Crafted By Colette

I don’t have enough sketchbooks. Well… I don’t have enough different types of sketchbooks. I don’t really have any hardback ones. And after seeing seven million Illo sketchbooks on YouTube – that are super expensive and practically impossible to buy in the UK – I had a craving for a square sketchbook.

So I got Little Red. Little Red is just 12 x 12cm and has nice thick paper.

I filled the first page with one of my little monsters – just a pencil sketch. I draw a LOT of monsters in this shape. It’s the go to thing I draw when testing new pens or paper. I’m considering making it an official species – but that’s a whole other blog.

After that I wanted to test the claim on the back of the label that said Little Red was suitable for watercolour. For one of the Twitter challenges I join in with, I needed to do a little piggy. First up was some ballpoint pen sketches from Pinterest images.

Followed by a pencil sketch of a nice round cute piggy. Which I then coloured with watercolours. The paper worked well – the colouring looks dodgy because I borked it up. I’m still learning with watercolours – there’s a lot of blog posts about that in the pipeline.

The sketchbook held up well though. I mean, it buckled. But that wasn’t surprising.

Then, when I did an online order from The Works (one of my favourite stores here in the UK), I got another sketchbook. Big White.

Technically Big White is not a sketchbook. Technically it’s a notebook. The paper is white and smooth though, and I really like how markers work on it.

I’ve had one of these books before. It’s essentially the same as the All Who Wander Are Not Lost notebook I used for one of my art journals way back in May 2018. But this one comes with a customisable cover.

I sketched out a unicorn, because unicorns. I tested alcohol markers on the inside cover a little bit and it seemed to work fine.

I was wrong.

I tested some other brands, but they weren’t any better.

Thankfully using an eraser helped remove most of it, so I could try again. I tried watercolours – I’ve done some watercolour pieces on smooth paper before.

Nope. Coloured pencil?

Well, ish. So I gave in and did the whole thing in pencils. It didn’t look too bad in the end, even if it was a little disappointing.

For a minute a least…