Kraft Paper Sketch Book From Hahnemühle Fine Art

I posted this review several years ago on another blog. Many of you did not follow me there, so I thought I'd bring it back out and share the review with you today. 

The Kraft Paper Sketch Book from Hahnemühle Fine Art.  Hahnemühle has entrusted me to work with their products and tell you about them. They trust me to play and give an honest review. All the thoughts here are mine. (But I can tell you a secret before you read any further - I absolutely love this book!)

So let's go back to that first photo.I noticed as soon as I opened the plastic wrap, this would be a super cover to tangle! Or paint, or collage, or mixed mediapalooza, whichever art style floats your boat. Both front and back of the spiral book seems to be covered in similar, but heavier, paper than the pages. So I pulled out my Tombow Mono Drawing Pen

and started having some fun! The pen work went on like a dream!  Smooth, no skips, nothing on the surface of the cover for my pen to hang up on. Just smooth fun. I even used a little Cosmic Shimmer watercolor

and it was awesome! Water did not bother this cover at all. Piece of cake!

Then I moved to the inside pages. There are 80 sheets of paper which means 160 work surfaces if you work on both sides of the page. I don't typically do that, but I could if I wanted. What color are the pages? As the name implies - they are the color of craft paper. A sort of tan color. With undertones of grey which my camera and scanner both picked up. It was really difficult to get an accurate shot of the color. 

With tan pages I like bringing in brown pens with white highlights and lots of shading. And the Kraft paper did not disappoint. I tangled a garden on the first page of my book. For tools I used a Tombow Mono Drawing Pen, a Zebra Zensations Sarasa Fineliner, a brown Micron, a gel pen and a General's white charcoal pencil for highlights, the Zentangle woodless pencil for shading and probably something else I am forgetting. Hahahaha!

So. How did the first page go? Awesome! Absolutely no problems with the pens or the gel pen or the shading/highlighting tools. The surface of these pages feels slick to the touch and I expected that to be an issue with pens but it was not. All my tangling tools worked great! The particular book I have is about 6" x 8" and is the perfect size for a tangled garden! With the spiral binding I could easily remove this page for framing or for gifting. 

Next, I wanted to see how a large amount of black ink would work on these pages. Remember I said the surface was slick? And at 55 lbs the paper is not all that thick. I really did not know what to expect but it worked great! No bleed through of black and I got a good solid coverage of ink. No feathering, no bleeding, no smearing. I used the same basic tools I used on the garden drawing, but was heavier handed and more intentional. Awesome sauce!  I should point out that I really love the way shading works in the Kraft Book. Smoothing and pushing with my tortillon worked very well! I was able to get a smooth, almost buttery look!

I had a maroon and a blue micron that I hadn't used much. I wanted to see how they would look when used on the Kraft pages. With the tan backdrop. The blue held up really well, fairly true to life in color. The maroon looks a little darker here on the Kraft paper, but I can still tell it's maroon. For this drawing I used Zebra Pens' Drafix pencil to shade. It went down very well. A little harder to smooth and push with the tortillon - an issue with the pencil itself. 

By this point I had already used my normal go-to pens and pencils and gel pens. So I pulled out a black StazOn Ink pad and this cute little stamp and stamped a girl right onto the page. I used Copic markers to add color. Copics are alcohol based markers and they literally bleed through pretty much everything! Sometimes through more than one layer of paper. 

Considering this paper is only 55 lbs, this bleed through is not all that bad. (And there was none on the next page.) One thing I noticed is the StazOn ink itself did not bleed through, it stayed on the front of the page where it belonged. The color quite literally has 5-6 layers of Copic on most places. Knowing that - the bleed through isn't that bad. I kind of like her little bow-legged look on the back of the page. Heheheh. And If I want to - I can recreate the front here on the back with perhaps pencil. So it doesn't mess with the Copic color on the front. Then I could have two cute little girls blowing dandelions. Win/win. 

These next three pieces of art used the same StazOn ink pad. The color is Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens. The colors in all these stamped images are a little subdued because they are on a tan colored paper - but that was part of my process - to see if I could still get pretty images. And I think I did. Absolutely.

I had no problem coloring with these markers. No soaking up of ink, no feathering, no smearing. And these Pitt pens did not bleed through to the back at all. The back of these three pages are pristine and ready for more art. 

The Pitt Artist Pens are perfect for the Kraft Paper Sketch Book. The colors even remained pretty much true.

I wanted to see how the paper handled a little water. For these sweet little owls, I used a water brush and Amazrock Watercolor Pencils. Granted, it wasn't an overwhelming amount of water like I am prone to use, but I used a fair amount of water to move this color around. And I had no warping or rippling of paper. None at all. Just a sweet little row of owlets being all cute and stuff.

For this last one, I brought out my Wink of Stella Glitter Pens, the Tombow Mono Drawing Pen, a regular black Micron, a Sharpie fineliner, and a golf pencil. And they all worked splendidly. I tell you this paper is beyond wonderful for all the different tools I used. I had no problems at all. 

My recommendation to you would be this. Buy it. Hahaha! Simple and to the point, that's me.

You can not go wrong with this paper for tangling, stamping, colored pencils, non alcohol markers, gel pens, glitter pens. This Kraft Paper Sketch Book from Hahnemühle can do it all and be your new go-to journal. And you might want to get more than one! Here are a couple places you can purchase the Kraft Paper Sketch Book line:

Amazon 

BHPhoto 

New Egg  

Ken Bromley Art Supplies 

Buy with confidence and have fun! 

I'd love to see your results!

This product was given to me by Hahnemühle.

All the projects shown and ideas mentioned are mine.