Sugar Overload

3/24/16 brush pen, Field Notes Sweet Tooth notebook

I’m probably the only person in the first world who cares about the potential for using Field Notes’ Sweet Tooth edition for sketching (well, there might be one other person – you know who you are), so I’m not sure why I’m blogging about these little pocket notebooks again. But just like I can’t resist trying papers that I’m pretty sure won’t meet my needs, I also can’t resist documenting my findings for the general public’s edification. 

After being delighted by the possibilities of using the red paper book in the trio, today I broke out both the blue and the yellow books. Unlike the red paper, which really made my white gel pen pop, the blue paper (strangely named “Blu Raspberry”) doesn’t show quite the same high contrast. Still, the Platinum Carbon Black ink in the Kuretake brush pen looks great on the smooth stock, and the gel pen shows well enough that I still like it for highlights. In general, I don’t like blue as much as red, but I can see it has its place.

3/24/16 (This poor guy was being interviewed
for a job at a coffee shop.)

Yellow (aptly named “Banana Split”) is another matter. The white gel pen hardly shows at all, so it’s not useful as a toned paper. On the upside, I’m sure yellow could be used with any ink or writing instrument, just like white paper. Much worse, though, is that show-through is significant from both the sketch on the reverse side as well as the page under it. (Compared below is the reverse of Field Notes Workshop Companion, which has the same weight of paper, but seems more opaque to my eye, even though it is white.) Both red and blue are completely opaque and display no show-through at all.

There you have it. You read it here first. Meanwhile, I’m going to spend the remainder of these wet and blustery spring days filling these notebooks until my teeth ache.

Reverse of yellow Sweet Tooth (Kuretake brush
pen used)

Reverse of Workshop Companion Field Notes (same
brush pen used)