Watercolour in Daler-Rowney Sketchbook

This is a post that combines two of my more recent subjects for posts in one. You have to admire that kind of economy, don’t you? My last post was about having made my first pictures outside of the UK and Europe. Well, continuing in the same vein last week I painted a scene from the New York subway – the 1 Train (Line 1) in uptown Manhattan above ground. Here it is if you don’t believe me.

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.

Which Travel Sketchbook? Supplementary

To paraphrase Tina Turner, I don’t need another sketchbook. I mean, I always like getting a new sketchbook, but I don’t actually need one. Especially a travel journal sketchbook. By my reckoning I have an unfinished Moleskine, two unopened Moleskines, and an Amazon Basics that I have only made 1 picture in so far, not to mention a couple of cheap n’ nasty own brand books. Well, here’s the first thing. A couple of days ago I had a letter from the Inland Revenue promising to give me back some of my tax money. My first thought was to spend it all before they ask for it back. However it pays to be a little cautious with this sort of thing. The other thing is that I have a mega sketching trip booked for August, in celebration of my retirement and my 60^th, to New York and Dublin. With the best will in the world I want something that will give me my best results.

Now you may remember that in a previous post I mentioned that when I was looking at online and video reviews I kept finding reviews that compared the large Moleskine travel journal with the Seawhite Classic A5 travel journal, the majority of which reviews saw the Seawhite coming off better. You can see where I’m going with this I think.  

So I ordered off Amazon on Thursday, with the promise of free delivery with Amazon Prime yesterday. Then I got an email late in the day saying that there had been a delay and I wouldn’t get it until Monday. So of course it arrived today. I don’t think you can complain too much about the delay and anyway this post is not comparing delivery processes. I think I probably waited for at least 30 seconds before I started opening the package. At first glance the unopened Seawhite journal looks very like one of the unopened Moleskine journals I mentioned earlier. Notice the positioning of the

open book logo on both. To be fair, though, the dimensions of the Seawhite are just a little bigger than the Moleskine as the Seawhite is a true A5.

Once opened there are other similarities and differences. Both are elastic bound – the Seawhite’s elastic feels tighter. Both have folding document wallets at the back and both have silken ribbon pagemarkers. That’s also true of the landscape Amazon basics book too.

The cover of the Seawhite is just a wee bit more glossy than the Moleskine. I prefer the Moleskine covers, but in all honesty there’s not a great deal in it and others may prefer the Seawhite.

Right let’s get down to the tale of the tape. Priced today on Amazon, the three contenders are:-

The Amazon Basics travel sketchbook (landscape 13 by 21cm) gives you 72 sides of 200gsm paper for £4.42. That’s 6.13p a page.

The Moleskine large travel sketchbook (portrait 13x21cm)gives you 104 sides of 165 gsm paper for £19.50 on Amazon. That’s 18.7p a page.

The Seawhite Classic portrait A5 travel sketchbook gives you a massive 128 sides of 130 gsm paper for £9.99. That’s 7.8p. a page.

Now, I’ve used Moleskine books on all of my sketching expeditions for the last four or five years. I like using Moleskine and I like the results I get. By very careful shopping around you might just be lucky and get the lage travel sketchbook for as little as £15 – or just over 14p a page. So when I compare books, what I have to ask myself is – is a Moleskine sketchbook twice as good as the Seawhite?

Here's an ink sketch I made in Denmark in the Moleskine notebook (above) compared with my first sketch in the Seawhite(below). The paper in the Seawhite is a purer white while the Moleskine has at least a hint of ivory about it. Looking at both I wouldn’t say that there’s a huge difference in quality between the two. Maybe because the paper of the Seawhite is a brighter white I would say that the darker shading tends to zing a little more in it, and this is something I also found in my A4 Seawhite book. I only have this sketch to go on, but there was absolutely no ink showing through on the other side of the page and this surprised me a bit since it’s an issue I’ve had with some sketches in the A4 book. I really enjoyed ink sketching in the Seawhite book. The paper in the Moleskine is very smooth while the Seawhite is a little more textured, and I like the very slight resistance to the pen that you get.

So this encouraged me to add some watercolour. Received wisdom tells you ever to add watercolour to any paper less than 130 gsm. My Seawhite A4 sketchbook has 140 gsm paper and takes watercolour well with some buckling, so I was hopeful. Here’s the result. Now, I like this. It’s taken the watercolour quite well. The colours are relatively bright (considering the subject matter). But how on Earth have Seawhite managed to get 130 gsm paper to behave like this under watercolour?! This is not camera trickery – there is very little buckling, and I could happily use the other side of the page for another watercolour sketch. Compare this with Moleskine. You can see the buckling on the edge of the Moleskine. Also the colours seem just a little more muted in

the Moleskine. So, granted, I have only made the one picture so far, but I don’t think it would be easy to argue that the Moleskine is twice as good as the Seawhite. I fact I think that I can understand why people seem to prefer the Seawhite.

Let’s have a look at the way that the Seawhite compares with the Amazon Basics travel sketchbook. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yes the colours look brighter in the Amazon. It’s early days with both. While I liked ink drawing in the Amazon book I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did in the Seawhite. I’ve only made one picture so far in both books so it’s maybe a little early to draw definitive conclusions. Still, I have to say the Amazon book hasn’t suffered in comparison with the other two at all. Both the Amazon Basics and the Seawhite classic travel sketchbooks so far seem like very serious contenders to be carried across the Atlantic in the Clark backpack this summer.

Comparison

Well, yes, it did strike me that if I make another bus painting, this time in my Winsor and Newton book, then we can make a comparison of sorts. So, contestant number 1 - 

This rather nice A4 ink and watercolour sketch shows a scene from c 1956. It was made in a WH Smith Globetrotter notebook. This is a discontinued line, and the paper in the book is surprisingly thin. I've bee told not to even bother trying to use watercolour on anything lighter than 130gsm. I don't know the weight of the paper in this book, but if it's 130gsm it's certainly no heavier. But I do like the way that the paper has taken these colours, and the buckling is not so bad as to prevent me from framing it and putting it in a local exhibition. 

So, having got this result from using a really light paper, what could I get from a more expensive book? Let's see our second contestant then.

This is the same sketch that I posted this morning, but it's a new photograph of it a few hours later, after the paper has had a chance to dry thoroughly. It's not as easy to compare as it could be bearing in mind that the two pictures use a different rage of colours largely. Still, I really enjoyed taking up so much of the page with the coach itself. The sketchbook here is my A4 portrait Seawhite of Brighton, with 140 gsm paper. This is still very much on the light side for applying watercolour, but once the page had time to dry out properly the amount of buckling reduced significantly. My gut feeling is that the colour is just a little subdued compared with the first sketch - but then on he other hand I don't think that I used the same set of paints. 

Let's have a look at our third and last contestant for this post - 

This was painted with the same set of paints as the previous one. This is in my Winsor and Newton portrait A4 170 gsm sketchbook. The blue works as well as the same blue in the previous sketch, maybe even a little better. The sky is a little anaemic for my liking. but the bus itself is pretty good. I wish I'd done a single seater coach rather than a double decker bus for comparison. . 

But the upshot is that there's no clear winner. I enjoyed making all three pictures and I would use any of these sketchbooks for the next one, whatever that might be. 

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.

Which Materials - Hardbound 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 made a couple of sketches in it using coloured Staedtler 0.3mm fineliners, and the show through on these was more pronounced than in the mont marte book. That 10 lower gsm seems to make all the difference.

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.

Which materials? 2) Travel/pocket watercolour sets

Yesterday I posted about the different travel sketchbooks that I’ve used over the last 8 years. Today I’d like to look at the subject of travel watercolour paint sets.

If you read that post, you’ll know that even though I haven’t used specifically watercolour sketchbooks the 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 I tried yesterday, because this seems to take watercolour well. 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

scene on each of the pages. Every year in the UK our sovereign has two birthdays. One is their real birthday, commemorating the day they were born. This is a private affair. Then they have their official birthday. I kid you not. The official birthday is usually celebrated in June as the chances are that there will be better weather for celebrations. As it happens, despite his real birthday being in November, King Charles III’s official birthday this year falls upon the Fifteenth of June – incidentally my real birthday. I can’t afford to have an official one as well. The main ceremony on the official birthday is the Trooping of the Colour, where members of the guards regiments put on their finery and parade. Very colourful it is too. So this is what I chose to depict, thinking it should give me an opportunity to use a range of different colours from each and compare the results. I made the trial as fair as I could by using the same paper for each and he same subject matter as close to the same picture as I could draw it. For the record, each set comes with its own brush and I only used the brush provided with each set.

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. Yes 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.

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, the 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.

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 even get it a little bit cheaper

sometimes. Hobbycraft are currently asking £20. That’s Hobbycraft for you. 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 yesterday and this is the first sketch I’ve 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.

Which Materials? 1) Travel Sketchbooks

So, a few days ago I completed my self-imposed challenge to draw all of the locations on the London Monopoly board (allowing me to use a few earlier sketches which are of the required quality. ) As a reward for this and for selling some prints on Etsy and gaining a commission for a sketch, I decided to buy myself a new sketchbook. Yes, I still have a few pages in the current one left, but what the hell? And it strikes me that I’ve never yet posted about sketchbooks. So let's rectify that and begin with travel sketchbooks.

I greatly enjoy urban sketching and I have made the best part of 20 city break sketching trips since 2016 so It's important to have a decent travel sketchbook on the go. Over the last few years experience has helped me clarify what I'm looking for from a travel sketching journal. I want something that isn't overly large - small enough to be carried in a large jacket pocket but large enough to allow for quite detailed ink sketching. It must be robust enough for some pretty rough handling, so hard covers are better. As well as taking ink comfortably it's nice if the paper is heavy enough to be able to cope with a little watercolour as well. 

When I first discovered Urban Sketching I just didn’t want to be carrying A4 spiral bound books around, so I started using books like this. It’s Daler Rowney again, this time staple bound soft cover. I did find some packs of these discounted, but generally they’re slightly more expensive than a red and yellow spiral bound sketchpad, which has five pages more. Also the paper in the staple bound book is only 130 gsm. It’s fine for ink, graphite or charcoal sketches but isn’t heavy enough to take a watercolour wash. Also, it’s hard to get a decent scan from an exercise book style pad like this than it is from a spiral bound book.  

As I said, I travel as much as I can around Europe and I’ve made 17 sketching trips since 2016 – and

lost the time we were locked down for covid as well. Ideally I wanted to find a decent sketching journal. Now, when friends and family learned that I was so into my sketching and painting they would often give me materials, and my first real travel sketch journal came to me this way. It’s the one on the left here, while the one on the right is the Moleskine travel sketching journal that has been my journal of choice for the last few years.

The book on the left had a label on it – now gone – which said it was from Wilkinson, a British retailer that is sadly no more. The cover is essentially a soft cover, but with a sort of faux leather vinyl. The vinyl is now coming away from the paper covers which is a shame, however the book has withstood a fair amount of punishment, and all the pages are still secure. I used this book in many places. There are about 100 pages in it, and you could use both sides of each page for ink sketching. That’s pretty good considering the paper doesn’t feel very heavy at all, in fact I’d be surprised if it was more than 130 gsm. As you can see from the photograph above, it does take watercolour, but you could never plan on using the opposite side of the page for anything else. I have tremendous affection for this book, and I did try to obtain more when I was coming close to filling it. Sadly, Wilkinson stopped stocking them and I couldn’t get any. It’s a real shame, because as budget sketching journals go you could have done a lot worse.

For example – there’s this one here. Morrisons is a British supermarket chain. I was in my local Morrisons one day a few years ago when I treated myself to a walk along the stationery aisle. I found this sketching journal, very cheap, and bought it. Now, it’s almost exactly the same size as a Moleskine travel journal, slightly less than A5. Like a Moleskine, there is a document wallet at the back. Here the comparison ends. The covers are card, and don’t seem very hardwearing. As for the paper, well it is very thin and light, lighter than the paper in the Wilco book. So I always used the Wilco book in preference, and by the time I’d finished the wilco book, I had been given my first Moleskine. So all I used this for was making written notes. So when I started writing this post I decided that I would only be fair

to test it by making a sketch. So I made a sketch of my hero, Tom Baker as The Doctor. Well, it proves that you can make ink sketches in it. I didn’t enjoy sketching in it as much as I did in the Wilco, or the Moleskine, and don’t think it brings out the best in a fineliner sketch – if anything it looks more like biro and the image shows quite badly through the thin paper. Well, I will go to great lengths for you when I’m making a post, so I made another sketch in it. This is based on a photo of Piccadilly Circus in the 1950s. The photo underneath it shows you the same picture after watercolour had been applied to it. Now, I have to admit that I am rather surprised about the way that it turned out. The lower part of the sketch, with the car , in act, everything from the rooftops

downwards is a lot more vibrant than I thought it could possibly be on this paper. The sky though is the real telltale. When you’re painting wet on wet on this paper it waffles la lot. In fact the page underneath it does so slightly as well. To be fair it  dried well enough hat I could use the page underneath it the next day. But it is an issue with cheaper sketchbooks like this. If you only wanted to use it for a light medium like graphite I reckon it wouldn’t be too bad. But anything much heavier, including fineliner which is my weapon of choice and you won’t be able to use both sides of the paper. Which means it’s maybe not such great value after all.

My oldest daughter asked me one day in late 2019, a propos of nothing, which was a good make of travel sketching journal to buy. I told her that in my sessions with the South Wales urban sketching group, and in Facebook art groups I belonged to the name that kept coming up was Moleskine. Lo and behold, on Christmas day 2019 she gave me my first Moleskine travel journal.

In terms of quality, it’s quite a cut above the Wilco book. Mind you, it’s a lot more expensive too. Its dimensions are slightly smaller than the Wilco book, but I like this size for travel sketching. This is a hardcover book, and those covers can take a lot of punishment. They give you a nice support if you’re sketching with the book on your knee, for example, or even sketching standing up. There are 104 pages, a bit of an odd number. The paper is pretty smooth and it takes a fineliner well. The paper is 165 gsm, and this is pretty forgiving. I’ve been able to use watercolour on sketches in it, and although there’s a little buckling, it’s nowhere near as much as I got in the Wilco book. It’s so watercolour friendly that you can draw or even paint on the other side of

your painted page without any show through. I know other reviewers who compare Moleskine with a similar product from Seawhite of Brighton, who feel that the Seawhite journal makes watercolours look brighter and more vibrant. Well, I haven’t used a Seawhite travel journal yet, but I’m very happy with the way that my Moleskine book takes colour. One other feature is a handy document wallet attached to the backcover. With this book it’s a case of you get what you pay for. Moleskine sketchbooks ain’t cheap. But in my experience you’re paying for quality rather than just the name.

Coming back to Seawhite, I’ve never had a Seawhite travel journal like this. However, I have had a Seawhite A5 Concertina style sketchbook, that I used on a few trips. It has 70 painting surfaces, and is 150gsm. I liked using this a lot. It took watercolour well, with the colours mainlining their brightness- see above -  and no show through at all. It took a little getting used to but once you’d got the hang of it you could use it just like a normal sketchbook. This is a quality item, the only issue for me being that it does have fewer pages than the Moleskine.

Now, for Christmas 2023, instead of Buying me another Moleskine travel sketchbook, my daughter bought me two books, one of which was this Seawhite of Brighton A5 landscape spiral bound sketchbook. Now, it’s not specifically a travel sketchbook, but there’s no law against using it as one. I haven’t used it yet, but again, in the spirit of investigation, I made a sketch in it for this post. Now, if you’re looking at it you maybe be asking yourself the

same question. Why do they put their label where they put it on their sketchbooks? Because that’s clearly the back of the book, not the front. Well, leaving that aside, I made this sketch of a tram in Rome. I have been to Rome, and seen trams there, but I was 19 and stupid so I never rode on one. There’s no issue with using fineliner in it, but then the paper in it is 160gsm, only five less than Moleskine. The texture is not quite as smooth as the pages in the

Moleskine, but I don’t mind that at all. So here’s the same sketch with watercolour. What do you know – I really like the outcome. There’s hardly any waffling, let alone cockling, and you can definitely use both sides of the page. The covers are very thick, very tough card. This is a pretty impressive piece of kit.

Beauty if in the eye of the beholder. I like to take a black casebound book on a sketching trip, which is the only drawback I see to the Seawhite book – aesthetically it’s not as appealing as the Moleskine books. This does not have elastic to hold it closed, and nor does it have a pouch at the back for documents. So I am encouraged to try out the Seawhite Travel journal in the future, although it is only 130 gsm. But as regards this sketchbook, if you can get over the fact that it’s not a black, portrait hardcover then this is a good budget alternative to the more expensive classic large Moleskine. 

For the record here's my rating of the books I've discussed - the higher the score, the better.

Make	Paper and pages	Sketching	Painting	Durability	Aesthetics	Cost	Total/ 60	Average Score
Wilco Own brand	7	8	6	7	7	9	44	7.3
Morrisons Own brand	5	7	6	5	6	9	38	6.3
Moleskine Large Travel sketchbook	9	9	8	9	9	6	50	8.3
Seawhite Concertina A5	8	9	9	9	8	7	50	8.3
Seawhite Spiral bound own brand A5	8	9	9	8	7	7	48	8