Tinted Bockingford NOT Watercolour Paper: A Comprehensive Guide to Its Features and Benefits28/2/2025
For artists seeking a reliable and versatile surface, Tinted Bockingford NOT watercolour paper stands out as a remarkable choice. Manufactured by St Cuthberts Mill in England, this mould-made paper combines archival quality with a distinctive texture, offering a unique blend of performance and aesthetic appeal. Available in a range of subtle tints—blue, cream, eggshell, grey, and oatmeal—this paper elevates artwork by providing an instant mood-setting backdrop. Whether you’re a professional artist or an enthusiastic beginner, understanding the properties of this paper can transform your creative process. This article delves into its key features, practical applications, and finer details, ensuring you have all the information needed to make the most of this exceptional paper.
Display of Tinted Bockingford NOT paper tints: blue, cream, eggshell, grey, oatmeal, alongside the standard white variant.
Technical Specifications and DurabilityMaterial Quality: Built to Last
Crafted from 100% high alpha cellulose, Tinted Bockingford NOT watercolour paper is acid-free and buffered with calcium carbonate, ensuring long-term stability. Its pH-neutral composition and absence of optical brightening agents guarantee that colours remain stable and resistant to fading when exposed to light. Rated at 140lb (300gsm), the paper is robust enough to handle heavy washes without buckling, provided it’s stretched or taped as recommended by St Cuthberts Mill. This archival quality ensures that your artwork endures, making it a trusted choice for pieces intended for display or sale.
Practical Specifications
Available in the following sizes:
Versatility Beyond Watercolour
While designed for watercolour, Tinted Bockingford’s utility extends to a variety of media. Its texture and strength make it an excellent drawing paper, accommodating pencils, charcoal, gouache, pastel, pen and ink, and even printmaking. The tinted backgrounds enhance these applications, offering a fresh alternative to stark white surfaces. Artists have noted its tolerance for multiple layers of coloured pencils and its compatibility with erasers, achieving professional finishes suitable for gallery exhibition. This versatility broadens its appeal, catering to mixed-media artists and those exploring diverse techniques.
Close-up of the distinctive cold-pressed (NOT) texture on Tinted Bockingford paper, showcasing its unique surface quality.
Key Features of Tinted Bockingford NOT Watercolour PaperExceptional Pigment Retention: A Standout Feature
One of the most compelling attributes of Tinted Bockingford NOT watercolour paper is its extraordinary ability to capture and hold pigment. Artists using high-quality pencils, will find that even a light touch yields vibrant, saturated colour transfer. This characteristic minimises the effort required to achieve bold, impactful hues, making it an efficient choice for detailed works like portraits or intricate illustrations. The paper’s surface, created using natural woollen felts, provides a random, cold-pressed (NOT) texture that enhances pigment adhesion, ensuring colours remain vivid and true without excessive layering.
Tinted Options: Setting the Mood
Unlike traditional white watercolour papers, Tinted Bockingford offers five distinct hues that add an immediate atmospheric dimension to your work. The transparency of watercolour paint means the paper’s base colour influences both painted and unpainted areas, allowing artists to subtly alter the mood or time of day depicted. Blue evokes serene twilight scenes, grey suggests moody, overcast skies, while cream and oatmeal lend warmth to portraits or landscapes. Eggshell provides a soft, neutral base that complements a wide range of subjects. These tints, though pale, invite experimentation, making the paper a favourite for artists aiming to infuse their pieces with emotional depth from the outset.
Seamless Blending: Effortless Transitions
Blending is where Tinted Bockingford truly excels, setting it apart from many other papers in its class. The surface allows for smooth, effortless transitions between colours, requiring minimal pressure or manipulation. In a practical test with a portrait, initial layers of skin-tone colours blended seamlessly when adjusted with a secondary tone. However, a word of caution: the paper’s strong pigment retention can pose challenges with opaque blending tools. For instance, using Derwent Drawing’s Chinese white to blend proved problematic, as its opacity overwhelmed underlying tones due to the paper’s receptive nature. This unique trait—while a strength—requires careful selection of blending mediums to avoid oversaturation. Opting for less opaque tones or tools can yield harmonious results, preserving the artwork’s intended subtlety.
The paper’s capacity to accept multiple layers without losing integrity is a boon for artists who build complexity over time. Unlike many surfaces that resist additional pigment as layers accumulate, Tinted Bockingford remains responsive, allowing for rich, multi-dimensional compositions. Should mistakes occur, its excellent colour-lifting abilities shine through—pigment erases easily, offering a forgiving canvas for refinement. In one instance, an erroneous application of white pencil lifted effortlessly, enabling a swift correction with an alternative tone. This adaptability makes it ideal for both meticulous planning and spontaneous experimentation.
Layering and Correction: A Forgiving SurfaceEnhanced Layering Capacity
Tinted Bockingford NOT watercolour paper demonstrates a remarkable ability to accommodate extensive layering, distinguishing it as a standout medium for artists working with varied pencil grades. This surface readily accepts both soft pencils—ideal for establishing base layers and backgrounds—and harder pencils suited to rendering fine details, without reaching a point of saturation where pigment begins to slide off. In our experience, most papers exhibit a threshold beyond which additional layers become increasingly difficult to apply effectively. However, Tinted Bockingford defies this norm, maintaining its receptiveness even as colours accumulate. This exceptional performance stems from its superior pigment retention, which eliminates the need for heavy-handed applications, allowing for a fluid and effortless buildup of numerous layers—a quality we have rarely encountered in other papers.
Chaffinch on Grey Tinted Bockingford NOT Watercolour Paper using Derwent Drawing pencils
Upon initial evaluation, one of the most striking attributes we observed was the exceptional manner in which the paper captures and retains pigment. For the Chaffinch portrait illustrated above, we employed the Derwent Drawing pencils, and were notably impressed by the minimal effort required to achieve robust colour transfer onto the surface. The paper’s receptive quality ensures that even a light application yields impressive saturation, making it an ideal medium for artists seeking efficiency and depth in their work. When exploring the blending capabilities, it facilitates seamless blending with remarkable ease, requiring only minimal manipulation to achieve smooth transitions between hues.
Female Portrait on Grey Tinted Bockingford NOT Watercolour Paper using Caran d'Ache Luminance and Derwent Drawing pencils
For our second trial, we chose a vibrant portrait. We began by laying down the foundational colours constituting the skin tones of the portrait. Initially, we opted to blend these tones using Derwent Drawing’s Chinese white. However, this proved to be an oversight on our part. Given the paper’s exceptional pigment adhesion—previously noted as a strength—the opaque nature of the Chinese white overwhelmed and saturated the underlying colours, muting the subtleties we had intended to preserve.
Combination of dry blending and Zest-it solvent blending, using Derwent Drawing pencils and Caran d’Ache Luminance on Tinted Bockingford NOT paper.
This experience was unprecedented in our work with various pencil ranges, as typically, the challenge lies in layering additional colours as the surface becomes less receptive with each application. In contrast, this paper demonstrates a unique capacity to accept multiple layers effortlessly, maintaining its integrity and responsiveness throughout the process. Recognising our misstep, we promptly adjusted our approach. The white pencil, fortunately, erased with ease—a testament to the paper’s versatility and forgiveness—allowing us to refine our technique without compromising the artwork. We then selected an alternative tone for blending, which proved far more harmonious with the existing colours and enabled us to achieve the desired effect.
Blending with Zest-it on Tinted Bockingford NOT paper
Female portrait on Tinted Bockingford NOT paper, demonstrating Zest-it watercolour pen blending alongside unblended pencil work
Tinted Bockingford NOT watercolour paper proves to be an exemplary surface for combining Zest-it pencil blend with coloured pencils, yielding impressive results for artists seeking refined textures and expansive coverage. Its exceptional pigment retention ensures that the pencils’ colours adhere vividly to the surface, creating a robust foundation that enhances the effectiveness of the Zest-it solvent. When applied, this blending medium produces a remarkably smooth finish, facilitating effortless transitions across larger areas and enabling the creation of soft, tonal backgrounds. This synergy between the paper’s receptive qualities and the solvent’s blending capabilities allows artists to achieve a polished, seamless effect with minimal effort, making it an ideal choice for both detailed compositions and atmospheric expanses.
Art Insights and AvailabilityUser Insights: Real-World Performance
Feedback from artists underscores the paper’s strengths and quirks. Many praise its subtle tints and quality at an affordable price point, noting its suitability for portraiture and atmospheric landscapes. However, some have observed that the tints are less saturated than expected, requiring adjustments in technique to maximize their effect. Packaging issues, such as occasional dents in shipping, suggest a need for improved protection, though these rarely impact the final mounted piece. Overall, users appreciate its forgiving nature and professional-grade results, often citing it as a go-to for both practice and exhibition-quality work.
Availability and Considerations
Tinted Bockingford is widely available through art supply retailers like Jackson’s Art Supplies and Bromleys in the UK, though some regions, such as the US, report difficulty sourcing the tinted option. Offered in single sheets or packs, it’s accessible for artists wanting to test its capabilities. Priced competitively for its quality, it strikes a balance between premium cotton papers like Saunders Waterford and more budget-friendly options, making it a practical choice for regular use.
If you are looking to purchase some of this paper, you can click the links below. Both Ken Bromley and Jackson's Art ship worldwide, but be aware that shipping may be expensive.
Please share this article with fellow artists or enthusiasts who might benefit from exploring Tinted Bockingford NOT paper’s unique qualities.
We’ve explored the unique qualities of Tinted Bockingford NOT paper—from its pigment retention to its blending prowess. Have you tried this paper in your own projects? Share your experiences or favourite techniques in the comments below—we’d love to hear from you!
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Our newsletter has dropped and we have three new articles now available. We like to cover a wide range of mediums and products in each article, so in this newsletter, we explore the Chromaflow coloured pencil range, the latest pencil produced by Derwent. Do we have a UK Prismacolor Premier pencil finally? Our second article covers the creamy oil pastels by Sennelier. Even if you don't work with oil pastels, you may find this article interesting, and you may even decide to try them yourself. Finally, we have the latest tutorial for soft pastel artists. If you haven't tried soft pastels before, we highly recommend you give this tutorial a go. It's so easy and you don't need any previous experience to make a brilliant piece of art. Click on any of the images below to visit the article and have a read. Why not grab a coffee, as we do throw lots of information into our articles, so we hope you enjoy them!  Derwents' new coloured pencil rangeThe Chromaflow pencil was released in June of 2021, initially in the USA and India and then the UK and the rest of the world, the following year. Derwent is a company, that has produced quality products for over a century and a half, so we would expect this new range to meet all the usual standards, but do they? In this article, we analyse the quality and application of the pencils. Did we find the same quality that we have come to expect from Derwent? We provide information from our own research, as well as reviews by other artists', found online. See how they compare to other brands, in particular with the highly popular Prismacolor Premier pencil, but with Derwents' other lines too.  Sennelier collaborated with Picasso to create this lightfast oil pastel rangeThe Sennelier (pronounced Sen-el-EE-A) oil pastel is creamy, with an extraordinarily high pigment content, providing vivid colour and excellent covering potential and brilliance, with a high degree of light stability. Oil pastels are comprised of pigment in a non-drying binder of oil and wax, which is formed into a compact stick. Like soft (dry) pastels, alternative brands offer diverse combinations of binder, oil and wax, which make them soft or hard. The Sennelier Oil Pastels use the same high quality pigments and high pigment loads as their other lines, combined with a pure, synthetic binding medium and mineral wax. In this article, we explore the possibilities of this compelling brand and the rich history of the company. We discuss best practices, delve into lightfast properties and provide recommendations on effective accessories. Finally, we share the feedback of other users and our own thoughts on this product. Even if you have never used oil pastels before, this article may inspire you to give them a go.  New tutorial - Poppy field on black base for soft pastel artistsThis is a tutorial created for the soft pastel artist. You may be a complete novice, unsure where to begin on your journey, or an intermediate looking for more knowledge. Pastels are a quick and easy medium, making them ideal for the absolute beginner. We provide a simple breakdown of how to create an eye catching landscape of these sun-kissed poppies. We show you how to build the foundations and offer practical techniques. By providing images and descriptions, we offer an easy to follow guide for every artist. You may just wish to pass the time with a box of pastel and a cuppa, simply because you like the composition. Wherever you are in the process, we encourage you to embellish as much as you want, or keep it as simple as we have. Why not give it a go?
PERSONAL RECOMMENDATION: I have used this product for many years to help seal my graphite and coloured pencil drawings as well as my pastel portraits too. I have tried some other fixatives, but I personally like this one due to the fact that it also includes a UV filter, which offers extra protection. Some fixative nozzles can become blocked which is when spitting happens and this can leave marks on your drawing, particularly noticeable if you use it for your pastel paintings. I have never had that problem with the Loxley one. USING IT ON MY OWN DRAWINGS When working on my coloured pencil portraits, I sometimes apply a fixative between the layers which helps to extend the working surface and minimise saturation if I have applied a large amount of layers to a particular piece. As the fixative secures previous layers, ensure you have finished blending as you may not be able to do this after sealing it with fixative. In the video above, you can see the Loxley fixative appear in the video showing you where I apply a spray of fixative. There are around 8 or 9 layers on this area alone and as I need to apply highlights to the dark fur, the fixative allows me to do this without muddying the colours. I can then continue with more layers. Once the portrait is complete, I treat it with two layers over the whole of the portrait to minimise smudging and to offer extra protection to the framed portrait, particularly as many people do not choose a UV or museum glass when framing. USING IT ON PASTEL ART If you work with pastels, you may wonder if you should use a fixative on your drawings. Take a look at the comparison photos below and see what may happen if you do. The one on the left is before applying fixative and the one on the right is after. See how the fixative has darkened the colours, creating a more translucent finish. The fixative has dampened the pastel application, causing the darkening of the pastels. This may depend on the pastels you use though as higher quality pastels may not react in the same way as cheaper brand ones due to their being more pigment in them. Many papers, particularly textured ones, do not require a fixative as they hold the pastel well with minimal pastel drop. At the end of the day, the final decision is yours alone. DIRECTIONS FOR USE: When spraying, hold the can about 12" away from your upright drawing and spray evenly from top to bottom. It has also been suggested to me that you can turn your drawing 45 degrees and respray, so you are applying a balanced amount over the whole of your drawing. Spray too close and you may create speckling from the aerosol. WHAT ABOUT USING HAIRSPRAY AS A CHEAP ALTERNATIVE TO FIXATIVE?
Never use hairspray as a fixative. Manufacturers of hairspray make this product for use on hair, not artwork. As hairspray is not acid-free, should you spray it over your artwork, it could cause it to yellow over time. The acid in the hairspray can cause discolouration of the pigment and may also make the paper brittle too. If you have ever used hairspray, you'll note that some can leave a tacky residue behind, not good for your work. It really is better to buy a fixative made for art, which will help protect your work properly for many years. If you wish to see the final portrait of the Boxer dog being created in the video above, click this link For anyone who uses the Caran d'Ache Luminance pencils, the company has released 24 new colours! You can buy individual pencils or purchase 20 of the colours in a box set called the 'Portrait assortment' These pencils have been available to 'pre-order' for a while, but online stores, are now receiving stock and getting them sent out to everyone. My set appeared on Saturday morning (18.07.20) and I have to admit to being very excited upon opening the box. For me, the Luminance pencils are THE best pencils I have used and I really appreciate that Caran d'Ache have extended the colour palette from 76 to 100. I suspect this was a reaction to Derwent releasing their first, fully lightfast pencil range last summer, which had 100 colours. For anyone interested, I have both ranges. The Luminance pencils are my regular 'go to' pencils as they are a little firmer than the Derwent Lightfast, and I am able to create finer details with them, but both ranges offer different colour palettes and having a larger choice is always a bonus.
The two darker tones, Indanthrone Blue and Dark Indigo will make a more natural replacement for the black pencil, but as the majority of my own work includes pets and portraits, having additional browns and pinks added to the palette is excellent. My current favourite colours are Burnt Ochre 10% and Burnt Sienna 10%, which I use on almost every portrait, so the introduction of the Herculanum Red, Violet Pink and Dark Flesh 40% are most welcome!  Above are the four new colours not included in the Portrait set. Personally, I think that Caran Dache should have created the Portrait set and include all 24 colours as they are just as important as all the other colours. I also wish they had included an extra grey for the 'eye colour selection', but as I use the greys more than most other colours, I could never have enough choice! Have you got yours yet? Do let me know what your favourite, or most used colours are, and which new colours you are most excited about!
You can view our Luminance article by clicking the link below. |
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