Amazon Basics large landscape sketchbook - First thoughts

This time last week I explained how I’ve now moved to my Amazon Basics classic sketchbook. It’s landscape oriented, in 21x13cm format, and has the read document pocket and elastic fastening that you’d expect from this type of casebound notebook or sketchbook. It contains 76 pages of 200gsm paper. Here’s some of the sketches I’ve made in it this week.

The book has lived in my rucksack which I use every day and shows no ill effects yet. I will be interested to see how well it stands up to the next few weeks. The only reason why there’s a question in my mind is that more than one of the reviews on Amazon does complain about pages coming away. Well, at the moment it seems perfectly secure to me.

I’ll be honest, as you can see the majority of sketches I make in a daily sketchbook are monochrome fineliner sketches. Which in some ways makes me more undemanding than many sketchbook users. I wouldn’t say that the quality you can achieve with fineliner is quite as good as you can in the equivalent of Moleskine or Seawhite but I really wouldn’t say that there’s a great deal in it. The paper does have a bit of tooth to it, more than the Canson Graduate Mixed Media even though they are both 200 gsm. It’s much more textured than the paper in my Moleskine or my Royal Talens and more than the Seawhite. This means its not as enjoyable for me to sketch in, as there’s more resistance to the pen than I like. This is all a matter of personal preference. I will say that it deals with a set of coloured fineliner better than the Royal Talens which shows through more.

Bearing in mind that I do most of my sketches in fineliner I have never yet brought a specifically watercolour journal. The best that I have used yet for watercolour is the Canson Graduate Mixed media. The Amazon Basics is not as good as that one in my opinion. The first picture I made in it, of two trams in Lisbon showed it handling a light wash pretty well. The colours remained really bright. However the next two, while brighter and better than they appear in the scans above are a little more muted. While painting the amphicar I found the paper pilling quite badly, and though they flatten quite well , it’s not as well as the Canson.

One of the big selling points of the Amazon Basics large Classic sketchbook is the price. Last week saw it briefly offered at £3.80, more usually it is £4.42. That looks like value for money working out at about 5p a page. But then the Royal Talens sketchbook that I finished earlier this month has a whopping 160 pages and that works out at today’s price as better value than the Amazon Basics. There’s not a huge amount in it, but if you were like me a sketcher who primarily works in dry material then the Royal Talens looks more like the standout product to meet your needs.