Designed to stand out.
Before We Made Art Materials, We Made Art
A considered material for artists who notice every detail.
Growing up in China, we watched a British children's show called Art Attack. It aired on the Dragon Club, and a whole generation of us grew up on it. We loved watching Neil Buchanan turn paint, paper, cardboard, glue, and whatever else was lying around into something none of us saw coming.
Back then we never thought about "fine art." We didn't check whether our materials were professional grade, and we didn't much care how the finished thing would turn out. We just wanted to try. That was the first time we understood that an idea in your head can become something you can hold in your hands. That feeling stayed.
Art never really left. When the time came to choose a university major, we chose art and painting. We spent years in studios, tried every material we could get our hands on, and, like most art students, made plenty of work that looked nothing like what we had pictured. We kept painting anyway.
After graduation we stayed in China and went deeper, studying further at an art academy. It was there, on the art supply street just outside campus, that we started seeing materials differently. The first time we walked into a shop stacked with imported watercolor paper, paints, brushes, and sketchbooks, we wanted to try everything. Then we saw the prices.
“Good paper does not compete with the artist. It creates the conditions for an idea to become fully itself.”
— The Flunbrato Studio
If you paint watercolor, you probably know this feeling. You pick up a sheet of cotton paper. Your mind is already three washes into a painting. Then the brush stops above the page, and something in you hesitates. We kept circling one question: why should trying and making mistakes on good paper be something that takes courage?
Around the same time, we started looking at home with different eyes. We come from China, and manufacturing has always been close to us, so close that we stopped noticing it. There are people here who spend their lives studying paper. People who make brushes, people who bind books, workshops with decades of hands-on experience.
So the question slowly changed. "Can good art materials be made in China" stopped being the interesting part. What we wanted to know was what happens when that kind of making experience meets the eyes of people who paint every day.
So we started. There was no perfect first product and no business plan worth the name. There were paper samples. Different textures, different bindings. Things we liked, things we knew weren't good enough, and versions we threw out and started again. Slowly, one idea got clear enough to keep. In time it had a name: FLUNBRATO.
Our Values, Carried Forward
We wanted to make the materials we would keep on our own desks. Good paper that doesn't cost so much you're afraid to experiment on it. A sketchbook built around how painters actually work, instead of around the way books have always been bound. Small details that exist for a reason.
The first thing that came out of this belief is the sketchbook now in our shop: a gutter-free watercolor sketchbook built on traditional Chinese butterfly binding, with two sheets of 300gsm cotton paper mounted into one 600gsm spread. Why should a binding be allowed to interrupt a painting down the middle? We didn't think it should.
We still work this way. Some weeks we're studying how paper handles water. Some weeks an artist uses one of our sketchbooks in a way we never imagined, and we start planning the next version. We don't have all the answers. We're still curious. Maybe that part hasn't changed since we were kids.
Back then, watching Art Attack, seeing someone make something interesting gave us one simple urge: I want to try that too. Years later, that urge is still what FLUNBRATO runs on.
