hello and welcome to cheap joe's art stuff my name is julie and i'm here to impart some knowledge
to you today via a two-minute art tip and today's tip actually comes um from a youtube comment from
a viewer if you uh rewind a little bit you will see that we were talking about
paper surfaces and we had a customer comment about oh well i guess we'll be talking about other
aspects of paper coming up soon and i thought well yeah why not we should just definitely do
that so today we're going to be talking about paperweight i'm going to explain to you how
those numbers and everything are derived and where all this stuff came from numbering system that we
use to describe artist paper actually derives from the printing industry so this is how they actually
weigh and talk about different kinds of papers in uh for printing purposes um and basically we start
out with a ream of paper so you know like when you go to the office supply store and you buy a pack
of paper for your um your printer or whatever you will buy a ream and the definition of a ream is
500 sheets so when you buy a reem they come up with a weight for that 500 sheet stack based
on its conventional sheet size and so for most artist papers as you know like especially you
know watercolor and large drawing papers they are 22 by 30. and i still have not found like what
the reasoning for that actually is i'm sure it's something to do with the golden mean or whatever
but the standardized size is a 22 by 30. so what we do is we take 500 sheets of a given artist
paper and stack them up in a nice little pile all those 22 by 30 sheets we weigh that stack
of 500 sheets and whatever that weighs gives us a number to assign to that thickness of paper
so 90 pound like or that kind of sketching weight paper would be the kind of
thin stuff that you see like in like a watercolor sketchbook um that would be for dry brush only
and stuff like that and then you go on to like 140 pound which is the most conventional
um kind of like artist or watercolor paper that can withstand you know almost any kind of
watercolor treatment but it does need to be stretched and stuff and on and on and on so that's
how we come up with those weights they're based on 500 sheets stacked up of a standard sheet size
and by the weight of that stack is the number that we assigned to it but just to kind of throw a
wrench in things what if we didn't have a standard sheet size what if it was completely and totally
different in huge like this one this is some arches natural white and a huge what was called
i believe single elephant um which is a 25 and a quarter by 40 sheet it's beautiful look at it
just want to pet it but anyway my point being is if we weighed 500 sheets of this larger sheet you
would get a higher number would you not because you have a whole lot more paper does that mean
that it's any thicker no it does not it just means it's bigger so when you're shopping in the catalog
or online make sure to be aware of the actual sheet size versus the number that it says
in terms of what its weight is because if it's a larger sheet a lot of times have a much larger
number in terms of its paper weight so check those numbers i think that you'll learn a lot
from like looking at all the different kinds of options that we have but hopefully this will make
your shopping a whole lot easier once you kind of understand how those weights are determined
so hopefully this was helpful to you and you learned a little something and we hope that you enjoy
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