Derwent Academy A5 casebound hardback sketching journal - Completed. Verdict

As I write this it is 14:26 on Sunday 8^th February and I have just finished the last sketch in my Derwent Academy A5 sketchbook. Now, I did make a sketch in it back in August when I bought it, so in the interests of accuracy I must record that I have made 127 sketches to complete it. That’s 3.62 sketches per day on average. It also means that I’ve finished two sketchbooks since the start of the year, and 6 since beginning the sketchbook challenge in July.

So what can we say about the Derwent Academy A5?

Value – Well, mine was incredibly good value because Amazon were selling off their stock and I got it for a remarkable sale price of £4.99. That’s a ppp (price per page) of 3.89p. That’s extremely cheap. However, Amazon have not stocked this item since and on average other stockers ask an average of £9.99. That’s 7.89ppp. It’s okay but not outstanding, and comparable with the Seawhite, which is my favourite ‘jack of all trades’ sketching journal.

Durability – Throughout the 35 days it took to fill the sketchbook it lived in my rucksack, which I use daily, and suffered no noticeable ill effects. This is good because it’s cloth bound rather than vinyl/faux leather. The Canson and the Amazon Basics were also cloth bound, and the Canson showed wear and tear on the edges of the cover, while the Amazon basics covers began bowing outwards.

Paper Quality/ Versatility. The paper is very white, and amongst the smoothest of any paper that I’ve used. It is only 135 gsm which beings its own problems. When you use it for ink sketches you do get a very clear contrast between the marks and the paper background, and because the testure is smoother there’s no real resistance to the pen, which means it seems to skate across the page, and I like this. The sketchbook is clearly labelled as being for dry media and makes no claim to being any good for wet media, and this is just as well. I made a pretty OK watercolour sketch in it, but the paper pilled very badly and the waffling made the other side of the page a very difficult and unpleasant surface to work on. With coloured fineliners the dark blue bled right through the page.

Overall Verdict

I would be tempted to buy another of these and put it to oneside purely for ink, graphite or charcoal sketching, but only if I found it on offer again. For the money I think you’re probably much better off buying the versatile Seawhite journal.

This is one of the better sketches I made in the Derwent Academy and it shows that you can get pretty good results in it using dry media like fineliner.