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.