So I've spent a couple of hours chatting with another artist about how certain artistic methods are often taken for granted by those who routinely use them, since they've forgotten the expensive trial-and-error process they had to go through. For me, stretching paper had, perhaps, a 30% fail rate. It wastes time and, in the case of thinner papers, can waste materials, too.
Whilst training at college and, for a while, whilst illustrating commercially, I used to use a thick watercolour paper, Arches 140lb hot-pressed. It takes a lot of abuse, can be sanded, scraped and soaked. And, if you really balls something up, you can shower off your