Here's a block of arches hot press watercolor paper. So this is the 140
pound 12 x 16 and it's 20 sheets. You can buy this paper in these
beautiful blocks and what that actually means is that 3.75 of the sides of this
block are glued down. You can see the black glue right here which is on almost all the
sides of this block, there's only a little teeny gap right at the top right
here. You can take a palette knife and then you can slip it into this spot right
here and then slide the whole way around and your paper will come off. The glue is
keeping your paper flat so the whole point of having the glue there is that
while your paper is wet the glue will hold the paper flat, so do not remove
your paper until after you're done painting. This is a question I've been
asked before, so that's why I'm talking about it. You can buy these blocks in
different sizes, so you can see I have a 10 by 14 block. I also have a cold
pressed block, though I usually buy hot pressed paper because it's my
favorite because I like details. I do also buy cold press sometimes and rough
is just a little bit too rough for me but this is a really cute size you can
have this size too. So I prefer to buy blocks for two reasons one it holds my
paper flat while I'm painting and also the block will be cleaner paper, and if
I'm paying a lot for watercolor paper and arches watercolor paper is expensive
I do not want to buy dinged and finger printed, smudgy, germy paper so I always
buy blocks. I recently bought these pads, this is just a pad of paper so it just
flips open like a regular pad. I just used this pH neutral acid-free glue, a
cheap craft brush and I used some binder clips, and then I got to make my own
watercolor block. So it's for book binding and they do sell padding compound
glue which you can use to make cheap pads at home but I did not want to use
that because I did not know if it was pH neutral or not. I put a thin layer of
this glue all around this pad of paper except for a small gap. And I did use
little binder clips on this and then I let it dry and what this is
done is it's made my own homemade block in this size, and I can actually just use
a palette knife like I do with the block and go all the way around this and get
this off. So I just wanted to show how you could improvise making your own
block out of a pad of watercolor paper and it doesn't have to be Arches and
doesn't even have to be watercolor paper. If you want your paper to be flat you
can actually glue 3.75 sides of your paper and turn it into a
watercolor block which I thought is actually really interesting. I had an old
block that was seven by ten and it was all used up and I had this cold pressed
paper so I just cut it down. You can see maybe the glue shimmering on it and what
I did was I glued 3.75 of the sides down. I'm really excited about this
because now I've got a whole pad of 20 sheets of watercolor paper in this size
again and it's usable and the bigger paper I had was just too big for me. I
also took the leftover paper that I had because it was a really giant size
and what I had left over was this square and so this is an 11 by 12 square. I did
the same thing; I put it onto some cardboard and I piled the leftover paper on top
of it and then I glued three and a half sides of this down with that glue and
then I left it to dry with some binder clips on it. And again this has made a
perfectly good block of watercolor paper, so if you have any loose watercolor
paper this is the way to turn it into a block. I had a spare cover and a spare
back and so I took this cover and I attached it to the top too, but when I
use the palette knife, the cover comes all the way off so if you do want to attach
a cover you want to attach it to your back card board. Do not attach the cover
to the top like I did, otherwise it'll just come right off. Now I can only
rest it on the top but but these are perfectly good blocks. I think that's
exciting because if you buy these small blocks they're not very economical and
they cost a lot more than if you buy a large block, so you can actually buy a
really big block and then cut it down into whatever paper sizes you want and
this might actually be more convenient cuz if there's a paper size that they
don't sell you can make your own blocks just using this glue, so I've never
really heard of this before. I just tried it to see if it would work because I
wanted that size paper in a block and it worked perfectly so give it a go!