Strathmore 566-5 500 Series Hardbound Mixed Media Art Journal, 5.5 x 8.5, White, 32 Count

Nice heavy weight paper! I wished it would open flat!

Pros: Good quality paper and respectable page count. I number my pages and leave unnumbered end papers at front and back and get around 187 pages or so (still waiting for someone to make an 8.5 x 11 with more than just ~200 pages). Cons: The icky, rubbery, matte, chocolate-brown cover. I cant stand to touch the new cover and the spine is now wider (with no increase in page count or paper weight). The binding went from elegantly slim and sexy to chunky and just plain tacky. No longer a premium product. What happened to the classic, smooth, shiny, black cover? No one else makes one like it and I am severely disappointed in Strathmore for changing it. I buy a new sketchbook for writing every 4-6 weeks and have done so for years. I have about 20 linear feet of filled sketchbooks, over 95% of them Strathmore 400 Series 8.5 x 11 hardbound sketchbooks. Once, I felt proud to have this book sticking out of my bag or laid before me on a table in a coffeehouse, making me appear erudite, classy, and so unquestionably wise and intelligent that my work clearly belonged between the hard covers of an elegant, high quality, bound book. My self image will never be the same. Sadly, I cant bring myself to buy a Strathmore sketchbook ever again.

Great product. Thanks

for my niece

Excellent!

Works good with my promarkers and copic markers.

Very good quality? Good buy.

I’ve been needing a smaller sketchbook and I wanted to try my luck with this one. It’s great. Can’t complain. Thick paper but copics still bleed through so I have to use something under the paper.

The quality of the paper is amazing, it is thick and copes well with watercolor and gouache. The cover of the scrapbook as well is good quality so you can keep your art for a long time.

I love the paper in this sketchbook so much, but the binding is very tight. It doesnt want to lay flat at all, which can get pretty annoying. Trying to hold open the book while sketching is a bummer. Ive been trying to train it to stay open by just holding it wide open a lot, but I shouldnt have to do that. :/ My other hardcover sketchbooks (Pentalic and Stillman & Birn Beta and Zeta) stay open fine, so youd think a big company like Strathmore would have figured it out...