{"id":141,"date":"2010-03-07T22:56:24","date_gmt":"2010-03-07T21:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/?p=141"},"modified":"2010-03-07T23:00:42","modified_gmt":"2010-03-07T22:00:42","slug":"mellotex-art-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/2010\/03\/mellotex-art-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"What paper do you use? Mellotex!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An artist wrote to me yesterday asking &#8220;What paper do you use&#8221;.  Well, I&#8217;ve been using Mellotex (formerly Ivorex) for almost all of my thirty professional years.<\/p>\n<p>Artists often use a variety of papers. For example, the renowned Trompe l&#8217;Oeil artist J.D. Hillbery (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jdhillbery.com\">www.jdhillbery.com<\/a>) chooses his paper to suit the texture he&#8217;s trying to achieve.  Other artists choose from a narrower selection of paper, such as Canson or Strathmore smooth Bristol board.  Personally, I stick with one paper regardless of the work, adapting my techniques on Mellotex rather than changing papers.<\/p>\n<p>Mellotex can stand an enormous amount of punishment and hardly ever suffers from raised fibres. It&#8217;s smooth enough to take graduated tone with 6H and has just enough tooth to accept 6B (which I hardly ever use &#8211; I prefer 2B as my softest grade). The surface is virtually texture-free, so it doesn&#8217;t interfere with what I&#8217;m trying to depict &#8211; in fact, papers that display their surface texture within a drawing are one of my pet hates!<\/p>\n<p>Mellotex is a UK product, available in Australia under the &#8220;Lustre&#8221; brand name but not generally available elsewhere. Although Mellotex is now sold as an office paper, as well as card, it is archival quality. The manufacturers state &#8220;Mellotex conforms to ISO 9706 requirements for permanence and as such is suitable for archival use or applications requiring \u2018acid-free\u2019 paper&#8221;. It is primarily used by the printing industry, so visit your local commercial printer and ask for the name of their paper supplier (or ask them to order on your behalf). I found a commercial paper supplier in Leeds about 20 years ago and bought 100 A1 sheets of Ivorex, which lasted until about five years ago. Then I discovered that Ivorex was now Mellotex, and available in Super White (the off-white I was used to using) and Ultra White. Now I work exclusively on 290gsm Ultra White Mellotex and enjoy the greater range of contrasts that are available to me.<\/p>\n<p>Because I have many overseas requests for Mellotex and my own supplier has a minimum order of 200 sheets, I now supply both Super and Ultra White from my website &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sibleyfineart.com\/shop.htm\">SibleyFineArt.com\/shop<\/a>. I have a minimum order of just 5 sheets (although ordering 10 sheets saves you money per sheet) and I will ship worldwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An artist wrote to me yesterday asking &#8220;What paper do you use&#8221;.  Well, I&#8217;ve been using Mellotex (formerly Ivorex) for almost all of my thirty professional years. Mellotex can stand an enormous amount of punishment and hardly ever suffers from raised fibres. It&#8217;s smooth enough to take graduated tone with 6H and has just enough tooth to accept 6B (which I hardly ever use &#8211; I prefer 2B as my softest grade). The surface is virtually texture-free&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[40,52,53],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equipment","tag-mellotex","tag-paper","tag-shop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146,"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibleyfineart.com\/_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}