PRINTING on watercolor paper

Hello All,

Just a brief description on how you can print watercolor paper on your desktop printer...

First of all there are so many printers out there that I can't really trouble shoot them all but I do know most printers have a manual feed option.  The manual feed is usually a door on the backside of your printer.  It's specifically made for printing heavier paper and because you are feeding it through the backside there is a straight shot through so it shouldn't get stuck inside your printer.  Many inkjet printers also use waterproof ink, please test if your printer uses waterproof ink before printing out a bunch of images.

So you would basically open the door on the backside of your printer...I would not try to use the regular paper feed as the regular paper feed probably will get stuck inside your printer.  I use 140 lb Fabriano Uno watercolor paper and also Arches 140 lb through my manual feed slot.   I simply use a ruler to measure 8.5 x 11 rectangles on a sheet of paper.  If it's a 22 x 30 sheet you will get 6 sheets of paper.

My printer uses waterproof ink but if your printer isn't waterproof you could do one of two things....

1- You could print out images onto regular paper and then take your watercolor paper to a copy store and have them print with a toner copier (which is waterproof) onto your watercolor paper.  They usually charge you half the price if you bring your own paper.  I just copied a couple of pages for .25 cents because I had my own paper.

2. You could also save the images to a thumb drive and take the drive to the printer with your own watercolor paper.  They will easily be able to print from the thumb drive.  Again, since you are providing your own paper it will not cost that much.

If you would rather not run watercolor paper through your printer and if you do not want to go to a copy store you could always print out onto copy paper.  After printing out the image you could use a pencil and scribble all over opposite side of the printout and then put the copy on top of the watercolor paper (pencil scribble down and image up on top of the watercolor paper) then trace image onto the watercolor paper.  After that you could ink the image yourself.

Printing and/or copying the image(s) will make it much more simple and quick for you however.

I hope this helps.