The Wonder That is Terraskin Stone Paper
- Samantha McLennan
- Apr 25, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 25, 2024
Welcome to my messy studio!
If I asked you “Hey, I have an extra pack of terraskin paper, do you want some?” what would you picture? Would you hear the word skin and be worried? Well fear not, unlike vellum (see my blog post titled “Botanical Illustration of the 1700s”) there is no actual skin involved in this incredibly cool paper type.
In 2017 I was enrolled in my very first design class at the University of Alberta. We had the task of painting a range of shades using artist quality acrylic paints. These paints were super thick and super expensive so I was completely new to using them. My professor at the time was a stickler about your projects being literally perfect, docking chunks of marks if a line wasn’t perfectly 90 degrees, or if she could see a wrinkle or fold in your paper. Yikes! I have been painting since before I could hold a paintbrush and I consider myself very detail oriented. However, I could not for the life of me paint a perfectly straight line with the very thick paint we were supposed to use, on a piece of watercolour paper. So I got clever, I drove to my local favorite art and drafting supply store and went straight to the paper counter. I asked for the heaviest paper they had that could hold acrylic paint without bubbling but be smoother than the bumpy watercolour paper I was using. If it was a movie the drawer would have had gold sparkles and light coming out as the very nice lady behind the counter introduced me to terraskin.
Terraskin paper is smooth, almost buttery, in texture. It is bendable without creasing, but still foldable like regular paper. It’s slightly stretchy, and thick like watercolour paper. It can be used with any writing or painting tool such as pencils, pens, markers, watercolour, ink, and of course acrylic paint. The only tool I haven’t loved using with it is pencil crayons as it is so smooth the pencil crayon doesn’t have enough texture to grip properly.
As far as I understand, this is how it’s made.
Terraskin paper is mostly calcium carbonate, which can be taken from the waste from limestone quarries. Calcium carbonate powder, which is often food quality, can be a by product of processing limestone. “The calcium carbonate is collected mainly from waste material of the building and construction industry, such as marble and limestone scraps, which are then ground down to a fine powder similar to chalk” (Ezcurra). The fine chalk is then mixed with polyolefin resin which is sometimes also called Bio-Polyolefin. This type of resin is “mainly obtained from oil and natural gas but can also be derived from renewable resources (e.g., sugar cane)” (Plastics Europe). Once the calcium carbonate and Bio-Polyolefin are mixed, the mixture is heated, pressed onto big trays, and rolled into large sheets. Those sheets are then processed into products like any other paper product.
I clearly love this paper. Right now, I have a size A5, blank, black hardcover, “Stone paper notebook” from A Good Company in Sweden. Here’s their website: https://www.agood.com/products/stone-paper-notebook-a5-hardcover-charcoal-black?layout=blank. My sketchbook lives in my backpack at all times, and I’ve had it for two or three years now, so it’s a little beat up but has held up wonderfully despite the abuse.
Here’s some of the pages within it:
Pencil sketching:
Watercolour:
Pencil Crayon (like I said earlier I didn’t love using pencil crayon in it)
Acrylic:
Unfortunately, in the past 4 years it’s been tricky to find, in Canada at least. The terraskin paper from the art and drafting store is no longer available as their supplier from a different country went out of business during COVID. I’ve seen a few new products start to crop up in the United States so that has me hopeful. Mostly I’ve had to order pre-made sketchbooks out of terraskin, which are beautiful, but can cost an arm and a leg coming from overseas. So here’s my big idea: why can’t we make it here in Canada?
Do I really know anything about the mining industry in Canada? No. I’m an artist in Alberta who loves this paper and would like it to be more available and a little cheaper please.
I’d also consider myself to be generally pretty ecologically minded. I love when there is one industry using the scraps of another industry to make something else. See the works cited for info on: 6 pack holders made from the scraps of the sugarcane industry, old car tires being turned into railway ties,or a student here in Alberta from Olds college growing mushrooms in beer industry waste. According to my limited research this month, in Canada “Limestone accounts for 79% of the total volume in tonnage” (Canadian Encyclopedia) in the mining industry. If this really cool, eco friendly paper could be made from the waste of an industry that already exists here why couldn’t we make it here? If you’re a person out there who knows how to start an entirely new industry, hit me up. I do great work on branding and packaging design! I will work for idea credit, free paper for life, and like 2% of the company.
Thanks for reading. Be curious and kind.
- Sam
AUDIO VERSION:
Works Cited
Links:
A Good Company’s video
A Good Company website
Production video
Funny youtube on terraskin
BBC on Stone Paper
Articles about stone paper:
Ezcurra, Magdalena. Terraskin® the paper made from stone: A study of a new writing support for forensic purposes, Forensic Science International, Volume 220, Issues 1–3, 2012, Pages 164-172, ISSN 0379-0738, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2012.02.018.
Plastics Europe. “What are polyolefins?”. Accessed April 24, 2024.
About limestone quarries in Canada:
About industries using scraps of other industries to make cool things:
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