Paper tests: feathering, bleed and the cheap pad that won

2025-02-02 · 3 min read

Every ink I own behaves differently on every paper I own, and I was tired of discovering that halfway through a piece. So on a wet Sunday I cut 10 cm squares from eight different papers, numbered them, and wrote the same three test strokes on each with the same three inks: a thin hairline, a full-pressure shade, and a pooled dot left to dry. Then I looked at everything under a 10x loupe and wrote down what I saw.

The three inks were a black iron gall ink, a dye-based black fountain pen ink that I use for practice, and a walnut-colored ink that I like for envelopes. The papers were two layout pads, a marker pad, two cartridge papers of different weights, a hot-pressed watercolor paper, a cheap printer paper and an expensive laid writing paper.

The results surprised me in two places. First, the expensive laid writing paper, which I had assumed would be the best, feathered badly with the fountain pen ink, the hairlines spreading to nearly twice their width with fuzzy edges, and the pooled dot bled through to the back. The surface is lovely to touch and awful to write on with wet ink. Second, the cheap marker pad, which I bought for pencil roughs, took all three inks without any feathering at all, dried in under a minute, and had a hairline so crisp the loupe showed clean edges. It is thin, it is slightly translucent, and it is the best practice paper I have found.

The iron gall ink was the best-behaved ink across the board, feathering on only the printer paper, which feathered with everything. The walnut ink was the worst, bleeding through four of the eight. The hot-pressed watercolor paper was excellent for finished pieces with the iron gall ink but the nib caught on the surface sizing when the paper was fresh, and it worked better after the sheet had been lightly erased all over to break the sizing, a trick I had read about and not believed. The two layout pads were fine and nearly identical to each other despite a large difference in what they cost. I now keep the numbered test squares in an envelope in the desk drawer and refer to them before starting anything that matters. The exercise took an hour and has saved me many ruined sheets since.