For the past year I’ve been using Hahnemühle’s Sketch Diary A4 to plan every project. I’ve planned the Wet Paint Schmincke Palette, two Da Vinci Trios and kept track of all the art I’ve done. Now I’m planning a project with my oil pastels. I want to find out if there are any good lower priced sets of oil pastels on the market. After contacting brands I’ll be doing lightfast testing. I also want to test drive as many lower priced oil pastel sets as possible.
All of these projects have many moving parts. I kept myself and the projects organized using my Sketch Diary. What a terrific idea, to combine quality lined paper and blanks in a coiled book. It has become my dream planner for all large projects.
Sketch Diary Specs:
- sizes: Portrait (A4, A5 & A6 )
- 120gsm paper (ruled on left, blank on right)
- 60 sheets/ 120 pages
- Black cover (can be drawn on)
- Back pocket for ephemera
- 2 Book labels for personalization
What I especially like bout the lined pages is the spacing. So many times, I find that my writing is squished, the line spacing in many journals are too small. In the Sketch Diary the spacing is generous, making it easier to write clearly and hence making reading it later even easier. The spacing is a little more than ¼ of an inch or 7/10ths of a centimeter. As the photos below show, my writing is not squished! As a lefty I really appreciate this. My writing sometimes can be kinda wonky. If I don’t concentrate it becomes messy. With more space, I can stretch my writing out, making even messy writing easy to read.
What To Do With Your Sketch Diary:
The right side of each set of pages is blank. This lets you draw, plan, sketch and create with notes you can take easily on the left hand side. I never have liked using lined paper for artwork, even the planning stages. I want to see what it’s going to look like in it’s finished stages. Blank pages allow for this. There is a nice tooth, just enough to let colored pencils grab the surface. But not too much to allow pens to skip or scumble. The paper is also wonderfully heavyweight, I didn’t find any bleeding happening through the pages. Any wrinkles are from gluing multiple images in the book.
I love that the paper is not white. YAY! Having a lightly toned paper allows for pen & ink, specifically technical pens and white pens to come to life on this paper. The light beige of the paper can be the mid tone. allowing for white highlights and black shadows.
Your Sketch Diary can be so many things. The simplest is, of course, as an artistic diary. Draw to your heart’s content and write about your day. It’s the perfect Bullet Journal. It’s a great project manager, that’s what I’ve used it for. I also have a friend, Alice who has used it to keep track of step-outs for her tangle patterns. For those of you who plan each painting, this would work well. Ideas and drawings are paired perfectly in this book.
Make It Pretty:
Finally, you can decorate the cover. The cover is black paper backed cardboard and works beautifully with all kinds of media that also works on black paper. I’m thinking Posca pens, metallic markers and as you can see, even colored pencil over white ink.
I used my home made white brush pen then added the whitest highlights using a Uniball Signo white gel pen. After it dried, I added a little colored pencil in ochre, blush, green and blue to give suggestions of color and dimension. All I needed to do then was use one of the blank labels that comes with the Sketch Diary and TADA, an artist’s project book to be proud of.
Where To Buy The Sketch Diary:
Find all the buying options for Hahnemühle papers at my Where To Buy page.
sandra strait
Your sketch diary looks so beautiful! Mine is so messy and uncoordinated lol. I love seeing what people do at this stage in the process.
Louise
Wow! That is one impressively beautiful and well organized sketchbook. I must have a dozen different types of sketchbooks and they don’t look as neat as yours! Thanks for sharing and inspiring us with your lovely pages!
Jean Marmo
What a beautiful diary! I have not done anything like this but maybe should give one a try.
Jennifer Rose
thats actually a good idea for a sketchbook, the lined pages would work really well for writing down any notes and ideas. would def keep things neat in the book 🙂
my sketchbooks are usually a mess lol, full of everything and after awhile they get so thick the cover just falls off lol
yours looks so neat and tidy 🙂
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