Arches is the mac-daddy of watercolor papers – pretty much the reigning champion, and for the most part, I can see why. It has a truly beautiful, non-mechanical mould-made texture, with a satiny soft and receptive surface. The bright white is a whiter paper than the natural, as its name applies, and really bounces light back through watercolors exceptionally well. It holds color intensity as well as the other highly-sized stock I tested, Lanaquarelle, and gives you a luxurious amount of drying time. That is part of my problem with Arches. Because wet-on-wet stays wet for several minutes, with a heavy water wash, I have to wait for between five and sometimes up to seven minutes to try and attempt a controlled bloom. If you drop water over paint that is too wet on Arches, the bloom starts off looking incredible – rich cauliflower fractal accretions at the edge of the pigment displacement, but then, heartbreakingly, you have no choice but to watch as the paper slowly absorbs the edges of your bloom, so that it dissipates into insignificance. For a highly sized paper, Arches also is not as conducive to lifting, either, and when glazing, I find that the paint can get muddy pretty quickly. Overall, and utterly exceptional stock though, and it is only my quirks of combining glazing with lifting and deliberate blooms, that kick this stock down to number four of my nine tested swatches.