Blue paper (known in Italian as carta azzurra, carta cerulea, and carta turchina) has often been used as a support for drawings and prints by artists. [1] With its inherent middle tone, blue paper is a particularly effective material for rendering the effects of three-dimensionality on a two dimensional surface. This effect is created through the use of light and dark drawing materials, like chalk, charcoal, ink, and white heightening, on blue paper.
Paper production can be traced back to China around 100 CE, arriving in Spain and then Italy via the Middle East around 1100. [2] European cotton paper differs from Asian paper in that the pulp is composed mainly of processed rags rather than of plant fibers. The earliest extant mention of blue paper dates from a 1389 Bolognese statute that refers to paper size, quality, weight, and price. [3] It's earliest use for drawing also originates in Italy, referenced below.
The rags were processed into paper in so-called paper mills. The working steps were subject to a strict hierarchy: The rags sold to the paper mill by rag pickers were first sorted by workers, often women and children. The rags were stamped and mixed into paper pulp in the next step. The pulp was removed with sieves and placed as a freshly laid sheet on a felt base in the first drying process (couching). [4]
Sorting the rags was a time-consuming process carried out meticulously for high-quality writing papers. This was not necessarily the case for coarser wrapping paper. As work clothing in many regions consisted mainly of blue textiles, rag fibers were often already blue. Further, neither woad nor indigo, the most common blue colorants, require a mordant or substance to fix the dye and were dark enough to cover stains. Brown and grey papers were also produced during this period. [5] The paper pulp for these less refined papers was stamped less thoroughly. Unlike white papers, they were often not bleached and were not treated with starch, as they did not need to be resistant to a quill.
Until the 18th century, there was no paper production specifically or exclusively for artistic works. However, artists were already drawing on blue paper in the 15th century. [6] Towards the end of the 15th century, blue paper was used as a support for letterpress printing and for printmaking. [7] The blue color provided a unique starting point for modeling light and shadow compared to the white paper. This is because the artist usually began with a dark drawing instrument, such as a pen or brush dipped in ink, charcoal, or chalk. These dark lines or traces are tonally closer to the colored paper than the lighter white paper. This allows white as a point of contrast, with modeling the highlights with lead or opaque white as an additional step. This step is not trivial, providing a new opportunity to differentiate the modeling. White paper was sometimes colored with an opaque ground layer to achieve this differentiation. [8] These drawn studies of light and shadow provided preparation for the more nuanced execution of such modeling in colored painting. However, such drawings on colored paper with their more elaborate modeling (compared, for example, too many chalk or pen and ink drawings on white paper) had a special aesthetic effect. Collectors prized them early on.
The earliest drawings on blue paper date back to the early 15th century in Northern Italy. [9] Beginning in the 15th century, a proliferation took place in Venice. [10] North of the Alps, blue paper was used for drawings from the early 16th century: First by Albrecht Dürer, then demonstrably by Hans Burgkmair and Jörg Breu. [11] In the Netherlands, the material became as a chosen support beginning in the 1630s. [12] The Dutch used logwood, made available by through the West Indies Company, as a blue colourant. Logwood-dyed rags were processed into paper pulp or the dye was introduced directly into the vat, a process credited to Dutch papermakers. [13] For pastel painting, which emerged in the late 17th century, blue paper was used particularly frequently as a support material alongside parchment, silk, canvas, wood, and copper. [14]
Albrecht Dürer, sometimes spelled in English as Durer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.
Drawing is a visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface. The instruments used to make a drawing are pencils, crayons, pens with inks, brushes with paints, or combinations of these, and in more modern times, computer styluses with graphics tablets or gamepads in VR drawing software.
Papermaking is the manufacture of paper and cardboard, which are used widely for printing, writing, and packaging, among many other purposes. Today almost all paper is made using industrial machinery, while handmade paper survives as a specialized craft and a medium for artistic expression.
Pulp is a fibrous lignocellulosic material prepared by chemically, semi-chemically or mechanically producing cellulosic fibers from wood, fiber crops, waste paper, or rags. Mixed with water and other chemicals or plant-based additives, pulp is the major raw material used in papermaking and the industrial production of other paper products.
GovertTeuniszoon Flinck was a Dutch painter of the Dutch Golden Age.
A paper mill is a factory devoted to making paper from vegetable fibres such as wood pulp, old rags, and other ingredients. Prior to the invention and adoption of the Fourdrinier machine and other types of paper machine that use an endless belt, all paper in a paper mill was made by hand, one sheet at a time, by specialized laborers.
An eraser is an article of stationery that is used for removing marks from paper or skin. Erasers have a rubbery consistency and come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. Some pencils have an eraser on one end. Erasers can come in various shapes and colors. Less expensive erasers are made from synthetic rubber and synthetic soy-based gum, but more expensive or specialized erasers are made from vinyl, plastic, or gum-like materials.
Fiber crops are field crops grown for their fibers, which are traditionally used to make paper, cloth, or rope.
The recycling of paper is the process by which waste paper is turned into new paper products. It has a number of important benefits: It saves waste paper from occupying homes of people and producing methane as it breaks down. Because paper fibre contains carbon, recycling keeps the carbon locked up for longer and out of the atmosphere. Around two-thirds of all paper products in the US are now recovered and recycled, although it does not all become new paper. After repeated processing the fibres become too short for the production of new paper, which is why virgin fibre is frequently added to the pulp recipe.
Manila paper is a relatively inexpensive type of paper, generally made through a less-refined process than other types of paper, and is typically made from semi-bleached wood fibers.
Cotton paper, also known as rag paper or rag stock paper, is made using cotton linters or cotton from used cloth (rags) as the primary material. Prior to the mid-19th century, cotton paper was the main form of paper produced, with pulp paper replacing cotton paper as the main paper material during the 19th century. Although pulp paper was cheaper to produce, its quality and durability is significantly lower. Although pulp-paper quality improved significantly over the 20th century, cotton paper continues to be more durable, and consequently important documents are often printed on cotton paper. Different grades of cotton paper can be produced.
A writing material, also called a writing medium, is a surface that can be written on with suitable instruments, or used for symbolic or representational drawings. Building materials on which writings or drawings are produced are not included. The gross characterization of writing materials is by the material constituting the writing surface and the number, size, usage, and storage configuration of multiple surfaces into a single object. Writing materials are often paired with specific types of writing instruments. Other important attributes of writing material are its reusability, permanence, and resistance to fraudulent misuse.
Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses, herbivore dung, or other vegetable sources in water. Once the water is drained through a fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distributed on the surface, it can be pressed and dried.
Tree-free paper, also known as no tree paper, offers an alternative to traditional wood-pulp paper due to its unique raw material composition. This type of paper is considered more eco-friendly especially when evaluating its entire life cycle.
Paper is a thin nonwoven material traditionally made from a combination of milled plant and textile fibres. The first paper-like plant-based writing sheet was papyrus in Egypt, but the first true papermaking process was documented in China during the Eastern Han period, traditionally attributed to the court official Cai Lun. This plant-puree conglomerate produced by pulp mills and paper mills was used for writing, drawing, and money. During the 8th century, Chinese paper making spread to the Islamic world, replacing papyrus. By the 11th century, papermaking was brought to Europe, where it replaced animal-skin-based parchment and wood panels. By the 13th century, papermaking was refined with paper mills using waterwheels in Spain. Later improvements to the papermaking process came in 19th century Europe with the invention of wood-based papers.
Christ among the Doctors is an oil painting by Albrecht Dürer, dating to 1506, now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. The work belongs to the time of Dürer's sojourn in Italy, and was according to its inscription executed incidentally in five days while he was working on the Feast of the Rosary altarpiece in Venice. The work was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci and possibly based on the most probably earlier painting by Cima da Conegliano on the same theme.
A colored pencil, coloured pencil, colour pencil, map pencil, pencil crayon, or coloured/colouring lead is an art medium constructed of a narrow, pigmented core encased in a wooden cylindrical case. Unlike graphite and charcoal pencils, colored pencils' cores are wax- or oil-based and contain varying proportions of pigments, additives, and binding agents. Water-soluble (watercolor) pencils and pastel pencils are also manufactured as well as colored cores for mechanical pencils.
Amalfi paper, also called Charta Bambagina, is a valuable type of paper produced in Amalfi since the Middle Ages.
Hemp paper is a paper variety consisting exclusively or to a large extent from pulp obtained from fibers of industrial hemp. The products are mainly specialty papers such as cigarette paper, banknotes and technical filter papers. Compared to wood pulp, hemp pulp offers a four to five times longer fibre, a significantly lower lignin fraction as well as a higher tear resistance and tensile strength. Because the paper industry's processes have been optimized for wood as the feedstock, production costs currently are much higher than for paper from wood.
