Yesterday's pictures

Yeah, London tram again. Like this ink and watercolour addition to my sketchbook
 

Peregrine Falcon. I've been watching Painting Birds with Jim and Nancy Moir

Which Travel Sketchbook? Supplementary

To paraphrase Tina Turner, I don’t need another sketchbook. I mean, I always like getting a new sketchbook, but I don’t actually need one. Especially a travel journal sketchbook. By my reckoning I have an unfinished Moleskine, two unopened Moleskines, and an Amazon Basics that I have only made 1 picture in so far, not to mention a couple of cheap n’ nasty own brand books. Well, here’s the first thing. A couple of days ago I had a letter from the Inland Revenue promising to give me back some of my tax money. My first thought was to spend it all before they ask for it back. However it pays to be a little cautious with this sort of thing. The other thing is that I have a mega sketching trip booked for August, in celebration of my retirement and my 60^th, to New York and Dublin. With the best will in the world I want something that will give me my best results.

Now you may remember that in a previous post I mentioned that when I was looking at online and video reviews I kept finding reviews that compared the large Moleskine travel journal with the Seawhite Classic A5 travel journal, the majority of which reviews saw the Seawhite coming off better. You can see where I’m going with this I think.  

So I ordered off Amazon on Thursday, with the promise of free delivery with Amazon Prime yesterday. Then I got an email late in the day saying that there had been a delay and I wouldn’t get it until Monday. So of course it arrived today. I don’t think you can complain too much about the delay and anyway this post is not comparing delivery processes. I think I probably waited for at least 30 seconds before I started opening the package. At first glance the unopened Seawhite journal looks very like one of the unopened Moleskine journals I mentioned earlier. Notice the positioning of the

open book logo on both. To be fair, though, the dimensions of the Seawhite are just a little bigger than the Moleskine as the Seawhite is a true A5.

Once opened there are other similarities and differences. Both are elastic bound – the Seawhite’s elastic feels tighter. Both have folding document wallets at the back and both have silken ribbon pagemarkers. That’s also true of the landscape Amazon basics book too.

The cover of the Seawhite is just a wee bit more glossy than the Moleskine. I prefer the Moleskine covers, but in all honesty there’s not a great deal in it and others may prefer the Seawhite.

Right let’s get down to the tale of the tape. Priced today on Amazon, the three contenders are:-

The Amazon Basics travel sketchbook (landscape 13 by 21cm) gives you 72 sides of 200gsm paper for £4.42. That’s 6.13p a page.

The Moleskine large travel sketchbook (portrait 13x21cm)gives you 104 sides of 165 gsm paper for £19.50 on Amazon. That’s 18.7p a page.

The Seawhite Classic portrait A5 travel sketchbook gives you a massive 128 sides of 130 gsm paper for £9.99. That’s 7.8p. a page.

Now, I’ve used Moleskine books on all of my sketching expeditions for the last four or five years. I like using Moleskine and I like the results I get. By very careful shopping around you might just be lucky and get the lage travel sketchbook for as little as £15 – or just over 14p a page. So when I compare books, what I have to ask myself is – is a Moleskine sketchbook twice as good as the Seawhite?

Here's an ink sketch I made in Denmark in the Moleskine notebook (above) compared with my first sketch in the Seawhite(below). The paper in the Seawhite is a purer white while the Moleskine has at least a hint of ivory about it. Looking at both I wouldn’t say that there’s a huge difference in quality between the two. Maybe because the paper of the Seawhite is a brighter white I would say that the darker shading tends to zing a little more in it, and this is something I also found in my A4 Seawhite book. I only have this sketch to go on, but there was absolutely no ink showing through on the other side of the page and this surprised me a bit since it’s an issue I’ve had with some sketches in the A4 book. I really enjoyed ink sketching in the Seawhite book. The paper in the Moleskine is very smooth while the Seawhite is a little more textured, and I like the very slight resistance to the pen that you get.

So this encouraged me to add some watercolour. Received wisdom tells you ever to add watercolour to any paper less than 130 gsm. My Seawhite A4 sketchbook has 140 gsm paper and takes watercolour well with some buckling, so I was hopeful. Here’s the result. Now, I like this. It’s taken the watercolour quite well. The colours are relatively bright (considering the subject matter). But how on Earth have Seawhite managed to get 130 gsm paper to behave like this under watercolour?! This is not camera trickery – there is very little buckling, and I could happily use the other side of the page for another watercolour sketch. Compare this with Moleskine. You can see the buckling on the edge of the Moleskine. Also the colours seem just a little more muted in

the Moleskine. So, granted, I have only made the one picture so far, but I don’t think it would be easy to argue that the Moleskine is twice as good as the Seawhite. I fact I think that I can understand why people seem to prefer the Seawhite.

Let’s have a look at the way that the Seawhite compares with the Amazon Basics travel sketchbook. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yes the colours look brighter in the Amazon. It’s early days with both. While I liked ink drawing in the Amazon book I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did in the Seawhite. I’ve only made one picture so far in both books so it’s maybe a little early to draw definitive conclusions. Still, I have to say the Amazon book hasn’t suffered in comparison with the other two at all. Both the Amazon Basics and the Seawhite classic travel sketchbooks so far seem like very serious contenders to be carried across the Atlantic in the Clark backpack this summer.

 I feel at the moment a little bit like I did once I go into my stride with the 30x30 direct watercolour challenge last year. Which, come to think if it, is only a couple of weeks away this year. I only wet back to watercolour to compare how well it works in some of the different sketchbooks I've accrued over the years. I liked a couple of the ones I made a fortnight or so ago that I've done more since - a couple more last weekend for example, and I also used watercolour and ink to fill in a couple of the gaps with my monopoly series. And do you know what? I really like having some colourful sketches in my sketchbook. I my current Seawhite sketchbook five out of the last nine have had watercolour applied to them. The way that dots of ink show through on purely ink sketches mean I can't really use both sides of the page anyway. So these are the coloured sketches from the Seawhite book

 This is another nostalgic sketch for me, since Osterley in Hounslow where this is set is only a couple of miles from Hanwell where I grew up. 

I've loved steam engines for a very long time, so it made sense to move on from the coaches and buses for this sketch

If you've read my blog in the last few days you've already seen this one.

The first time that I ever went abroad was to Greece in 1982 when I was 18. I had a return plane ticket to Athens, and my goal was to backpack to Crete. I really wanted to see Knossos - and I made it! 

Roll on the 30x30 challenge!

Comparison

Well, yes, it did strike me that if I make another bus painting, this time in my Winsor and Newton book, then we can make a comparison of sorts. So, contestant number 1 - 

This rather nice A4 ink and watercolour sketch shows a scene from c 1956. It was made in a WH Smith Globetrotter notebook. This is a discontinued line, and the paper in the book is surprisingly thin. I've bee told not to even bother trying to use watercolour on anything lighter than 130gsm. I don't know the weight of the paper in this book, but if it's 130gsm it's certainly no heavier. But I do like the way that the paper has taken these colours, and the buckling is not so bad as to prevent me from framing it and putting it in a local exhibition. 

So, having got this result from using a really light paper, what could I get from a more expensive book? Let's see our second contestant then.

This is the same sketch that I posted this morning, but it's a new photograph of it a few hours later, after the paper has had a chance to dry thoroughly. It's not as easy to compare as it could be bearing in mind that the two pictures use a different rage of colours largely. Still, I really enjoyed taking up so much of the page with the coach itself. The sketchbook here is my A4 portrait Seawhite of Brighton, with 140 gsm paper. This is still very much on the light side for applying watercolour, but once the page had time to dry out properly the amount of buckling reduced significantly. My gut feeling is that the colour is just a little subdued compared with the first sketch - but then on he other hand I don't think that I used the same set of paints. 

Let's have a look at our third and last contestant for this post - 

This was painted with the same set of paints as the previous one. This is in my Winsor and Newton portrait A4 170 gsm sketchbook. The blue works as well as the same blue in the previous sketch, maybe even a little better. The sky is a little anaemic for my liking. but the bus itself is pretty good. I wish I'd done a single seater coach rather than a double decker bus for comparison. . 

But the upshot is that there's no clear winner. I enjoyed making all three pictures and I would use any of these sketchbooks for the next one, whatever that might be. 

Another bus

 I made a post last week comparing various A4 sketchbooks I possess and explained how I picked up a job lot of WH Smiths Globetrotter sketchbooks. I'd never used one before so I made a sketch of a old coach from the 1950s with ink and then added watercolour. Here it is

I like his one so much that I carefully took it out of the book, framed it, and used it as my contribution to a local exhibition. Well, I was inspired to do another coach of a similar vintage this morning. 

Really and truly I needed to give the paper longer time to smoothen itself out before photographing it. Still, it's not too shabby, especially considering that this is painted on sketchbook paper, not paper specifically made to take watercolour. This is in my Seawhite of Brighton Portrait A4 sketchbook, ad the paper is 140gsm. It's nice to have some colour work in my sketchbook as the vast majority I make are left in monochrome. 

London Monopoly Challenge Mayfair

 

Mayfair unlike all the other colour properties is not a street. It’s an area, a rough quadrilateral – local resident, the Regency wit Sydney Smith called it a parallelogram. It’s bordered by Park Lane, Oxford Street, Regent Street and Piccadilly. Which, to add insult to injury, are all themselves locations on the London board. I can’t help holding this against Mayfair. I can’t help making an anthropomorphic comparison. To me, if Mayfair is a person, then it’s a spoilt toff, who has everything handed to him on a plate, who wouldn’t last five minutes in a dust up with Whitechapel or the Old Kent Road.

Coming back to reality for a minute or two, then, Mayfair takes its name from a fair held in the area during the month of, well, May. The fair predated the development of the area, first taking place during the reign of Edward I. The fair lasted until 1764, specifically in the part of Mayfair that is now called Shepherd Market – you can see the street sign on the sketch which is based on a scene from the fifties, judging by the clothes.
As tended to be the case with other London fairs, the May Fair became known for its increasing seediness, but the area took a remarkable turn upmarket when the land on which it was held was obtained by the Grosvenor family. The family would acquire the title of the Dukes of Westminster, a title that is still in the family. They developed the land, building the elegant Hanover Square, Grosvenor Square and Berkely Square. I’ve never heard a nightingale singing there, but since I only walked through it at midday once that’s not surprising.
Mayfair has not lost its exclusivity since its development following the demise of the May Fair. The nature has changed, though. Prior to the 20^th century it was a London home to many aristocrats, but now there are more commercial headquarters and national embassies – notably the American embassy on Grosvenor Square.
I can’t help wondering whether Victor and Marge were swayed in their decision to make Mayfair the most exclusive property on the whole board by the presence of some very famous hotels. Brown’s hotel between Albemarle and Dover Street is supposed to be one of the oldest in London. A.G. Bell made the first telephone call in the UK there, and Rudyard Kipling wrote at least part of the Jungle Book there. Even more famous is Claridges on Brook Street. During he Second World War it was said that only Claridges was good enough for exiled European Royalty.
Despite my chip on the shoulder about Mayfair, I have to admit that it is a highly diverting part of London to walk around. It’s squares are beautiful, the area is not short on sculpture – I like Hares by Sophie Snyder in Berkely Square and there’s even a couple of museums – one to Michael Faraday, and another in Brook Street dedicated to residents Handel and Jimi Hendricks. What a musical collaboration that might have been. 

London Monopoly Challenge Park Lane

Park Lane. I don’t know if you’ve ever see the very famous Frost Report Sketch, featuring John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, where the three of them stand in a line, and bowler hatted John Cleese says of Barker ‘I look down on him because I am upperclass.” Barker then looks a Cleese, then down on Corbett saying “I look up to him, but I look down on him. I am middle class.” Ronnie Corbett then adds “I know my place.” Well, to me Park Lane is like the Ronnie Barker character, ad I don’t know whether I should look up to it because its in the most expensive set on the board or look down on it because it is so clearly a second best to Mayfair. Not a heroic Scott of the Antarctic second, nor a Buzz Aldrin second, either. Park Lane never has a helpful Chance or Community Chest telling players to go to Park Lane. Park Lane’s rent with a hotel might well be £1500, but that’s still a whopping £500 less than Mayfair. And Mayfair’s not even a street – it’s an area!

Park Lane runs from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner, and this is where the name derives from. Before this it was called Tyburn Lane. The Tyburn is one of London’s underground river, but as we saw when we visited Oxford Street, Tyburn became synonymous with public executions. I can’t help wondering if it’s the name of Park Lane that decided Victor Watson and his faithful secretary Marjorie to put Park Lane exactly where it is on the board. For where they put Park Lane on the London board there is Park Place on the original Atlantic City Board. It must have seemed like a bit of a know brainer, especially considering that when they were out scouting Park Lane was already one of the most prestigious locations in London. The fact that it was home to the very swish newly built Dorchester Hotel can only have added to the attraction.

Both of the properties in the purple set have had their names used for cigarette brands. While we’re on the subject of Park Lane trivia, being part of London’s inner ring road, along with Pentonville Road Park Lane marks a boundary of London’s inner city congestion charge zone. Since the start of the 20^th century Park Lane has had a rather uncomfortable relationship with motorised traffic. It officially reached saturation point in 1950s, so work was carried out to widen the road between 1960 – 63 so hat has 3 lanes each way separated by a central reservation. This time also saw the building of the largest underground car park in London, underneath Park Lane and Hyde Park. I remember my father in the early 70s thinking about parking there and taking us to see the Christmas lights, seeing how much the car park cost, changing his mind and driving us all home again. Well, as he informed us, it was the thought that counts.

Park Lane saw its ties with the worldwide game of Monopoly when the Park Lane Hotel hosted the 1988 world Monopoly Championships. Bearing in mind how long a game can take I wonder if it was finished in time for the 1989 championships. In the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Adventure of the Empty House” the house in question is located in Park Lane. Now that’s one achievement where Park Lane did come first. Mayfair has not held one yet!

London Monopoly Challenge Liverpool St. Station

Here’s a question for you to think about. In 1935, when Victor ad Marjorie made their scouting visit to London to work out which properties to use, which of the four stations they picked was the busiest? Answer? Liverpool Street. How come? Well, actually, between the two world wars, Liverpool Street was the busiest station in the whole world.

Compared with Kings Cross and Fenchurch Street, Liverpool Street was a relative newcomer, first opening in 1874. If you’re wondering how it could be that the London North Eastern Railway ended up with all of these termini in Central London, well, none of them were actually built for the LNER. The LNER was only 14 years old when Vic and Marge first alighted at King’s Cross – previously the terminus of the Great Northern Railway. Liverpool Street was built as the terminus of the Great Eastern.

In his book, “Britain’s 100 best stations” journalist Sir Simon Jenkins, who served on the board of British Rail throughout the 1980s, described how Liverpool Street came close to being demolished in the 70s. It survived not least because of the energetic defence by the preservation movement, led by Sir John Betjeman, still smarting from the demolition of Euston Station, which led to a public enquiry in 1976 – 7.

Since then the station has been greatly redeveloped but sympathetically so. Every effort has been made to keep the character of the original station and has largely succeeded really well.

Monopoly Challenge Bond Street

Bond Street is now divided between New Bond Street, the northern section and Old Bond Street, the southern section. But it’s still commonly called just Bond Street. Just visually you might wonder why Bond Street, relatively narrow and modest in appearance when compared with the elegance of Regent Street and the wide, eternally crowded bombast of Oxford Street, is actually the ‘boss’ location of the green set. Well, if we boil it down to simple terms there’s a couple of reasons. Firstly, it going as an exclusive shopping street far earlier than the other two. It was built up by Sir Thomas Bond around 1720. History does not reveal if he was ever shaken, or indeed stirred. Prestigious shops were established on Bond Street throughout the 18^th century.

Secondly, Bond Street has managed to maintain this air of exclusivity. So much so that Carl Faberge’s only establishment outside of Russia came to Bond Street in 1910. It closed five years later due to turmoil in Russia caused by the First World War. Bond Street is still home to upmarket jewellers like Asprey and Garrards. It’s also the auction capital of London, being home to both Sotheby’s and Bonham’s.

There’s a sculpture that I really like in Bond Street. It shows what looks like a bench with two old codgers chewing the fat on it. It’s called Allies, and the two old codgers are actually FDR and Winston Churchill. It was erected in 1995 by the Bond Street Association to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. 

Which Materials - More Travel Journals.

I mentioned that I’ve been taking a closer look at the materials I’ve accrued in the last few years, and I’ve come upon two more entries in the Travel Sketchbook Stakes. One of them is still available and one of them isn’t. Let’s begin with the one that isn’t.

If you live in the UK you might remember a specialist stationery and office supplies retail chain called Paperchase. The first book I’m going to write about was a Paperchase own brand book. On the left is a large Moleskine for comparison. Paperchase went into administration in January of 2023 at which time the UK’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco, bought the Paperchase brand. They no longer make this particular product.

On first sight it looks rather appealing. It’s slightly larger than the Moleskine. It doesn’t say but I shouldn’t be surprised if this is a true A5. The cover is vinyl, and very flexible. If used as a travel journal I don’t really know how hardwearing it would prove. It lacks the elastic and the document wallet you’d normally expect in a travel journal and is quite a bit thicker than the Moleskine. This despite the fact that the paper inside is a lot, lot lighter. It doesn’t say how many pages there are and I lost count, but if this fitted your requirements as a travel journal the it would keep you going for a long time. If.

It’s an own brand product. Retail outlets love you to buy own brand products because they take a much larger slice of the profit. However, you as a consumer are only likely to buy an own brand product because it’s significantly cheaper than a branded product. But it can mean that the lower price has been achieved by sacrificing quality and bearing in mind the number of pages in his one I was afraid that this would be the case with the Paperchase journal.

On the positive side it’s okay for making ink sketches as you can see from the sketch of Lisbon’s Torre de Belem. The issues came with a vengeance when I applied watercolour to the sketch. On a positive note smaller areas of intense colour came across okay. But on a larger area where wet has been applied on wet, like the sky, the colour really is insipid. As you’d expect with such light paper the buckling is very obvious. But even worse than the buckling is the way that the colours have leaked through not just onto the other side of the page, but then through onto the sheet underneath. This was given to me, so I don’t know how much it cost. But I’m afraid I would be very much a last resort if I was on a sketching expedition.

Well after that It’s a pleasure to be able to get onto an own brand which is considerably better. This is the Amazon Basics Landscape Hard cover Sketchbook. It’s landscape format, but other than that it’s clearly following the tried and tested Moleskine format, as you can see in the photograph. The Amazon Basics is on the left. There’s the obligatory elastic and bookmark, and also a document wallet on the inside of the back cover. Now, unlike

Paperchase, Amazon have been smart enough to find other ways to achieve a bargain price than by compromising on quality. The Moleskine gives you 104
sides of 165 smooth gsm paper. The Amazon Basics gives you 72 sides of 200 gsm paper, which has a more textured surface than the Moleskine pages. I made the sketch of the trams and there was no ink showthrough whatsoever. I made this sketch with the book open on my lap and found it very pleasant to use. So I applied watercolour and this was the result.

To my mind the quality and vibrancy of the colours is at least as good as the Moleskine. And, looking at the other side of the page, there’s hardly any buckling (less than the Moleskine) and no showthrough. You can paint on the other side of the page, I’m sure.So, as I said, there’s only about 2/3 the number of pages that you get in the Moleskine. That’s true. Today on Amazon the cheapest large Moleskine travel journal costs £14.97. This Amazon Basics journal costs £4.42. So you can buy three of them for £13.26 – which gives you twice as many pages as one Moleskine AND saves you over a pound for your trouble. I was so delighted with this product that I wet straight back to Amazon and left a glowing review. The best budget travel sketchbook I’ve found yet.

I noticed that Amazon Basics also offer a portrait hardback plain notebook. I’m not tempted to try this for a couple of reasons. Firstly it’s two pounds more expensive than this landscape book, and secondly because it contains 20 pages. The paper must be a hell of a lot thinner than in the landscape book and in fact a lot of the reviews say as much. Shame, but it’s a no from me, Simon.

Which Materials - Hardbound A4 Sketchbooks

 

When I began sketching and painting almost a decade ago I soon learnt that you’re less likely to get decent result with watercolour if you don’t use heavy enough watercolour paper. You can’t use any old paper, in a way that I could with fineliner. I would buy a cheap pad like this. They’re not expensive full price – and at the time I could find them on discount in various places. The paper is a little smooth, but at 170 gsm it has a pleasing weight to it. You can make perfectly good sketches on it and if you're careful it will give you decent results with watercolour on top.

I also used these Daler Rowney red and yellow books. I gave myself a challenge a few years ago to make sketches of all London Underground stations and this was one of the first of several

different books I used, and it performed perfectly well for what I wanted. So did the Easynote. The Daler Rowney is only 150 gsm and only has 25 pages compared with the 40 pages of the Easynote, so for me that’s the best option I’ve used at all in the last few years of this sort of sketchpad. I'd call it a budget option, but bearing in mind the number of pages in both, they're really not that great value. If you take the Daler Rowey for example, today this pad retails for slightly more on Amazon than a Seawhite 140 gsm that has more than four times the number of pages in it. You can make fine ink sketches in a read and yellow pad, but not noticeably better than the results you ca get in the Easynote, or the hardbound Seawhite. So, as I've often said, you live and learn.

Which brings me to hardback A4 sketchbooks. Although I had been given quite a few over the years I had never used one until Christmas Day 2023. The same daughter who had bought me the Moleskine travel sketching journal bought me this hardback sketch book. It’s landscape format, which I was a bit dubious about but which I’ve really enjoyed using. The brand is Mont Marte, which is not a brand I’ve encountered before. They are an

Australian based company. The book has fifty leaves, giving you 100 pages. The covers are embossed with a crocodile skin effect which make them pleasing to the touch. The paper is 150 gsm, with quite a rough texture. I wouldn’t use a fineliner that is any thicker than 0.3mm on it for anything other than shading, but all in all, I made a couple of sketches in it and found that I really enjoyed using it. So much so that I really didn’t want to make any substandard sketches in it. Which has come to affect the amount of time and care I am spending on my sketchwork and that’s certainly not a bad thing.

With fineliners you do sometimes get a bit of showthrough which makes me wary of using both sides of the paper. I used watercolour washes on this picture of Hammersmith Bridge and I do like the way that the colour comes through, even though the cheap generic fineliner brand I was using proved to be far less waterproof than I had thought. However, if you do apply watercolour then you really cannot use the other side of the page. There’s relatively little buckling which is all to the good.

When I finished the Mont Marte book towards the end of March I bought myself a Seawhite of Brighton hardback A4 sketchbook - which I mentioned earlier. I’ve been reading reviews and watching reviews on Youtube most of which are really positive. It’s a British company and the sketchbooks are manufactured in the UK. These are all positives.

The sketchbook has 46 leaves making 92 pages. I would say that the paper has a slightly smoother texture than the Mont Marte book. The weight is

140 gsm, and this is a bit of an issue. I use fineliner for the most part and even using fineliner with a nib as thin as 0.1mm you do often get show through. Not always but often enough.

I made a couple of sketches in it using coloured Staedtler 0.3mm fineliners, and the show through on these was more pronounced than in the mont marte book. That 10 lower gsm seems to make all the difference.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised when I applied a bit of watercolour to a sketch in the Seawhite book. I made sure that I used a waterproof fineliner this time and my initial thoughts are that based on one picture from each book, the Seawhite holds colours better than the Mont Marte, comparable to the Moleskine, I’d say. It’s buckled a little more than the Moleskine, but not as much as I worried that it would. After all, this is not specifically a watercolour book.

On a positive note, this is just as sturdy and hardwearing as the Mont Marte, and Seawhite products are more widely available in the UK than the Australian brand. Show through aside I’ve really enjoyed sketching in the book, and some of the sketches which make a strong contrast between dark and light have come out very effectively.

As I said at the start, I’ve completed the Monopoly Challenge and sold some prints recently so I went out to reward myself with a new sketchbook. I started out in Hobbycraft in Swansea. Hobbycraft are a UK arts and crafts superstore chain, which began in 1995. Speak as you find – Hobbycraft in Swansea has a nice atmosphere but I find it’s a little slapdash. I’ll give you an example of this. The drawing and painting supplies used to be on the first floor. Then they moved it downstairs. But they couldn’t be bothered to change the signage. My arthritic hips did not thank them for the wasted trip up and downstairs on my previous visit. I looked in again, but the only hardbacked A4 sketchbook which fitted what I wanted was the Seawhite one, and I did think that the price was a little steep. Since then I’ve checked online and you can definitely save money on it if you shop around. So I decided to see what was available in The Range and come back for the Seawhite if necessary.

The Range is another UK chain, although not a specialist Art and Craft chain like Hobbycraft. I’ve always felt that they have a good range, should you pardon the pun. In The Range I found this Winsor and Newton hard bound A4 portrait sketchbook, quite a bit cheaper than the price Hobbycraft were asking for the Seawhite equivalent. I think that it can be dangerous to automatically assume that a brand name is an absolute guarantee of quality, but Winsor and Newton is a name which leads me to expectations. I always carry a Winsor and Newton pocket sketchers Cotman set as part of my essential sketching gear and I’ve never had cause to regret it. My first travel watercolour set was a WH Smith own brand set and there’s no

comparison between the two in the quality of colour you get. So yes, I expect a lot from this sketchbook.

Now, what I’m going to say is very much a first impression, since I’ve just made the 2 sketches thus far. Bearing that in mind then, the book has 50 leaves which make 100 pages, which is a little more than the Seawhite book. The paper is 170gsm, which is heavier even than my Moleskine travel journal.

First impressions are that the 170gsm paper of this book takes fineliner better than the other two. Using a 0.05mm fineliner produced noticeably finer lines in this sketchbook than in the other two. This makes the marks just a little bit sharper. I wouldn’t say that there’s a huge amount in it, but it’s there. Also, in the first sketch in the book there isn’t even a hint of showthrough – but then this was also true of some of the pages in both of the others, so I’ll keep an eye on how consistent this is. To my eye the same watercolour set is brighter and more vibrant on this paper, and there’s noticeably less buckling. You could comfortably sketch on the other side of the paper, and I shouldn’t be surprised if you could pain on it as well.

One feature I’ve noticed is that the pages are perforated so you have the option of removing them more easily from the book, should you choose to do so.

So, would I recommend any of them? Yes, definitely, I’ve enjoyed using all three. With each one I have found myself looking forward to drawing in it.

I would say that if I wanted a sketchbook and I found all three for the same price, I would opt for the Winsor and Newton. There’s really nothing much to choose between the Mont Marte and the Seawhite and I would have no problem with using either brand in the future.

Funnily enough I do have another entrant in the hardback A4 sketchbook stakes. This is the WH Smiths Globetrotter A4 portrait leather hardbacked sketchbook. This is a line that has been discontinued and that is why I have so many of them – 8 in total. They were originally £7.99. . . but being as they were being discontinued they were being flogged off for a fraction of that price. My wife saw them and stocked up. So, sorry, but if you like the look of this product, well, you’re very unlikely to find it anywhere. Now, this was a few years ago now, and I hadn’t used one of them yet. Partly this is because I wasn’t using any hardbound A4 sketchbook. But having embarked on this series of comparisons it has had the effect of making

me look at my stockpile of materials and try them out.

the name, ‘Globetrotter’ shows that this product was aimed at the travel journal market, as if you couldn’t tell, and what you have here is an attempt to scale up the popular Moleskine format. So although this is A4 and slightly more than twice the size of the large Moleskine, it has the elastic strap keeping it closed, the integral ribbon bookmark, and he document pocket at the back. The covers are hardback, but covered in faux leather vinyl. Now, your Moleskine give you 104 surfaces of smooth, sturdy 165 gsm paper. The Globetrotter gives you , I made it, 97 pages, or 194 surfaces. This paper too is smooth, like a Moleskine. Sturdy though? Well that’s a different matter. The paper feels very thin. It doesn’t say how heavy it is, but I’d be surprised if it was even 120 gsm. After all, how else are you going to squeeze so many sheets into it?

The sketch above shows that you can actually make a pretty nice detailed ink sketch on it. I used a uniball 0.1mm fineliner because I know that this is waterproof and will take watercolour. Maybe this is why there was no showthrough with the ink. I used the same colours that I used in the other painted sketches in this post and here’s what the finished picture looks like.

I have to say that I’m very pleasantly surprised with the results. As I said, I’ve never used this book before, but I will again. You could make an ink drawing on the other side of the page, although I think painting on both sides would be asking for trouble.

Which materials? 2) Travel/pocket watercolour sets

Yesterday I posted about the different travel sketchbooks that I’ve used over the last 8 years. Today I’d like to look at the subject of travel watercolour paint sets.

If you read that post, you’ll know that even though I haven’t used specifically watercolour sketchbooks the Moleskine and Seawhite books that I favour will take watercolour pretty well, and although the majority of sketches that I make while abroad are plain ink, it’s nice to know that I have the option of colour if I want. Even a dauber with no great watercolour skill like myself can enhance sketches by adding colour.

So, why specifically a travel paint set? Why not just use an ordinary set? Well, sketching on the move is easier the less equipment that you carry. If you take the full watercolour set that you use at home, you’re not only going to have the set, but also brushes and other paraphernalia. Will you be able to use it balancing it on your knee, or while you’re standing up? How is your set going to cope in your bag, especially if you’ve just been using it?

So, in the last 8 years I have bought three different pocket travel paint sets. If you look at the photo you’ll see all three. My first is the set at the top of the photo. This was an own brand set by British retailer WH Smith. Soon afterwards I bought the middle set – this is in the Winsor and Newton Cotman Range. Then just yesterday I bought the bottom set – Daler Rowney Aquafine.

Now, I know from experience what I think about the first two, but I’d never used Daler Rowney paints before. So, I came up with an idea – I would take three pages from my Seawhite book I tried yesterday, because this seems to take watercolour well. I would draw pretty much the same scene in ink on each page. Then I would paint one page with each of the three sets to compare. The photograph shows the

scene on each of the pages. Every year in the UK our sovereign has two birthdays. One is their real birthday, commemorating the day they were born. This is a private affair. Then they have their official birthday. I kid you not. The official birthday is usually celebrated in June as the chances are that there will be better weather for celebrations. As it happens, despite his real birthday being in November, King Charles III’s official birthday this year falls upon the Fifteenth of June – incidentally my real birthday. I can’t afford to have an official one as well. The main ceremony on the official birthday is the Trooping of the Colour, where members of the guards regiments put on their finery and parade. Very colourful it is too. So this is what I chose to depict, thinking it should give me an opportunity to use a range of different colours from each and compare the results. I made the trial as fair as I could by using the same paper for each and he same subject matter as close to the same picture as I could draw it. For the record, each set comes with its own brush and I only used the brush provided with each set.

So, let’s begin with WH Smith’s own brand travel set. This is still available and is listed on WH Smith’s own website as retailing at £10, which is the bottom/middle end of the market. Yes you can get sets this size that are cheaper but most of these are specifically marketed for kids, and so there would be a question mark in my mind about the quality.

So, the set is bigger than the other two but still would fit easily within a coat pocket. As you can see, it has 12 colours – white, yellow, red, crimson, orange, 2 blues, 2 browns, 2 greens and black. It’s a sensible range and you can mix any other colours you want. The brush is okay for a travel brush.

Now, if I tell you that my set is already 8 years old, the something might strike you. It really hasn’t been used much. There must be a reason for that. Well, there is. I find the colours rather insipid. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that this particular sketch came out as well as it did. That red is a lot more vibrant than I expected. However if you look at the pink of the street, and the blue of the sky you’ll maybe get an idea of what I mean. Compare this with what I produce using the Winsor and Newton set.

Let’s have a look at the set first. Yes, this one has been used. If I tell you that this is my second Winsor and Newton Cotman travel set that might give you an idea how much I like this brand. It’s currently retailing on special offer on Amazon at £15. If you are prepared to shop around you can even get it a little bit cheaper

sometimes. Hobbycraft are currently asking £20. That’s Hobbycraft for you. It’s the smallest travel set I have, which makes it easy to use anywhere Now, you might well have noticed one of the strange features of this set. There’s no black. There’s everything else you need, but there’s no black. You may well have been told that you shouldn’t use black in watercolours anyway, so this must be deliberate on Winsor and Newton’s part. To be fair it does have the effect of making you think about how you are going to render the places where you would have used black. 

I make no bones about it, I think Winsor and Newton are a quality brand and I like sketching with this set. Yes, I made the sky a bit blue for some people’s liking, but it serves as a demonstration of what you can do with this set that you can’t with the WH Smiths. It’s a small thing, but the travel brush in this set was my favourite of the three as well – just that bit finer than the other two. As regards the black, well the paints are all standard half pans, so if it bothered me that much I could buy a standard half pan ivory black and put it in place of a colour I used less. Haven’t needed to yet.

As I said earlier I bought the Daler Rowney Aquafine travel set yesterday and this is the first sketch I’ve made with them. I paid just under £10 for them which is about as cheap as you can get them by shopping around. This is the same price as the WH Smith set, but Daler Rowney are specifically an art supplies company. I’m not sure that their name carries quite the same cachet as Winsor and Newton but whenever I’ve used their products in the past they have been of good quality in my opinion. The photograph shows the set after I made the painting. It’s slightly bigger than the Winsor and Newton but not significantly so. I was slightly disappointed when I first saw the range of colours. 

There is a black, but only one shade of green and only darker blues. Mixing colours can be awkward when you’re sketching outdoors and chances are you’re going to be doing a bit of foliage, necessitating different shades of green so that’s a drawback. I don’t find that these paints mix quite so well as the Winsor and Newton paints do, which is why I couldn’t get such a bright blue for the sky. But on the positive side, to my mind this set is clearly better to use than the WH Smith set which cost the same. (Actually, I think it cost the same - £10 – when I bought it in 2016.) With this set I came closest to the proper colour of the roadway and I think the red of the uniforms is every bit as good as W&N, if not slightly more vibrant. But the W&N set is so consistent – the colours all work together so well in a way that they don’t quite do in the DR set. Still, I have to say that bearing in mind the relative cost I am rather impressed with DR. With a little practice with it I reckon I could probably get results which are even closer to W&N.

So, here’s the three sketches for comparison–

You know looking at it I think there’s even less to choose between W&N and DR than I thought. Still just about prefer Winsor and Newton, but I’d be happy to use DR as well in the future. WH Smith, not so much.