Other than Sketching Journals, what materials do I use and what would I recommend?
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
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.
Okay. Now, or my 60th birthday back in mid-June I was given lots of lovely drawing stuff, including this – A Daler Rowney Ebony Special Edition Sketchbook. I believe that the special thing about this is the Union flag cover. Nothing against that either. I’ve been a while getting on to using it because I preferred to use a landscape format book for my bridges and tunnels challenge. But when I made my sketch of the Woolwich Ferry on Saturday that finished off my second Mont Marte sketchbook, and so it made sense to do the Thames Barrier sketch in the Daler Rowney.
Okay, my first impressions were very positive. The paper is smoother than the Seawhite book, and much smoother than the Mont Marte, and comparable to the Winsor and Newton. It’s a pleasurable surface to draw on, although I do know some sketchers prefer just a little more tooth.
The weight of the paper is 150 gsm, the same as the Mont Marte and slightly heavier than the Seawhite. The Winsor and Newton is 170gsm. I can say that as a general sketchbook for drawing, this is a nice product I’m happy to use, albeit I still have a slight preference for the Winsor and Newton.
Please feel free to hold your own opinion about the quality of the painting or otherwise. Personally, I’m not unhappy with the way that it turned out considering how despondent I was feeling after the first session. But that isn’t really the point of the post. I made the painting in my Daler-Rowney special edition A4 sketchbook. The pages are 150 gsm and I have to say I am amazed at how well it took the watercolour. I’m talking about the way that it stood up to the watercolour. There’s no discernable cockling or buckling. If anything it did at least as well if not even better than my Winsor and Newton book and that’s 170 gsm. Big tick for D and R from me.
Using today’s prices on Amazon the Seawhite is £8.95, the Winsor and Newton £10.64, the Daler Rowney £12.29. I can’t find the Mont Marte on Amazon. But in all honesty you can find great deals on all of these if you’re prepared to shop around a bit which means that you don’t need to let the price dictate which you go for.
I'll be honest, I've enjoyed using all four of these brands. I'm not including the WH Smiths Globetrotter book because that's no longer available anyway. I don't fid that the Mont Marte quite matches the other three when it comes to applying watercolour, but there's very little to choose between Seawhite, Daler-Rowney and Winsor and Newton. I've had slightly better watercolour results with Seawhite and Daler Rowney than with WN, which is my slight favourite for ink sketching over the Daler Rowey. The Seawhite is very ice to draw on but you ca get a little ghosting. So if I had to choose one casebound all purpose sketchbook this size, I think I'd go for the Daler Rowey. I'd be happy to receive any of the others as a gift too.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Travel / Pocket watercolour paint sets
I haven’t used specifically watercolour sketchbooks but the Amazon Basics, 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 because this seems to take watercolour well and being spiral bound it's eaasy to take the three pages out for comparison with each other.. 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
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. 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. In my experiece once you start paying £10 for a small travel set, then you have the right to expect a decent quality. If you pay much less, then don't complain if the quality isn't there.
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, then 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.
Bu 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 maybe even get it a little bit cheaper than that. Be careful though because you can also end up paying a lot more too, sometimes. Hobbycraft are currently asking £20. That’s Hobbycraft for you. Hobbycrat are a UK Art and Craft retail chain, who have a better and wider range than most, but whose prices are on the more expensive side. 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 recently and this is the first sketch I 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.
Best Overall - Winsor and Newton/ Daler Rowney. * I would rather use the Winsor and Newton, but I happily use the DR set too. In terms of cost the W&N is half as much again as the DR. For this reason I can't choose between them.
No comments:
Post a Comment