What I found and where
Went up to Montreal this weekend to see RUSH play on their R40 tour and while I was in town I found some cool stores and beautiful papers to work into some calligraphy projects. I’ll cover all the stores in another post this week, but the two that had an incredible selection of paper were DeSerres and Au Papier Japonais.
DeSerres is a large chain store in Canada with an extensive collection of art supplies. Their paper section included some beautiful handmade papers and I picked out a few options I thought would work well with some projects I have in mind. The textures and weight are amazing – perfect for some calligraphy or brush painting.
Their overall paper selection is fantastic – racks of hot and cold press watercolor, velum, colored Canson, architectural grade – you pretty much name it and they had it.
The second store – which was just amazing – was Au Papier Japonais. This store is outside the city center but was an easy 30 minute walk – and well worth it. They focus on hand made japanese papers but also had some from Nepal. The sizes ranged from small 8.5″x11″ all the way up to massive 6’x4′ sheets for larger projects. Types of paper ranged from colorful screen printed Chiyogami (for origami and other projects) to Washi and Yuzen. The store easily had several hundred varieties of paper on display and the folks working there very knowledgable on what I would enjoy working with.
I purchased several sheets of the colored papers being made in Nepal – their saturation is just amazing in person – and the textures unreal. I think these will work well with a broad brush and some white gouache or ink – can’t wait to try them out!
Here are some more pics of the papers I snagged including some Washi, and Chiyogami.
More on the full list of pen and paper stores I ended up at later this week.
Locations:
334 Rue Sainte-Catherine Est