The work aims to study the effect of a known environment friendly water-based color paste on the coating uniformity of printed matter with different gravure process parameters. With homemade water-based color paste and aluminum foil paper as the experimental materials, the performance of printed matters was studied when the water-based color paste was at different speeds, pressures and plate depths. The coating effect of water-based color paste on the aluminum foil paper was characterized by such instruments as electronic thickness tester. When the printing pressure and speed were different, the change in mean value, range and variance of sample thickness was not significant. The sample thickness variance was increased with the increase in the plate depth. The printing pressure and speed had little effect on the thickness of printing samples, while the printing depth had a significant effect on the thickness of printing samples. Moreover, when the plate depth was 30 μm, the sample thickness variance was the minimum and the coating uniformity of water-based color paste was the best. The plate depth has a significant effect on the thickness of paper-based composites.