Yupo is a super-smooth semi-glossy substrate for artwork, made entirely of polypropylene. For this reason it can be reworked almost endlessly, and because the surface doesn’t absorb moisture, there are all manner of interesting effects that you can achieve with it. I discovered it only recently, but I have been working with it every day for weeks. In my experience so far, just about any type of paint, ink, marker or pencil works well on it. (I do tend to steer away from watercolour markers, because they leave a sheen that may not be desirable.) The only medium that really won’t work on Yupo — without putting down some sort of gripping material first — is dry pastel.

As a visual artist, my pictures are always aiming for four goods:

1. To keep and create a sense of air, light, and space. Practically, that means reserving white or bright areas and suggesting their presence in other parts of the picture (with reflective surfaces, chinks in pigmented areas, etc.).

2. To use precise strokes to suggest different textures, appropriate to the figures I’m painting: strips of bark on tree trunks, drops on umbrellas, the prickliness of certain foliage, the look of feathers, hair, fur, stone, and so on.

3. To model and bring my subjects alive with compelling and vivid colour. It is one thing to introduce neutral, earthy, or muted colours. It’s another thing altogether to have muddy colours, which convey opacity and darkness without charm.

4. To be readable: to make the scenario I’m showing delightfully and easily comprehensible. This is why I usually work from greater abstraction to finer detail. My privet hedge, for instance, may start out as a series of criss-crosses in various dark greens, but it will eventually be resolved with a different brush into something more leafy-looking. Therefore my paintings develop in layers, and what comes before and after in the process interact with each other to create the final result.

For all these reasons, I have fallen in love with Yupo paper! It allows me to put down very precise marks, working quite small as I do (typically on sheets less than 8" x 10”) ; it allows me to lift colour, shift colour, and layer colour as I like; it easily permits the reserving of white areas (or the putting-in of them, later); it responds well to water and other solvents; and the pigments one puts down remain vivid. It is a serious art substrate for serious artists — and that, for me anyway, was truly unexpected. And as a real bonus, I never have to stretch the paper or concern myself with preventing buckling. This is a paper that water loves!