Strathmore’s lower priced option is also 100% cotton (amazing!) so it’s nice and absorbent, through the paper seems more likely to buckle than the more expensive Strathmore sketchbook. Paper is creamy white, like the standard paper I paint on and is treated so it held up pretty well to buckling. This one is a dream to paint on with gorgeous 100% cotton paper (this is really unusual in a sketchbook) and comes beautifully bound, but it’s expensive – at 50p/65c per side – and, as it’s not wire-bound, you can’t tear a sheet out easily if you make a real mess. Strathmore 500 series Premium Mixed Media These are just my opinions, I am not affiliated with any of these brands. They also work well for any type of botanical painting or realistic watercolours of any sort, as well as for, of course, mixed media work! These things combined means the best sort of sketchbooks for this style of work are those marketed as for ‘MIXED MEDIA’. So I also need the paper to be ROBUST, which usually means it’s as THICK as possible.
And I create multiple layers of fairly watery paint on dry paper, to achieve really realistic tones and hues. My method aims for crisp detailed brush strokes – so I need SMOOTH paper to do that. In this post I’m putting some sketchbooks through their paces to see how they perform with my watercolour method.
