My A5 and A6 sketchbook covers

Creating an Organic Looking Urban Sketchbook

When I’m doing my daily urban sketching I tend not to create an organised and tidy sketchbook. My books are really just my playground for continuing my habit for drawing people and street scenes, and experimenting with sketching techniques and styles.

When I’m travel sketching, I take this same experimental approach to filling my sketchbooks, they don’t look polished and planned, each page is an explosion of ink lines and intuitive dabs of colour that lack a feeling of cohesion as you travel through the pages.

Creating an Perfect Looking Urban Sketchbook Page

I’m in awe of the urban sketchers who create page after page of perfect landscape and street scene sketches, and at one point I wanted to be just like them. But in order to create a flawless sketchbook filled with beautifully composed and executed sketches I think you have to have time to sketch, and sketch static objects.

When you’re sketching subjects that move – i.e. people, you can’t always plan what the sketch is going to look like. There’s an element of the unknown that you just have to embrace. And it’s this … I’m not sure what the word is, it’s not excitement, frustration, or anxiety … but it’s the feeling you get when you start speed sketching and get lost in the moment, and the little voice in your head is say “I hope they don’t move” or “bloody hell, I wish they’d stop fidgeting!” That feeling of spontaneity you get when sketching people live, is what I enjoy the most, and I think it would get lost if I tried to plan a perfect page.

Choosing the Right Paper for your Urban Sketchbook

Over the years, I’ve experimented with different watercolour and mixed medium sketchbooks, and my go-to sketchbook has long been the grey Sketch Books from Hahnemühle which have 200gsm cold pressed paper with a fine texture. This weight of paper is ideal for ink and wash. I find that if I have a sketchbook with 300gsm paper, I’m become precious about sketching and worry that I’m going to “ruin” a page. For me, that’s no way to feel about a sketchbook. I think you should be enthusiastic about sketching in it.

Covering my Hahnemühle Sketchbooks

The Hahnemühle 200gsm watercolour books come with a grey cover, so I like to cover mine to give them a bit of personality, and recently I’ve been doing a lot of Gelli Arts plate printing to create a collection of unique handprinted papers.

I covered my most recent A5 and A6 sized sketchbook with some abstract paper that I wanted to keep for myself. The A5 is covered with a yellow and black design, and the A6 is covered with a turquoise and black design. Although I’ve used different colour combinations, there is still a cohesive feel to them.

These are going to be my sketchbooks for May 2026. I tend to have two sketchbooks on the go at the same time. The A5 for when I’m messing about in the studio or when I have an urban sketching day out planned, and the A6 to have in my bag at all times so that I can capture quick sketches of people while I’m out and about.

This paper is wild and unique. No matter how hard I try, I won’t ever be able to replicate the patterns I create – and that’s part of the enjoyment of gel printing, you never know what you’re going to get.

The back of the A6 sketchbook is just as interesting as the front, and includes some image transfer elements from a magazine. You can just make out the 2026 on the upper left of this back cover.

I really like the grungy and distressed feel of these papers. There’s enough white in the design to give them a feeling of depth, and I added a layer of clear acrylic pouring medium on top of the paper which emphasises that depth, and also gives the papers a bit of a sheen.

What I’m really happy with is that the organic nature of these covers reflects my organic approach to sketching contained within.