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.