your desired dimensions. When it comes time to paint on a loose sheet, adhere it to a hard surface, such as a clipboard or art board. You can easily work on multiple paintings at once by preparing multiple boards.

How to cut it: You can cut the paper with ordinary scissors or with a paper cutter. I have this hand-held Cheap Joe’s paper cutter which is essentially just a letter opener. You fold the paper and run the cutter down the fold. The edges get a bit curly, but it’s a much straighter cut than I can get with scissors. I find this cutter is the best for me because it doesn’t take up a large amount of space. But larger paper cutters designed for crafting may give you neater cuts.

How to adhere it:

• The most common way is to tape it down using watercolor-friendly tape on all four sides. Tape leaves you a nice crisp edge to “frame” the painting.
• For smaller paintings, you could omit tape, wet the back of the paper and simply use surface tension, which allows you to paint to the edge of the paper. This might be preferable if the paper has a deckled edge.
• For larger paintings, if the backboard is just about the same size as the paper, you could use binder clips, which are reusable (unlike tape) but may leave awkward shapes at the edges.

Pros & Cons of Full Sheets

Pro: Quality/Selection. The nicest watercolor paper comes in this format, and sometimes this is the only way it comes.

Pro: Size flexibility. You can cut your paper down to any size and shape, or a variety of different sizes – you’re not locked into a particular size because it’s “how the paper came”. And if you want to work big – really big – this is your only option!

Pro: Cost-effectiveness (maybe). Each sheet is several dollars (~$6-$18 USD in my area, depending on quality). You may still think that’s a lot for one big piece of paper, but remember that you could cut it into a lot of smaller sheets. While cost-effectiveness is usually touted as the top reason to use full sheets, you should do your own research; when I did the math, I found that pads were often cheaper per square inch.

Con: Surcharges. If you shop online, one thing to factor into the cost effectiveness is that shipping large-format paper sometimes incurs a shipping surcharge because it’s oversized. This can feel like a kick in the teeth when you plan to immediately cut it down anyway.

Con: Effort. There’s the extra step of cutting the paper and taping it down. With a block, there’s none of that – you just start painting.

Con: Storage. Where are you going to keep this giant paper? Do you have those big drawers in your house? Smaller pads, blocks, and sketchbooks are easier to keep on an ordinary bookshelf.

Con: Not portable. If you want to sketch on the go, you have to have the foresight to cut your paper ahead of time, bring tape and something to lean on, and waste precious daylight taping things down in the field. Sketchbooks are more “grab and go.”

Pads

What can I say, it’s a pad: a stack of paper that’s glued on one side to keep it together.

How to Use Pads

Generally, I remove one piece of paper at a time from the pad, and then use it like a loose sheet: cutting it down if it’s too big, taping it to a board, etc. There is no real advantage to working directly in the pad.

Pros & Cons of Pads

Pro: Easy to find. Even non-art stores sometimes carry watercolor pads.

Pro: Comes in various sizes. You can probably find a pad that’s in the size you like to work, so you don’t have to cut it.

Pro: Still flexible as to size. Because I use pad sheets loose, I can still cut them down if I want to. For example, if I sometimes like to work at 9×12 and sometimes at 6×9, it’s convenient to get a 9×12 pad and cut the pages in half when I want to.

Pro: Cost-effectiveness. In my research into cost-effectiveness, I found pads were actually the cheapest per square inch.

Con: Quality/Selection. Typically I find that the nicer paper doesn’t come in pad format.

Blocks

A watercolor block is a pad that’s glued down on all four sides.

How to use blocks

Paint on the top sheet of the block (while it’s attached). The glue on the pad will hold the page taut so you don’t need to tape it down or anything. When the painting is fully dry, you can slide a knife, credit card. or another flat object underneath it to free it from the block. The sheet underneath will now be available for your next painting.

Pros & cons of blocks

Pro: No need for tape. Because the block holds the paper taut, you don’t need to tape it down. You don’t even need to own tape (unless you use it for masking).

Pro: Paint right to the edge. No tape means no white border around your painting. (You might consider that a con if you like the white border, but personally I like being able to do a “full bleed”.)

Con: Get paint stuck in the glue. This is a lesser-reported-on pitfall of blocks that I have run into. When I paint right to the edge, I sometimes get paint on the glue that reactivates and smears when I try to paint to the edge on my next painting. Wiping down the sides or picking off the edges of the glue can help. However, using single sheets reduces the possibility for that cross-contamination.

Con: You’re locked into a size. You can’t cut the paper – well, you can if you take it off the block first, but that removes the advantage of it being a block.

Con: One painting at once. If you want to work on multiple paintings at once, you need to either have two blocks, or remove one of the sheets from the block and tape it down (negating the pro’s of a block).

Con: Expensive. Compared to loose sheets, blocks tend to be more expensive per square inch of paper.

Tiles/Small Sheets

Artist tiles are very small, usually square pieces of paper that often use quite thick paper.

How to use tiles

It’s the same as loose sheets; they’re just already small so you don’t have to cut them down first.

Pros & cons of tiles

• Pro: Convenient if you like to work small. If you like to work small, you don’t have to cut anything before you begin to work, and the edges will be perfectly straight.
• Con: Not flexible as to size. You have to work small.
• Con: Not cost-effective. If you do the math, small tiles are often among the highest priced per square inch.
• Con: Lack of availability. Very few brands and lines offer small tiles.

Sketchbooks

A bound book, often with hard covers, containing blank watercolor paper for you to paint on.

How to use a sketchbook

Sketchbook are the most convenient option “on the go” for quick watercolor sketches outdoors. For that, you’d just flip open to the next blank page, quickly do a painting, wait a few minutes for it to dry, and move on.

You can also use sketchbooks for full-on multi-layered paintings as you might do on any other paper, depending on the quality/weight/material of the paper. You might choose to tape down the edges and/or use binder clips to make the paper lie flatter.

Pros & Cons of Sketchbooks

Pro: Portable. Sketchbooks are favored by plein air and urban artists because you can carry it around and the hard covers provide a portable surface to lean against. All the paper is bound together so there’s minimal messing about with slips of paper and potentially losing them.

Pro OR con: Usually lightweight paper. You never see really heavy paper (like 600gsm) in a sketchbook, which makes sense. It wouldn’t lie flat, it would be heavy, there would be a ludicrously small number of pages. The most common sketchbook paper weight seems to be 200gsm, which I often find too flimsy for the kinds of heavy washes I want to put down, though it may be fine for a quick-working urban sketcher who just wants to dot their pen sketches with a bit of color. In fact, lighter-weight paper is preferable for quick sketches because it dries faster, meaning less waiting around before you close the sketchbook and move on.

Con: You can’t usually paint on both sides of the page. Depending on the thickness of the paper and the warping level, I may paint on the back of a previous painting, but it’s more common for me to leave the back blank (or just use it for notes).

Con: Paint may seep onto the following pages. If you don’t take care to keep well away from the page margins, or you paint across the seam in the middle of the book, paint can spill or seep onto other pages.

To limit this, you can will tape down the edges to the edge of the book, as well as laying tape across the binding. This also gives it extra tautness and prevents curling when drying. (This is how Kolbie Blume does it in their 10 Day Challenge, for which they use a Wonder Forest sketchbook.) Still, if you’re going to go to that much trouble, you might as well use loose sheets.

Pro: Use two pages at once (maybe). Unlike a block, where you have only one page available to you at once, with a sketchbook you can have up to two – as long as the paper is thick enough to paint on both sides (which, again, I believe sketchbook paper rarely is, despite the advertising.) If it works out, though, this gives you a few interesting sketchbook-specific options:

• Paint two paintings at once: I like this method of working because it gives me something to do while I wait for a wash to be dry. When I’m trying something experimental, I often simultaneously work on a “burner” and the “real” one, so I can try out every step and correct my mistakes the second time.
• Painting across the spread: Some people favor sketchbooks because you have the option of making two paintings on each side of the page, or opening up a spread and making one giant long painting across the binding. Personally I have never managed that without making a mess.

Pro: Automatic organization for a group or sequence. I used sketchbooks for the aforementioned 10 Day Challenge, and it’s been nice to have that group of paintings in a sequence in book form. Sometimes I flip through it and see my skills improve! It’s also been nice to use a sketchbook to make a little booklet of color swatches, which I still use for reference. Some people use sketchbooks as a sort of diary. If you find it messy to produce an ever-larger stack of loose paintings, and you want to look back on your work in order, filling sketchbooks may be the neater solution you’re looking for.

Con: Hard to separate out paintings. The flipside of having everything organized is that it can be more difficult if you want to remove a painting from the sequence. There have been times when I painted a real dud in my sketchbook and wished it was on a loose sheet so I could just throw it away and pretend it never happened. There have been other times when I painted something I loved in my sketchbook and wished I could frame it! You can tear or cut out a page, but at a cost to the integrity of the sketchbook.

Conclusion

The different formats have different use cases, and everyone has their preferences, but I’ll tell you where I landed.

I was using blocks for awhile, but I find there’s a “block surcharge” compared to pads and yet I find them a little less functional and convenient. Block glue does not hold paper as flat as tape, you can’t cut the paper, and you can’t work multiple pieces at once. I prefer to work with “loose sheet” methodology, meaning I set up multiple clipboards or backboards with taped paper.

Although I use loose paper, I tend to avoid full sheets. Most posts of this kind come down on the side of full sheets, but I find them annoying. They are just too huge, which makes them annoying to buy, annoying to store, and annoying to cut down.

So, for everyday painting at home, I typically get pads. I usually buy them around 9×12 or 11×15 (quarter sheet) size. This is the upper limit of how big I feel comfortable painting, but it’s still small enough to fit on a bookshelf. I have found this to be the most convenient, cost-effective, and flexible option for the sizes at which I typically work.

Because I like to work small and am often too lazy to cut paper, I also enjoy using tiles, even though I know it’s usually financially not a good deal.

For plein air, sketchbooks are the way to go. I can’t be taping paper in the field. I usually work with a bit less water when outdoors anyway, and want a faster drying time, so lighter paper is a positive.