Mary Tins Supplemental

If you’ve ever bought off ebay you may well have experienced what happened with me. So, a fortnight ago, just a few days after Christmas I ordered a replica ‘Mary’ tin from ebay. I posted yesterday all about this. Well, what I didn’t tell you was that I was messed around something rotten by Evri, the delivery company, so last Sunday I was looking at alternatives in case it never did get delivered before my nerve snapped and I claimed a refund. Well, one of the reasonably priced alternatives I looked at obviously alerted the owner and he offered it to me at a reduction. The price was so good that I felt, hmm, I certainly don’t mind having three boxes rather than 2, so I bought it. This was the one that arrived yesterday and the one in the photos with my post yesterday.

Later on yesterday, then, the first one I ordered arrived. Here’s a photo of the three together.

So, the genuine Mary tin is in the middle. The one on top is the last one to arrive, while the bottom one is the one that I wrote about and photographed yesterday. So let’s take my original away for a moment:-

The embossing on the lids seems pretty much identical, but of course there is one glaring difference. The top one seems much closer in colour to my original while the bottom one seems more of a coppery or bronze colour almost. There is one other even more obvious difference between the two tins which you can’t see from the photo. Compare the bottoms of the three tins :-

Yes, my first replica tin on the bottom does not have any writing on it, while the top is stamped with the Daily Mail. I don’t know why. There doesn’t appear to be any sign that the plain one has had anything done to it to remove the writing so that someone could try to pass it off as an original. Which I’m sure would be a forlorn attempt anyway because it doesn’t require any expertise whatsoever to tell the difference between original and replica. I guess its because they were made in different batches, and being promotional items, nobody was that bothered about each replica being identical to all of the others.

I do find the whole replica business quite interesting. During lock down I assembled a little collection of various models of trams and buses produced by Matchbox and a few of their competitors. In the process I obtained these two models –

The one on the left is an original Matchbox Models of Yesteryear London Tram. The one on the left is not – it is a promotional model offered by Typhoo tea in 1985 to celebrate their 80^th birthday. Apart from the advertising banner, they seems identical. But they aren’t – there is little or no plastic in the Matchbox model, while the roof, wheels and baseplate of the Typhoo bus are all made of plastic. My guess is that the plastic parts made it cheaper to manufacturer and lighter to transport.

Derwent Academy Journal - First Impressions

Yes, I know that it’s only been a few days but I bet you’re dying to know how the Derwent Academy Sketchbook is working out for me.

I usually make a sketch on the first page when I buy a new sketching journal, so the book already had one sketch in it. Since then I’ve made 2 on Sunday, 2 on Monday , 2 on Tuesday, 3 on Wednesday, 3 on Thursday, 3 on Friday and 4 today. That’s 19 in total this week – close to 3 per day.

Bearing in mind that the book has 128 pages I’m aiming (hoping) to fill it by the end of February. December was a month where I couldn’t really achieve very much with the sketching journal challenge because of other projects. But last week I ended up making over 20 drawings in order to finish my Seawhite of Brighton A5 sketching journal so I seem to be back in the groove with it. When I try to project how long it’s going to take me to fill a sketchbook I use a rate of 2 pages per day as a rough guide. With 108 pages left that suggests a finish on 5^th March. But then, if you go back to before December I was averaging more than 14 drawings a week, so I think that it’s a decent bet that I will be able to complete by the end of February. Barring unforeseen circumstances. I know that I’m committed to it at the moment because of what happened on Tuesday. I’ll try to explain.

On a week day/working day, part of my routine is that after finishing breakfast I can usually have between 45 minutes and an hour before I want to leave for work and in this time I try to make the first drawing of the day. Usually I do manage to do this and it means that I only need to do one more after work to hit the target. It often means I have the option of making a third drawing as well. On Tuesday, though, I decided to spend the time between breakfast and departure for work reading to the end of the John Grisham novel I was reading. There’s a fine line when you have set yourself a challenge. On the one hand you don’t want to fall behind if you don’t have to. On the other hand you don’t want it to start feeling like a chore. Okay, but there were a couple of complicating factors on Tuesday night, though. For one thing I wasn’t going to be home until later than normal, because I needed to visit the local library to photocopy my picture handout for Thursday night’s quiz. Then when I got home I really needed to write a review of Monday night’s University Challenge for my blog. I got into the habit of leaving these reviews before Christmas and they really started to stack up. It took a big effort to get myself back up to date. So it would have been easy for me to have just let it go on Tuesday. And I didn’t. I made one drawing, with the plan of calling it a day, but having completed one I found the oomph to do another.

So let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about my first impressions of the journal itself. When I’m trying out a new sketching journal there’s several things I’m looking out for. In no particular order these include

- Durability. I need a sketching journal to be able to stand up to living for weeks at a time in my rucksack.

- Design. Some sketching journals just look and feel nicer than others

- Versatility. Although the majority of my drawings in a sketching journal are done in fine liner pen, it’s also nice to know that I have the option of using coloured pens and even watercolour if I so desire. This leads on to the next criterion –

- Paper quality. Specifically, how pleasurable it is to draw on, and how well it takes black fine liner.

- Price. Specifically the price per page. I don’t like to feel like I’m paying through the nose for an inferior product. Likewise I don’t want to pay a premium for a well known name.

How does the Derwent seem to measure up in these areas, then?

Durability. The jury is out for a while on this one. When it’s had a few weeks living in the rucksack I’ll be in a better position to let you know.

Design. It’s a genuine A5 size, like the Seawhite. To be honest I don’t mind whether a journal is true A5 or slightly smaller like the Moleskine and Royal Talens. The hard covers are cloth bound, like the Canson and the Amazon Basics. I can’t say I have a strong feeling about this, but I do prefer the finish of the Moleskine, Royal Talens and Seawhite journals. Cloth often does feel a little cheap. The journal does have elastic fastening, but lacks an integral bookmark or a document pocket on the inside cover. That’s not necessarily a deal breaker for me, but I’d rather have them than not.

Versatility -The paper is 135gsm. That’s actually the  same as the Seawhite which copes well with watercolour, but then the paper in the Seawhite performs exceptionally well considering how light it is. The good people at Derwent do stress that this is for specifically dry media. I have used watercolour, with mixed results. I was surprised how nice the painting I made is – the colours combined quite nicely even if they are just a wee bit muted. The good news is there is no show through on the other side. However the paper is so waffled and buckled that it was difficult to make a decent sketch on the other side of the paper. I have tried using 0.4mm cheap and cheerful coloured fineliners. Curiously it was only the dark blue that came through in 2 places. 

Paper Quality - The pages themselves are quite a bright white, brighter than the pages in the Seawhite, and they’re pretty smooth. This worried me a bit at first. But I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised with the way that it responds to black fineliner. First impressions are that it’s not quite up there with Moleskine and Seawhite but it’s maybe just a bit better than the others. With a 0.1mm fine liner the lines that you get are very nice and crisp.

Price - In August I think Amazon decided that they were not going to stock this product any more, and so they were selling them off for a really good price. In terms of price per page it’s the cheapest pure sketching journal I’ve bought.

Mary Tins

Okay, this is neither about art nor quizzing so doesn’t really fit  within the scope of either of my extant blogs. But what the hell, it maybe fits slightly better within this one.

I do find the First World War an interesting subject, and have done ever since reading some of the poetry like “Dulce et Decorum Est”, “An Irish airman foresees his death” and “The Soldier” when I was at school. It’s just as well considering how many times I would teach the poetry in my career as an English teacher. Then when I started researching my family history I embarked upon a quest to find out where and when my grandmother’s father had been killed and was buried. (This was my father’s mother.) It took a lot of time and some creative lateral thinking, but I found that he had been killed on the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) and that originally his body had not been identified. His name was inscribed on the Menin Gate, but then removed when it was identified and buried in Voormezeele on the outskirts of Ieper (Ypres). I visited in 2016, and found the whole experience very moving.

However, for all of my interest, I’m not really interested in building up a collection of memorabilia. However, for Christmas a few weeks ago my brother bought me a genuine Princess Mary Tin, and I loved it.

If you’re not aware of the story, in the early months of the war, 17 year old Princess Mary, daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, decided she would like to buy a present for every British soldier on the Western Front and every sailor on a Royal Navy ship. She was gently informed “Sorry, your Royal Highness, but you ain’t got enough lolly for that, but never mind, we’ll get Joe and Josephine public to pay instead” or words to the effect. A public appeal was launched that proved wildly successful, so much so that the scheme was extended to include everyone in the Armed Forces. Mind you, not everyone got these by Christmas 1914. The last were distributed as late as 1920. The majority of them contained tobacco and cigarettes, but there were a variety of different contents for non-smokers, nurses and Sikhs amongst others. The tins were made of brass and this is one of the reasons why it took so long for everyone to be given one. Brass was in short supply at times, for example, the Lusitania was carrying tons of the stuff when it was sunk by a U boat in 1915.

I think that the tin itself is a very desirable object and I think a lot of the recipients did too considering how many of them are still around. On the lid is an embossed design, which seems to owe something to art nouveau. In the centre is the profile of the Princess, white there are 6 roundels in the border containing the names of allies Belgium, France, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro and Japan.You can probably see from the photograph that my time seems to have been extensively polished over the years and this has rubbed away and flattened out quite a bit of detail. But I like it tremendously.

Being the kind of person that I am, over the next few days after Christmas I set out to find out as much as I could about the tins. One of the things I discovered was that in 2014 the Daily Mail made a promotional offer to their readers to provide a replica Mary tin – and a replica King’s Shilling. I think they had to collect tokens or vouchers from the paper. I immediately wondered just how good a replica they were. To cut a long story short I found one for a reasonable price on ebay and bought it. Here it is

 

The first thing you notice about the replica is not something you can see in the photos. It’s the weight. The original is much heavier, and feels far more substantial. If anything the replica feels even lighter than the Old Holborn tobacco tins my father used to use. The detailing on the lid, the embossed design is cruder than the original. The Christmas 1914 lettering is smaller, and further down the lid too. As regards the insides:-

The lids are very different. The original opens flat while he replica only opens through 90 degrees. The original‘s lid closes over the edges of the body of the tin, while the replica lid has a deep edge that closes inside the edges of the main body of the tin. In short, then, I don’t see any way you could mistake the replica for original if you know anything about what the original is like.

What will I keep in the tins? I don’t really know yet, but I do plan to use them both

As I said, I’m not planning to start a memorabilia collection. But I will admit that there is one other object that I am curious about. Sadly this is a little more macabre than the Mary Tin. This is the Death Plaque, also nicknamed the Death Penny. This was a circular bronze plaque which was issued after the war to the next of kin of every member of the services who was killed in service during the war. By that reckoning one must have been issued for my great grandfather, Edgar George Bennett. As next of kin, surely it would have gone to his widow, my great grandmother. The complicating factor is that she remarried in 1919. As it happens, although she passed away before I was born I do remember her second husband, who my Dad called Grandad. I’d just love to know what happened to Edgar’s plaque. I imagine that if it had been retained it would have passed to my grandmother, and then to my father or my Uncle Jim. I’m guessing it was either discarded or lost in the years following the war. I’d love to know what happened to it, but at this stage I think that’s highly unlikely.

Back to the Sketchbook Challenge

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men. In the middle of July 2025 I gave myself a good old fashioned talking too about my proliferation of casebound A5 sketchbooks. To be fair, it hasn’t really stopped me buying new ones, but at least I’ve been completing them. By the second week in November I’d completely used up these :-

A Canson Mixed Media book

A Royal Talens Art Creation book

An Amazon Basics book (landscape)

A Moleskine Art Collection book

And I had gone bac to my Seawhite of Brighton Classic A5 sketching journal. Apologies if you’re a regular reader and this is old news to you, but back in 2017, I challenged myself to make at least one sketch every day for a whole year. I did it too, and I decided that well, if I could replicate this then I could do 30 odd pages a month. To cut a long story short, I found it easy to do so, so much that in fact in a good week I was averaging three drawings a day.

The problem came as we came back from the cruise in November. I had a project to make a calendar of detailed A4 sketches for a family member for Christmas. That took a week and a half. Then there was the matter of the home made Christmas Cards. Then there was catching up on the posts for my other blog. Then there was Christmas itself. By the time I managed to drag myself back to the sketchbook, there just was not enough time to complete it all before the end of December.

Well, that’s the way that it goes. As it is, with a marathon effort which has seen me make 12 drawings yesterday and today I have finished the Seawhite book. I like the Seawhite. If I’m honest it’s probably the best of all the books I’ve finished. It’s as good as the Moleskine which was the best of the others just for fineliner work, but it’s more versatile and quite a bit less expensive. It lived for months in my bag and has proven to be pretty hardy. It’s a good piece of kit.

So what comes next? Well, I have a Derwent Academy smooth hard cover A5 book, a Leuchtturm 1917, an Amazon Basics Portrait notebook and a Crawford and Black book. We’ll start with the Derwent. I’ll let you know my impressions when I have some to report.

Real Home Made Christmas Cards

I do enjoy making my own Christmas Cards. Well. I say my own, but there’s the thing, see. Up until this year whenever I’ve made Christmas cards they have either borne copies of monochrome designs I’ve found elsewhere, or painted images also copied from elsewhere. Well, following the way that my watercolours came on in leaps and bounds during the 30x30 direct watercolour challenge in June, I finally took the plunge .

I have always said that I am no good drawing or painting something out of my head. Well, during the last fortnight I’ve had a good look at a lot fo the cards out there, and tried to boil it down in my head to a process.

Stage 1 is to draw a design lightly on the card. You’ll see that the three completed cards that I’ve photographed each shows a snowy scene with a church. I’m not ready to create my own landscape with figures – not yet, but I was confident that I could create the shape of a fairly simple country church – several different churches as it happens. I felt it was important to go light on detail.

Stage 2 is to paint the sky and the snow. I have yet to try using masking fluid to create stars and snowdrops, but let’s walk before we can run. I overpainted at lleast part of the area where the trees would go, but left negative space where the church was going to go. Using wet on wet I’ve achieved some beautiful effects and the sky becomes a huge contrast to the snowy foreground. I then left the cards to dry completely before the next stage.

The next stage was to paint in the trees. Smaller trees in the distance first, and these I painted lighter and in a bluey green. Taller trees which are closer to the viewer greener and darker. I’d make the tops of the trees even darker, almost black, but then use the negative space further down to suggest snow laying on the branches.

Stage 4 is the first pass over the church building. I painted in the yellow windows, then allowed them to dry. Then I worked from light to darker, building up more definition on the church walls, and applying blue shadows where wanted on the snowy roofs.

Stage 5 is the second pass over the church building. This is for putting in the darkest shadows beneath the rooflines, window frame details, door and wreath on the door if I used one, That completes the painted image.

Stage 6 is writing Merry Christmas on the card. I did this with fineliner because I feel more confident with my use of fineliner than a paintbrush for lettering. Here’s the cards :-

I’m really pleased with these, because they are my own designs, from my imagination, and a big improvement from the pigswill I usually produce when working from my imagination.

Crawford and Black A5 sketching journal - fur coat and no knickers

 Okay. It is a truism that just because a product is expensive it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s good and just because something is cheap it doesn’t automatically mean it’s bad.

From time to time I pop into a UK chain called The Works. They do their own brand range of art supplies, under the name of Crawford and Black. I’ve noticed that Crawford and Black have their own entry into the casebound A5 hardcover elastic fastened sketching journal market. I couldn’t resist buying one to see if it’s any good. I will answer that question shortly.

So, here it is. It comes with all of the features of this type of sketching journal that you’d expect. Elastic fastening that you can’t see in the photo and ribbon bookmark. However it does not have a document pocket attached to the back.

£6 gbp does not sound like a great deal of money. But is it as much of a bargain as it seems? Well, you get 80 pages for your money which equates to a price of 7.5p per page.

Compare this with the Amazon Basics large sketchbook – slightly smaller at 21x13cm – which has 76 pages at today’s Amazon sale price of £3.75 for 76 pages. That’s 4.93p per page. Or the Royal Talens Art Creations 21x13 sketching journal at today’s Amazon price of £7.49 for 160 pages. That’s 4.68p per page. These are the two journals I’ve used whose price per page is cheapest. The Seawhite A5 classic travel journal, a fine jack of all trades sketchbook, retails today at £8.95 for 124 pages. That’s 7.21p per page.

Now, The Works and their Crawford and Black brand have a reputation for being cheap and cheerful. But that price per page isn’t even cheap! Maybe, I thought, maybe the quality will justify the price.

Well, to an extent the Crawford and Black book does rather look the part. The huge embossing of the name on the front cover I do rather like, even though most brands go for embossing that it much more understated. I worried about the quality of the paper since it is only 115gsm. The lightest paper I’ve fund to be effective in a book of this kind if the Seawhite’s cartridge paper which is heavier than this. I was worried about showthrough.

Here's the first sketch I made with 0.3mm fineliner. The sketch itself is okay. However if you look at the photo underneath of the other side of the page, even on the photograph you should be able to see that the image is to an extent visible on the other side of the page.

This is ordinary fineliner, and no other sketchbook I’ve used in the last two years shows through like this. Now, okay, you might say - well, it's a pretty faint, ghostly  image, bt for the price per page it should not be there at all.

You can see it even more clearly on this picture that I used coloured fineliners on.

Now, it is a funny thing that with coloured fineliners I do get a bit of showthrough in many of the sketchbooks I’ve used. But this is usually no more than a few dots.

I find myself so disheartened that I have not even tried to use watercolour in it yet. So maybe something miraculous will happen with it when I apply watercolour to its pages. But it somehow seems unlikely. Now, okay, you might say, well, for light black fineliner, graphite and charcoal it’s okay. But at more than 7p per page it should be just so, so much better. There’s an old phrase that my granny used to say for things which looked good but had very little substance – ‘fur coat and no knickers’ – and it seems to me a perfect description of this sketchbook. 

Awful. I do not know how The Works can possibly justify the price. Avoid it. By the by, I have submitted this review to the Works' own website. I'm not holding my breath that it will be included.

Moleskine - Are you Just Paying for the Name?

During the last week I finished my Amazon Basics sketchbook, less than a month after starting to use it. Yay. So, just a few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and go for a finish on one of my Moleskine sketchbooks. Just to bring you up to speed, in the last year I’ve bought quite a few Moleskine alternatives which I’ve been using instead of Moleskine. It struck me in July that I wasn’t actually finishing any of these books before buying new ones and that this really was not a great state of affairs. Since then I’ve cover to cover finished three of my alternatives. So now that I’ve switched back on to Moleskine, how does it compare?

Well, first of all, let’s look at the bottom line:-

These are my current sketchbooks. Those in green are either finished, or more than half used. Those in the light amber are as yet unused, or only have one sketch in them.

The table is organised on price per page. Top of the list is the Amazon Basics portrait notebook. I haven’t used this yet but I think it should be made clear that Amazon don’t claim this can be used as a sketchbook – and although I couldn’t find out how much the paper weighs, the fact that there’s 240 pages suggests it’s very light. The Derwent Academy book was on special offer – I think Amazon were getting rid of stock at the time as they don’t stock this product now.

So at the bottom of the table we have Moleskine. At today’s price of £20.99 that’s almost 21p per page, which is a huge price compared with the other green products in the table above. There is a school of thought that you’re paying a hefty premium for the name with Moleskine. The price suggests you’re getting a better, more premium product for your money. True? Well . . .

You know, Moleskine was the first ever proper casebound sketchbook I ever used. I began urban sketching almost 10 years ago. My youngest daughter gave me a Wilkinson’s own brand sketchbook she’d never used for her At A Level. It was A5 sized with soft faux leather covers and elastic fastening. I used it on several overseas sketching trips, and always enjoyed using it, even though the paper was relatively thin and even fineliner showed through so much that you’d only use one side of the page.

For Christmas a few years ago my oldest daughter asked what was a good make of sketchbook and I told her that I’d heard a lot about Moleskine, so she bought me one for Christmas. And I admit that it was a cut above what I’d been using before. I thought that my Moleskine book was a nice piece of kit. Then I started reading reviews on line which really didn’t like Moleskine very much, and I started roadtesting alternatives. My Moleskine was removed from my rucksack. Now, after using 4 of these alternatives extensively over the last year, how does it feel going back to the Moleskine?

The Moleskine feels like a serious piece of kit. But then so do a lot of the alternatives. The covers are reassuringly solid, while I found that the Amazon Basics tended to bow a little with use. There’s not a lot in it but I slightly prefer the more tactile pastel covers of the Royal Talens Art Creations sketchbook. But then, with the Royal Talens you don’t get the document pocket and with the Amazon Basics even thought the product description says that it has a bookmark, it doesn’t. The Canson book has both of these but the covers don’t seem to be as hardwearing as the Moleskine.

The majority of the pictures I use these sketchbooks for are made in fineliner. I thought I’d use some photographs of similar subjects to compare.

In the first photo are two pictures I made of Oliver Hardy. As a rule I find that you get slightly darker crisper lines on the Moleskine paper, which works well if you’re using ordinary fineliner for monochrome work. But in all honesty it’s difficult to make out a case that it’s several times better for ordinary fineliner than either the Amazon Basics is or the Royal Talens, if you look at photos comparing some of the animal sketches I’ve made in all three.

As regards the experience of using fineliner, well, Moleskine has smooth pages. They can be a bit less forgiving, but I do enjoy drawing on them more than the more textured pages of the Amazon Basics, where the paper tends to give a bit of resistance to the pen.

But then the paper of the Royal Talens is pretty smooth as well, and it’s hard to make a case that the fineliner sketches in the Moleskine are noticeably better than they are in either of the other two.

I also wanted to test compare how well coloured fineliners work in the Moleskine. I liked results I got in a Moleskine with coloured pens in Edinburgh a few years ago.

Now, I don’t think I’m imagining it that the Moleskine gives you clearer lines with coloured fineliner. Okay, I used dark blue in the Moleskine and dark green in the RT, and you can see that RT has a more yellowy paper, but I can assure you it’s the same with dark blue – there’s a slight fuzziness you don’t get with Moleskine. Compare it with this dark blue sketch in the Amazon Basics book - 

I think this is because the coloured ink for some reason has the effect of going through the RT paper, and it shows in conspicuous dots on the other side of the page. This is also true of Amazon Basics, while it hasn’t happened with Moleskine.

I don’t use watercolour a great deal in these sketchbooks, but for the sake of comparison I made a similar direct watercolour painting in the Moleskine to one I’d made before in the Canson. I find it a tricky comparison because the Canson paper is so white, while the Moleskine is more yellow. So the colours and contrasts do tend to pop a little more. However I have to say that there’s really not a lot in it. Where there is a difference is the way that the 200 gsm pages in the Canson tend to flatten out far better. If you look at a closed Moleskine side on you’ll have no trouble seeing which are the pages you’ve used watercolour on, even with the elastic binding the book shut.

If you compare it with a picture from the Amazon Basics book in the last photo you can see that the colours are more muted in this Castle picture, although they’ve combined better, and the page has dried a lot flatter than the Moleskine did.

The Verdict

Let’s start with the positives. I find that a Moleskine sketchbook is a nice thing to work in. I like sketching on the smooth pages. I get better results with coloured fineliner than I do in the books I’ve finished this year. There’s not a huge difference in the results you can get with ordinary fineliner, but I think that they’re at least as good as you can get in all of the alternatives. I’ve achieved some decent results with watercolour, but it doesn’t flatten out well, and I don’t find it easy to get subtle gradations of colour.

The Royal Talens has the lowest price per page of any sketchbook I’ve used extensively. I couldn’t say that the Moleskine book is even twice as good. Yet it’s well over 3 times more expensive. Yes, it’s a nice piece of kit, but in all honesty it really does appear that you’re paying a premium for the Moleskine name. As I said, the majority of my sketches are made in monochrome fineliner, and there really is no point in paying for a Moleskine when the results I'm getting elsewhere are pretty much as good.