Nassau v. W.H.Smith own brand - comparison

Yesterday I used the 40^th page in my Crawford and Black sketchbook. This means there are only 120 pages left in it which I think is reasonable if I decide to use it as the next sketchbook in the sketchbook challenge. I’ve got 39 pages left in the Nassau now which means we should be finished with it in a fortnight. I decided to put the Crawford and Black to one side for the time being and to switch to the WH Smith I bought last week as secondary sketchbook.

I thought I’d do some testing on the WH Smith. It already had the old bus sketch that I made last week. I decided to make a picture using coloured fineliner. Then it occurred to me this morning to make a comparison picture n the Nassau – same coloured fineliner, similar subject. Here they are.

Top - W.H.Smith own brand
Bottom - Nassau 

In terms of quality it’s not easy to say that either one is much better than the other. Maybe it’s because of the paper colour but the lines on the Nassau do seem to merge together more making the picture a little less distinct than the picture in the WH Smiths. I found this happened when I used coloured fine liner in the Royal Talens which also had off white paper. I made the point that the paper in the WH Smiths book reminds a lot of the paper in the Derwent Academy and again, when I made this sketch I really enjoyed the feel of the pen on the paper. With the W.H. Smith you can only see a few dots where the ink has gone through to the other side of the page. With the Nassau it’s far worse.

In the same spirit of investigation I took today’s photo prompt on Faacebook’s Daily Drawing challenge and did it in watercolour in both books. I used the same photo promt, the same set of paints and even the same brush. Here they are:-

Top - WH Smith own brand
Bottom - NAssau

Again, I would not say that there is really a great deal in it. The colours in the Nassau book look a little warmer than in the Smiths. That’s probably the effect of the off white paper on the tonal values. It was the Nassau version that I posted in the Facebook group because I think it’s slightly better.

Where the WH Smith book is clearly superior you can see when you turn the page over. With the Smith book there’s just a tiny bit of buckling but the other side of the page is perfectly usable. In the Nassau book, where I painted the peppers the other side of the page and to an extent the page underneath it has waffled and cockled very badly, so much so that the page looks as if it will be extremely unpleasant to draw upon.