2 Journals on the go

You know all about the sketchbook challenge so I won’t go through all the details again. I’m ploughing on through my Leuchtturm 1917 A5 journal, and with one day of this third week left to go I’ve already made 20 drawings in it this week. Happy days.

Now it occurred to me during the week that I’ll finish this journal in early March. Then I’ve a Nassau journal to use, but then I’ll either have to go back to Moleskine or start to use up the own brand books I’ve bought. Well, this gives me a problem. The thing about the own brand books is not just that they pretty much seem to have inferior paper in them, but that there’s so many pages in them. Let’s take the Crawford and Black (The Works own brand) I bought in November. Now, I stick with almost everything I said in my review. The paper really is not good. However, what I got wrong was that there were only 80 side of paper in it. No, there’s 80 pages and each page has 2 sides, so that’s a whopping 160. I don’t think it’s good value though because of the paper, but I must conceded that just in terms of cost the price per page is pretty good.

Now, at 160 pages it’s going to take more than 50 days to fill it even making three sketches a day. So I came up with this idea. While I’m making 3 sketches a day in the Leuchtturm and then the Nassau, I am also going to try to make one sketch a day in the Crawford and Black. By the time I’ve finished the Nassau I reckon I’ll have also made about 40 Crawford and Balck sketches and that will bring the total left down to manageable proportions. Here’s 4 sketches I’ve made in the last few days in the Leuchtturm and 4 I’ve made in the Crawford and Black. Can you tell the difference?

1) 

2)

3

4)

5) 

6)

7

8

So there you go. 8 pictures I've drawn recently but can you tell which were drawn in the £6 sketchbook and which were drawn in the £20+ sketching journal? Well, numbers 1,2 5 and 8 were all made in the £6 Crawford and Black and 3,4,6 and 7 were all drawn in the much more expensive Leuchtturm. You might have been able to tell because three of them were drawn in brown fine liner and it's very hard to use coloured fine liner in the Crawford and Black, because it shows through so badly on the other side of the page. You can see this in picture 1, where the dots of coloured fine liner from the drawing on the other side of the page show through badly.

For all that, though, I guess you can't see much of the difference between the books from these scans. My God, but you can feel it when they use them though. The C and B is just nowhere near as pleasurable a surface to draw on as the Leuchtturm 1917. Which seems pretty much a given considering that the Leuchtturm 1917 is more than 3 times the price. 

Well, my plan is to soldier on making one sketch a day in the C and B, then finish it after I've filled the Nassau.