Moleskine Sketch Book

I'm a complete and hopeless sucker for notebooks and sketchbooks. Though they're quite high-end for a lowly art student, my hoard is never without a few moleskines. (Waterstones' occasional 3 for 2 sales are a real blessing, as are Amazon's little discounts.)

If you're into notebooks, the iconic design should already be familiar to you: elegant rounded corners, plain black covers, and useful but unobtrusive features such as the elastic strap, ribbon bookmark and handy rear pocket for loose scraps. It's a simple formula that really works, and looks like a piece of art in its own right. It also brings with it little niggles that have always frustrated me about the brand, like tight binding that renders the first couple of blank pages impossible to fully open, paper colour that doesn't hold up well to a bit of erasing, and a tendency to bloat and come away from the spine if too many pages are used too heavily.

The large size sketchbook, as pictured, is 13x21cm in size (slightly narrower than A5) containing 100 pages of creamy-coloured acid-free paper. Costing around the £12.50 mark, they're not cheap, but one book goes a long way. The pocket-sized version is just over 9x14cm, slightly narrow than standard A6, costing in the area of £10.

The paper is of a good moderate weight (250gsm), perfect for pen and pencil work, though it can stand up to a fair amount of wet media before showing signs of buckling. It's not perfect, though. The famous off-white paper looks great to draw on, but the colour rubs away easily and becomes noticeably whiter where you've corrected mistakes, even when using paper-friendly erasers like putty erasers. I find the paper's also too smooth for media that demand a bit of tooth and texture, like hard pastels, and it has a slightly shiny surface that some wet substances, like ink washes and watercolour, don't settle well on. It takes some getting used to working on, and not all your materials may take well to it.

Moleskines have a certain fashionable appeal that I both love and hate: the historical background and established high quality of the range are very respectable and attractive, but buying a moleskine doesn't turn you into one of the great masters. I find they're popular among students for that air of Deep and Arty Mystique when, really, any book would suffice to hold your Deep and Arty Thoughts. Buying into the legacy is all very dreamy, but I try to distinguish "wanting a Moleskine®" from just "wanting a sketchbook" - in most cases any decent plain sketchbook will do the job for half the price. With moleskines, you're buying a brand image and an ethereal, romantic concept of creativity as much as you're buying a quality product, so don't let it blind you to humbler options that are just as functional. Though they visually embody the "little black notebook", they're far from the only ones out there.

They do make a great last-minute panic gift - if you know any creative sorts and need a premium-looking present that's both handsome and useful, there's always a moleskine that'll fit the bill. I'm a lot more tentative to buy them for myself, in fact. The price is steep for a blank book, making it quite a big indulgence and not something for everyday doodling about.

Overall, the moleskine sketchbook is a great product that looks and feels good to use, but it's not without its flaws and is far from the be-all and end-all of sketchbooks that it's made out to be. It's more of a luxurious present for yourself, once in a while. A beauty to look at, and a legendary brand, but not my favourite considering the price.