The rain and cold has been pretty relentless here in Sussex so far in 2026, and while I struggle with the heat of summer, I do miss the colour of a bright blue sky and greenery. Hazel catkins are out on the twigs bringing some muted yellow to the winter palette, but these too look rather nondescript without the sunshine on them.
I have almost finished my sage-green Leuchtturm sketchbook, and decided to depart from my usual square format and go a bit bigger with an A4 so I have more room to manoeuvre. My sketchbook really is my happy place, and I love working on my drawings and slopping some paint around, but every so often I lose my sense of inspiration and can’t think what to draw. When this happens I try and just get something on the page and not worry about what it looks like. It’s been a while since I had a large sketchbook, and I’ve previously had the Fabriano Venezia ones which are lovely, but they don’t have an elastic closure, and I find the spines need some punishment to get them to open flat. The Leuchtturm are stitched so are much easier to paint across the spread.
I also write a page of journalling nonsense every morning to get stuff out of my head, and for that I use the plain Moleskine cahiers. The paper is quite thin and I always use a fountain pen for writing, meaning the bleed-through and blots from the page before render my musings illegible but to be honest, that’s absolutely fine as I don’t keep any of these journals. Writing my morning pages has become a really effective way of dealing with stuff, and I want it to be an enjoyable process, so need a nice smooth surface to write on but given that I chuck them away or burn them, I don’t want to invest in an expensive or plastic-coated notebook. The cahiers have lovely cream paper with card covers and rounded corners, and are not expensive.
I normally buy my sketchbooks from Jackson’s Art but they didn’t have the A4 Master sketchbook, nor any Moleskine notebooks so I headed to the dangerous website for anyone with a stationery addiction: Cult Pens. Deary me…however I have had a really slow start to the year, sales-wise, so I had to be very restrained.
How are you coping with the northern hemisphere winter drag?
