New year, new sketchbooks

I finally attended my first Sketchcrawl last Saturday. Although I didn't actually see anyone else at the meeting place at 11 a.m. (the lobby kiosk at the Met), I did end up wandering about the museum sketching by myself. I've posted some of my results on the Sketchcrawl Forum; here's one that I did in the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Arms & Armor Court, using a Pentel brush pen, with watercolor added later on, during the train ride back to Stamford. (NB: I would pay good money to see Mayor Mike in a suit of armor...)

Since this was one of the last pages of my Moleskine watercolor notebook, I decided I would try out a couple of alternatives for my next sketchbook: A Fabriano Quadrato Artist's Journal and Hand-Book Journal Co. sketchbook. I'd heard good things about both. Here are some of my test sketches:
The Fabriano Quadrato's paper is extremely thin. Although the Staedtler watercolor pencil marks appeared fine, even the slightest touch of the waterbrush caused the paper to buckle quite quickly, so I gave up on using water. I think I'll have to stick to pen, pencil, and color pencil in this notebook.



Next, I tried adding watercolor to a pencil sketch of a crabapple twig in the Hand-Book sketchbook. It, too, has very thin pages and curls quickly.



Watercolor pencil didn't fare much better in the Hand-Book -- I drew the anemone with a Pitt Artist pen and used watercolor pencil before adding a bit of water. It, too, made the page curl quite a bit.


So, while I'll use both of these on and off, I've decided to stick with the Moleskine watercolor notebooks for now -- they seem to be the right size for my little bag and are of a heavier weight than these.