Botanical Ultra Smooth 300gsm

This is very smooth paper so I was delighted to see its release and thought it would be what I needed for botanical work. The clue is in the name.

I've tried it with coloured pencils and watercolour. It will take some layering of pencil with a light touch and get beautiful delicate details but it seems impossible to get to the 'oil slick' stage with polychromos pencils and similar that I usually employ. This was not the tooth filling which I expected to happen, but the surface of the paper just came away.

No matter, I thought, my primary need was for watercolour painting which is what this was designed for. Sadly not to be. Even glazing a light or colourless wash using a bead - brush not even touching the paper is enough to get a pilling effect.

Even putting low tak masking tape on for a brief time with the lightest of pressure lifted the surface.

I will persist for a little longer because I want to like this so badly but first impressions are that the surface is just too fragile. Looking like a return to the far more robust but increasingly less smooth HP Fabriano Artistico. An unfair comparison given the different prices and that this one is not 100% cotton, but disappointed all the same.

My favoured style of painting is pen and wash for which I always use Hot Pressed paper and over the years have tried most of the popular brands - Arches, Saunders Waterford, Fabriano Artistico and Bockingford. I finally settled on Bockingford as being the best because I could see no advantage in using the more expensive papers. With the advent of Botanical Ultra Smooth I thought I would give it a try and having done a handful of sketches have been very pleased with the results. It is advertised as a replacement for Fabriano 5, but not having used that paper I cannot make a direct comparison. However, for my pen and wash it is a beautiful surface which takes both the ink and the watercolour extremely well. It is marginally whiter than Bockingford (at least to my eye) but I do not know how it compares to Fabriano 5. My first impressions of this paper are that, for my purposes, there is very little to choose between it and Bockingford. One thing I have found though is that it is more difficult to lift paint from the Botanical than it is from Bockingford. Painters of flowers etc may come to very different conclusions to mine, and although I will continue to use the Botanical I will not be abandoning Bockingford altogether - at least not for the present. One final point: another thing that I find slightly off-putting is the fact that Botanical is not produced in the standard Imperial size. Is there a technical reason for this or is it just that the manufacturers are wanting to produce something as near as possible to Fabriano 5?

Because the title of the paper was Botanical Ultra Smooth I expected the paper to be at least up to the job title but it wasn't it was well below the quality that I expected. It just didn't perform very well at all, the paper soaked up the watercolour pigment so that it was impossible to lift. The surface of the paper broke up. In all the paper was a disappointment after all the hype on how good it was to be.