A Love Letter to Midori

            This is not a review in traditional form. I just wanted to take the time to sing the praises of one of my favorite sketchbooks of all time: The Midori MD. These books have served me incredibly well. As a studying artist, I have filled a lot of sketchbooks in the past couple of years. I like to do my research and find a good book, take a month or two to fill it up with drawings, and repeat the process in search of another book when I am done. I often find myself seeking to constantly improve upon the last book I was using, buying a different brand or style of book every time. In all of my time searching for sketchbooks, I have not returned to a specific brand as much as I’ve returned to Midori.

Two of my Midoris - One A5 with no cover and one B6 Slim with a paper stock cover

            The Midori MD Notebooks are very well bound and designed, featuring creamy cardstock covers with their minimalist logo engraved on the front. You can buy covers for these books sold separately, as I have on the B5 slim book I’m using now, but the A5 I filled up last year did its job perfectly without one. The book is also completely stitch bound, allowing for a flat surface to work on with minimal effort. Now, anyone can make a pretty notebook, but it really comes down to what’s in between the covers. Paper quality is king, and right now, Midori is wearing the crown.

            It’s difficult to find a balance in paper. Some papers are incredibly thick, and while it’s nice for ink, they make for short and cumbersome sketchbooks. Most sketchbooks that are practically sized are too thin to handle inks proficiently. Fortunately, Midori manages the best of both worlds. I don’t know the exact weight of Midori’s MD paper, but it can’t be much thicker than a typical printer stock. Unlike printer stock, Midori paper can handle just about anything I throw at it.

I could go on about the design of Midori paper and the company’s promise of “bleed and feather resistant paper,” but I don’t think any of that matters in comparison to a hands on demonstration of the paper’s quality. Take a look here at my test page of my A5 MD. As you can see, the only tools of mine that bled through are alcohol and paint markers, which is fair as I’ve seen those markers bleed through my thickest watercolor paper. Across the board, from fine liners to fountain pens to brushes dipped in ink, there is virtually no feathering. If you’ve been reading along with my other posts than you understand how much of a selling point this is for me. 

The only tools that bleed are alcohol and paint markers, but I haven't seen a paper that these markers won't bleed through.

            

            I don’t want to rant for too long about the wonders of Midori notebooks, but I am very passionate about them. If you do any kind of sketching, drawing, or writing in any kind of ink, you are doing yourself a disservice if you have not tried these notebooks.

Life drawing with Waterman Blue Ink

Stillman & Birn Zeta Series Sketchbook: Just Short of Greatness

            Before you read this review, it’s important that you understand a little bit about me as an artist. I love working primarily in pen and ink, and I’ve collected dozens of fine-liners and brush pens alike. I prefer illustrations with clean and precise line quality, so when my tools feather on the paper I work with, it frustrates me to no end. I could talk about that for a long, long time, and I did! You can read about that here, because today I’m not talking about that. Today, I’m talking about the Stillman & Birn Zeta Series Softcover sketchbook.

My Stillman & Birn Softcover Zeta Series. On the right - Lamy Safari Petrol Blue and Noodler's Ahab Flex Pen

            Stillman & Birn is a company that specializes in artist’s paper. They currently produce sketchbooks in seven different varieties, from Alpha to Zeta, and over a dozen formats. Their paper can also be bought by the sheet. Each one of their paper varieties offers a different type of paper to suit the needs of different materials, from dry media to heavy watercolor. I decided to choose a 5.5” x 8.5” softcover from their Zeta series, a smooth stock of paper weighing in at a generous 270gsm and advertised by their website as most suitable for ink and watercolor.

“Sounds great,” I think to myself. “I love ink and I love watercolor, so I will love this book.” I talk like a robot. This isn’t important. It turns out I did not love this book.

Allow me to explain. I do like certain things about this book. I think it’s a great book for watercolor sketching, the paper is smooth, and the format is nice. However, the binding is pretty lousy and the paper does not treat my inks as nicely as everyone on the internet led me to believe.

While it isn’t a deal breaker, I appreciate greatly when a sketchbook is bound to lie flat. This typically involves exclusive stitch binding, which the Zeta does not offer. 

Glue binding - Yuck!

The paper is organized in signatures that are stitch bound, but the overall spine is bound in glue. The book eventually lays flat, but it requires some breaking in, and some of the pages are glued together close to the spine, causing tearing when opened widely. The breaking in isn’t much of an issue, but the tearing is honestly pretty ugly. The hardcover format of the book appears to not have this issue. You can check out a review of that format from Teoh Yi Chie, a blogger who I tend to trust when it comes to art supplies. If you want to get another angle on this book, I definitely recommend taking a look at his writing.

Something I consider much more severe is the quality of the paper. Like I mentioned before, the Zeta is great for watercolors. However, its performance with my ink pens is bafflingly mediocre. There is at least no bleed, but the paper is incredibly absorbent, which leads to some pretty heinous feathering for paper of this standard. Some of the worst offenders are my Pilot Pocket Brush, my red Pentel Touch Pen, my Stabilo fine liners, my Pilot Razorpoint, and my Noodler’s Ahab Flex Pen with Waterman Blue Ink. 

Pilot Pocket Brush

Red Pentel Fude Sign Pen

 The feathering is not ridiculous, but it is noticeable, which is honestly unacceptable for such a thick, smooth paper. Even my pens with the least feathering soak right into the paper, cheapening the quality of each line as it hits the page.

Blue Stabilo Fine Liner

Pilot Razorpoint (Purple)

Noodler's Ahab Flex with Waterman Blue Ink

Overall, the Zeta has the potential to be perfect, a book that lets me work limited only by my imagination. I’ve been working with a lot of idea books that I could only use pencils and a few select pens in, so I was looking forward to shed those material limitations for a month or two. Unfortunately, the Zeta fails to deliver on this experience. It’s a competent book for watercolors, so if that is something that you’re into then I recommend it. However, I don’t carry around a watercolor kit everywhere I go. Its shortcomings are few, but each is severe enough to damage an experience that I had been given such high expectations for. The Zeta is good enough for me to keep for watercolor sketching and technique testing, but in terms of sketchbooks I will be returning to more reliable brands like Midori in the future.

Bleedthrough vs. Feathering, or Inconvenient vs. Unforgivable

            Whether or not you’ve heard terms like “bleed through” or “feathering” used to describe art supplies, you’ve almost certainly experienced both. Bleed through occurs when an ink is so wet it “bleeds” through the page and onto the other side, and usually onto whatever surface lies below the page. Heavy inks from alcohol markers like Copics and Prismacolors will bleed through thinner paper very easily, like on the sketch page shown below.

Bleed through

Feathering, on the other hand, involves a more horizontal movement of ink. When an ink feathers, it spreads out in small strands away from the initial line of the pen. Usually, an ink that bleeds will also feather, but the two can occur exclusively. Wet inks like this Waterman Blue combined with absorbent paper will often lead to feathering.

Feathering

When I talk to my artist friends and read blogs from artists and fans of stationary, I tend to see and hear a lot more complaints about the former issue than the latter. This confuses me greatly. While bleed through is an annoyance for sure, I don’t believe it is nearly as severe of an issue as I find feathering to be.

When I’m drawing, I want to have full control over the marks I make on my paper. If my ink bleeds through the page, I say “Oh well,” I put a piece of scratch paper under my canvas, and I keep working. When my ink feathers, my lines are cheapened and messy, and I’m faced with a problem that impacts the part of my process that I’m showing to other people. I would much rather have a piece of paper with good art on only one side of the page, rather than two sides of the page filled with drawings with unfocused and messy lines. Nothing bothers me more than watching those tiny feathers spread out of an ink line that I just laid down. I take the time to plan out the placement of every line in my drawings, and feathering creates hundreds of tiny, accidental lines that cheapen the value of the lines I intentionally placed. I can handle bleed through with some pretty minimal countermeasures, but feathering cannot be mitigated unless you change your pen, your paper, or both.