Moleskine Art Sketchbook

Name: Moleskine Art Sketchbook
Item: Moleskine Art Sketchbook
Rating: 4

05/09/21 Check Price Video

The Moleskine Art Sketchbook is a notebook in the Moleskine Classic style, but with heavyweight paper. It’s designed for sketching, drawing, and other artwork.

The Sketchbook is a Moleskine notebook that is designed for sketching and other activities. It looks like a standard Moleskine, but has heavyweight paper that can stand up to inking, erasing, and other art work creation activities.

The Sketchbook is a hardcover notebook that is sold in black, scarlet, blue, sapphire blue, and red covers. It’s often confused with the Sketch Album, which is a soft cover notebook that is wider than it is long.

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The Sketchbook has all the other features you’d expect from a Moleskine, like the faux leather cover, a lie-flat cover, a page-saving ribbon, a back pocket on the inside cover, and an elastic closure loop.

Learn more about Moleskine notebooks.

Moleskine Sketchbook Sizes

Like other Moleskine notebooks, the Sketchbook is sold in a variety of nonstandard sizes. These include:

Pocket: 3.5″ x 5.5″ with 72 pages
Large: 5″ x 8.25″ with 104 pages
A4: 8.25″ x 11.75″ with 96 pages
A3: 11.75″ x 16.5 with 96 pages

Moleskine Sketchbook Paper

The Sketchbook is sold in a very heavy 165 grams per square meter (gsm) weight.

The Sketchbook is only sold with blank paper. It’s sold in ivory (basically cream colored), “sketch-grade” paper. The paper is acid-free for safe archival storage, so long as your drawing materials are acid-free and of similar archival quality.

The paper is fountain pen-friendly, though the lack of lines or a grid means it’s generally used for fountain pen sketches, not journaling.

The paper is smooth, like all Moleskine paper, but has enough texture that pens have no problem gripping it. Ballpoint pens, gel, rollerball, and fountain pens all work well on the sketch paper, as do pencils and other pencil-like drawing tools like charcoal. The paper can also stand up to pastels and colored pencils.

The notebook is not designed for watercolor. Moleskine sells a watercolor-friendly notebook that is also in the Art series. That uses a more textured 200 gsm, cold-pressed paper.

Moleskine Sketchbook Review

Moleskine notebooks are not generally associated with having top-notch or very heavyweight paper. The Art series is Moleskine’s attempt to change that, but shift the paper to 120 gsm and above, with nice textures and the ability to stand up to watercolor, erasers, and other specialized applications.

The Sketchbook is perhaps the most popular notebook in the Art series. It uses cream colored 165 gsm paper that is seriously thick. It won’t stand up to a Sharpie (this will bleed though), but almost anything else will work nicely with very little show-through. Ghosting is not a problem and pencils, even hard pencil leads, won’t push through.

The cover and design are all standard Moleskine, from the leatherette material to the rounded corners. For me this is a good thing because it means a predictable design and because the standard Moleskine notebook is pretty good — its their paper that most people find to be the shortcoming.

This paper is much heavier, but of course you get a lot less of it — 104 pages in the Large (5″ x 8.25″) version that I bought. Smaller sizes are available but for me they are too small for drawing comfortable. Perhaps if I was more skilled I could use the Medium (4.5″ x 7″). There is a full-sized A4 model as well as a harder to find but quite huge A3 folio size.

For $18 for the large size this is a nice product and a good solution to drawing and sketching on the go. If you like blank pages and fountain pens or rollerballs, it’s good for note-taking as well, though it’s a bit expensive for this usage.