hello and welcome to chief 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 is basically a follow-up from a viewer question
we recently did a video about paper surfaces mainly watercolor paper surfaces and there were
some really great comments on that video and one of them was like oh well i assume you're
going to be talking about like this this and this about different papers and i was like well why
not we should definitely do that so here we are so today we're going to be talking about sizing
and sizing in different artist papers and how it works what is it what does it do all that kind of
stuff so to begin with what does it do okay so sizing is actually an additive or a ingredient
when they make artist papers what it does is it makes the surface suitable for aqueous media
so it's going to control the moisture absorption of various fluid medias onto the surface because
as you know most um high quality artist papers are made from cotton and if you were just to try and
paint on just raw cotton it'd be kind of like painting on a paper towel just won't work out
so the sizing mitigates how that fluid media actually absorbs or is handled on the surface
and also makes the paper more resistant to abrasion so if you were to scratch it or erase
it too much it can make it a lot more durable in that way what is sizing made out of generally it's
made out of gelatin which as you may know is an animal product that's um you know like made from
yucky animal bits and stuff like that however there are many manufacturers that have
synthesized sizing or synthesized artificial gelatins now which are completely
animal product free and so you don't have to deal with that if you are not into that at all
but for centuries that's what sizing has been made out of is like an animal gelatin we're going to
talk about two different kinds of treatments of the way sizing is actually put into the paper
or onto the paper one is called internal sizing or what's called beater sizing which means that
it's in the slurry itself and so it's actually getting churned in and it actually coats every
single little fiber of the paper as it's being manufactured in that slurry or that big soup
which is water gelatin and the cotton fiber the nice part about having the sizing be internal
like all the way through around every single fiber is that you have a certain consistency about it
um and that if you do a lot of sketching or scrubbing out with your watercolor or um a lot
of erasure then that sizing is going to be evenly distributed throughout and you're not going to
have to worry about the absorbency being different if you abrade the surface a little bit so you will
find that some of the more high-end papers are internally sized meaning that the sizing is mixed
into the slurry as it's being manufactured in contrast there is a thing called surface sizing
or external sizing and that is when the already manufactured dried sheet is passed through a
solution so it can be dipped or it can be sprayed it actually lowers the manufacturing cost and so
you will see that some of the lower priced artist papers do say that they're externally sized
that can be a considerable cost savings over the long haul if that is not something that's a
consideration for you however if you are somebody that does do some scrubbing out and does do
a considerable amount of sketching and erasure and stuff like that you you do run the risk of
erasing right through that surface sizing and down into the raw cotton fiber which can mean that the
water color or the paint or whatever that you're applying to that surface will
um it'll adhere differently and it will it will have a very very openly you know visually
different application um in any places where that that surface has been abraded and you've
actually worked through the sizing so that's a little bit a few little news nuggets about
sizing that we hope are helpful to you and maybe make the shopping process for
your surfaces a little bit clearer and hope this is helpful and we hope that you enjoy
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