Terri & Ayin, I appreciate the suggestion of Arches HP. I do know Arches papers. I use them. For the money, they're great and they do handle heavy use very well compared to most other papers. Just the way I work with water media, I rarely do either erasing or scrubbing, at which Arches excel. So other papers do me better most of the time, which is just a personal choice. My preference for watercolors is actually Cold Pressed, by the way.
I'm not expecting any of you to follow my travels with Cara D'Ache Neocolor crayons. They are posted here on Creative Spark, but you needn't refer back to those to understand my quest. I started with ordinary charcoal drawing paper and found that even with water the toothiness was too apparent for my taste with this medium. Then tried CP watercolor paper; still rather toothy for the effect I was seeking. Lately using Bockingford (my general overall fave) in their Hot Pressed version, but as you can see from Grasshopper Loop, tooth still quite visible - at least to my eye. Nothing wrong with that, but not quite what I was trying for.
Some folks love tooth visibility in water media and some use it super well! I have done so, but tend to prefer tooth to be filled, or at least that's what I visualize when starting a painting. Might be that crayons don't quite work that way even with water dilution.
Yupo is about as smooth as anything I've ever seen. Not to my taste for water media at all, because it's basically plastic.
Just to be clear, I'm not rejecting the suggestions here. I realize everyone is trying to help. It's entirely possible that what I'm seeking isn't out there, in which case, I'll just have to settle down to using this medium as is and use regular watercolor with it or instead of it.
Not the end of the world if this medium does well what it does well and isn't always useful for my purposes. Just tryin'....
