Born. A5 Visual Art Diary - Officeworks, hardcover

No affiliate links, and not a sponsored post - just my thoughts on a resource I like.

Quick takeaway

I quite like this sketchbook, and I wasn’t really expecting to. It has now become one of my favourites because it is good enough for:

• simple watercolour on the road (don’t expect anything fancy)

• gouache (again, if you use a lot of water, it will buckle)

• watercolour pencils

• pencil drawings

• pen and ink drawing (it is even smooth enough for some of my dip-pen nibs)

• writing

All of these things, and that it is cheaper (about 10 AUD at time of writing) than most watercolour sketchbooks I’ve used makes it an attractive option for me and has allowed me to free-up my sketching.

How I found them

I bought two on a whim from Officeworks just before we left for our road trip volume 2 in September 2021. The Born brand seems to be Officeworks’ own house brand.

I thought I’d try it out as the 180gsm of the paper seemed promising - many watercolour sketchbooks like the Moleskine watercolour journals are also about 200gsm. If nothing else, it could be a supplementary book to swatch and test things out or use if I somehow got through the 3 watercolour journals and about 45 pieces of paper and postcards along the way (I was WAY too ambitious!).

The Paper

180gsm

It has a slight texture - not as much as cold-press watercolour paper usually has, but definitely not as smooth as hot-pressed papers. You can see a bit of the texture in the photos below. The Glossy Ibis in the Gouache section shows it well.

The cover indicated it would work with pencil, pen/fineliner and brush/paints so I thought - why not.

How did it fare?

Watercolour

I started using it for quick sketches with watercolour, and it worked well-enough for that. The paper definitely buckled - to be expected really with a 180 gsm paper, but it did not warp as much as I’d have thought.

Of course when working with paper not specifically made for watercolour, there are other things to be expected - the colours won’t be as vibrant as on watercolour paper, you can’t really move the colour around a lot - where you put it is where its going to stay. You can see a bit of streaking as a result below.

It is fine for quick sketches, or ink and wash type work but it wouldn’t work well for proper watercolour paintings. Don’t expect wet-on-wet techniques to work well here.

Given that’s not what I was using it for though, for quick watercolour sketches, I found the paper held up well and I felt comfortable sketching freely in it.

Ink and Wash

I painted my final project piece of the Domestika Pen and Ink course in here too, and it worked surprisingly well with a dip pen and ink. The dip pen and nib didn’t feel scratchy and actually I’ve also used dip pen and ink in another one of these books that is entirely for writing. The paper is smooth enough for dip pens. It is of course not Bristol paper but as with the watercolour, the compromise is ok for me for the flexibility of being able to use the paper for so many different things.

Gouache

It works quite well for gouache - yes it buckles, but not as much as watercolour, depending on the consistency of the gouache you’re using. The colours of gouache on this paper are also more vibrant than those of watercolour on it.

I really like how it works with gouache, which is a key reason I think I’ll be using a lot more of these down the track. Gouache is also a lot more forgiving than watercolour even if you’re working with not-the-best paper.

Writing

I have used it a lot for writing. Given I was using this as my travel journal - and again because I wasn’t so precious about it or wasting precious watercolour paper with multiple pages of writing, I happily wrote in it. While in Darwin, I’ve filled an entire book with just writing.

Now this is where I think the sketchbook really started to come into its own for me.

I love my watercolour sketchbooks, but I’m also a writer, and the limiting factor of more expensive sketchbooks with fewer pages than this one is that I would never write entire pages of text in it.

I did use my Seawhite of Brighton book and stick things in it - so I technically ‘wasted’ a few pages that way, and it didn’t feel the best. This one? I don’t care. It is my sketchbook, notebook and journal - writing in it felt natural, normal, and I loved the flexibility of it for that reason. There aren’t photos of full pages of writing because well some of the writing is more personal, or drafts of things or just random notes/things I’d like to remember.

Pencil

I haven’t done many pencil sketches in it. They’re usually just outlines for watercolour, pen and ink or gouache. This medium is not something I use often (or am good at right now) but it seemed to work well enough for it in this one sketch I did in pencil.

Other uses and features

Sticking things in: I’d skipped a few pages to add to later on and since being in Darwin, I’ve done a few paintings and sketches of places along the way and stuck them all in here. Unlike the Seawhite of Brighton book I also stuck things in, I didn’t even need to think twice about it - it seemed natural for them to go in there. The only downside is that the book is now much much fatter, and there’s only so many things you can stick in before it is at its capacity, and won’t close properly.

Perforated page: Every page can be torn out and given to someone if you’d like, or stored elsewhere. This is a cool feature I think - I haven’t used it much, having only torn out one page I wanted to keep elsewhere but, its a nice-to-have if I did want to give some away. The perforations are visible in most of the photos above.

Price: As of March 2022 - It was/is cheaper than most of the sketchbooks I’ve bought and used for watercolour and gouache over the last two years. Watercolour sketchbooks cost around AUD $30 (or more) generally here, depending on the brand and where you buy them, but this is $10.12 (as of 29 March 2022).

Overall

Are the rough sketches in this book my best work? No, not by a long shot. But do I love them? Absolutely. I love all my sketchbooks but this one does hold a special place in my heart right now because of the memories captured within as well as all the different things I’ve tried with it.

The pages in these books are a combination of writing, musings, a blog post draft I just needed to get onto paper and out of my head that day, and sketches - lots of them, some I love, some are meh, and some I really don’t like (but that’s ok, and in adding some notes around the context of them, I end up liking the pages anyway).

This is good for so many things, allowing me to play more, and use it for whatever I feel like without any guilt or anxiety around “wasting” the pages. It is what I wanted/was missing most in a proper travel sketchbook without even knowing it.