Gerstaecker | Hardbound Sketch Books — 150 gsm

Wonderful - can't live without the touch book - This is my third review of this product because I have changed my opinion and feel it only fair to let prospective buyers know. I don't know how I could have not liked the paper when I first used this book. By now I am addicted and can't envisage a life with my touch book.

I have used it for sketches with pen (wonderful), coloured pencils (excellent), graphite pencils (excellent) and for watercolours (excellent). It is particularly amazing to have a sketch book that has paper good enough for watercolours (and with so many pages, too!). I don't make my paper very wet and it works brilliantly - the paper dries without any buckling at all. The paper is fairly smooth so maybe better for pen and pencil than for pastel or charcoal.

I am delighted every time I pick up this book - it feels nice and I enjoy looking through its pages before I start drawing again. I use it every day. I can't praise it enough and the friends that I've discussed it with agree with me - they asked where to get one, so I'm buying one for them to start them off.

It's particularly suitable as a sketching journal - a delight to use.

Update - some good points - I am the writer of the review Very Disappointing but I think I've been too harsh in my judgement. This was probably because I had certain expectations which were not met.

Thank you Great Art staff for changing my rating above to show as 1/5. For this update I've chosen to give 3 stars. Choosing the number of stars still doesn't seem to be easy, What I see below as I write this is 5 stars but this may change once uploaded as the last review did.

single pages
I realise that if I wanted to tear out the pages. I should have bought the spiral touch book - should have looked more carefully before buying.

suitability for various media
I've spent the last couple of hours trying to use the book and have been successful. If you are careful to choose the rougher side of the paper for watercolour, it will work, and I was wrong about not being able to use graphite pencil. You can use good graphite pencils on the shiny side and the drawing will work. What feels odd is that the drawing experience doesn't feel pleasurable but I'm not quite sure why.

Advantages
The paper is certainly white and that does look nice as a background for whatever is drawn on it.

The book itself is a pleasure to touch (can understand why they're called touchbooks) and it's satisfyingly fat so yes, it would be a good for a travel journal - or one just for life in general......

Very Disappointing - I wanted to give this product 1 star but the website will only allow 4 stars as minimum. What is going on here? Great Art - I thought you were wonderful. What's happened?

I bought an A5 and an A4 version of this book because it looked so nice and said it was suitable for dry media plus light watercolour but the paper is terrible. Like the previous reviewer I've found the paper to be awful, almost unusable.

The paper is different on each side, one side glossy, the other side with slight tooth but neither side is good for drawing. It is bound in such a way that you can't be sure which side the glossy surface will appear - sometimes it's on the left, sometimes on the right, not consistent.

I tried first of all to pull a page out of the book to check if I could easily do that in case I created a masterpiece....ha ha... but even if I could, the paper won't pull out but tears jaggedly.

I tried coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, charcoal and graphite pencils. None was any good.

I'm really disappointed. This is the first time I've bought anything bad from Great Art and I've been a customer for years.

Terrible Paper - The outside is very nice and makes it look like a more expensive sketch book. Sadly that's where the nice stops as the paper is terrible. Each side of a sheet of paper seems different, on one side it has a nice tooth with no shine. But the other side is highly glossy, almost waxy to the feel with no tooth. I tried various media on it, soft pencil, charcoal and ink and nothing was good because of the waxyness.

If you want a quility sketch book avoid. If you just want some cheap throw-away thing to scribble on it migh be ok.

*Note. I tried to give it 2 stars but the website would not let me give it less than 4...