WHERE PAPER COMES FROM

Paper.  We worship it.  It is what we draw on.  How is it made?

About 95% of the paper that we draw on comes from trees.  At the heart of it, the papermaking process is all about reorganizing the cellulose fibers in wood.

The natural glue which holds the cellulose fibers together in trees is call lignin.  The quality of the final paper product is based on how much lignin that remains.  Newsprint, which is considered a low quality and low strength paper, has a high quantity of lignin.

Wood must be broken down, either by mechanical or chemical processes.  A mechanical grinding process creates a soupy pulp of cellulose fibers and lignin.  So we have a rather low tech pulping process which involves nothing more than a very large mortise and pestle grinding up the wood.

For higher quality papers, a chemical pulping process is used.  Chemicals are used to principally separate the cellulose fibers from the lignin.  With the lingin out of the way, the resultant paper will be of a higher quality.

When you pulp wood either by mechanical or chemical processes, the color of the pulp in it’s natural state is brown.  That makes sense given that wood is indeed a brown color.  So to get the white paper that we all draw on, the pulp has to be bleached by another set of chemical processes.

That’s not the end of the chemistry.   Chemicals are added to the pulp to create a specific writing quality.  This is called sizing.

Chemicals can be added to the pulp to increase the wet-strength of the paper.  And they are added to increase what is called the dry strength.

So at the moment, what we have is a soupy pulp that is filled with chemicals.  The actual making of the paper is very similar to the process that the Chinese developed more than 1900 years ago.  The pulp mixture is applied in a very thin layer to a screen.  This thin layer is then dried and rolled.  And you have paper.

Various coatings can then be added over the basic paper.   These can be pigments.  And these can be optical-brightening coatings;  for example a really white paper most likely has some sort of coating.

Future pages will discuss the specifics of watercolor paper manufacturing.  We will also come to terms with our moral responsibility and culpability given that what we do, which is draw, consumes trees.

But for the moment, we should pause to appreciate what we draw on.  I hope that the intensely chemical process of typical paper making is not inherently bad for us.