I bought this sketchbook because I started carrying a smaller purse, and wanted one small enough to fit inside. It's a 3.3" x 4.7" dot matrix pad, bound at the top, with 80 perforated sheets (not my preference, but we use what we have). The day I bought it, I filled the first four pages and decided my goal for the book would be to fill as much space on the page as possible (easy to do with such small sheets!), using whatever materials I had at hand in the moment - preferably using as many materials as possible. So far my most frequently-used materials are basic gel pens (black and white) and Chartpak AD alcoholic markers, with mechanical pencil for the initial sketch. If you use markers like that, you HAVE to put a bleed sheet behind your page. Learn from my mistakes!!
(I hope to make pages for all the characters pictured here so you know who they are, but it'll take a while. ^^; Bear with me please!)
As an aside, I picked two of these little books up at a locally owned and operated stationary shop. The owner came down into the empty shop as I was checking out and I have to paint a picture for you. This man is at least 70 years old by his own admission, and he dressed like it. He had a very formal grey suit, dress shirt, and a black bowtie. On a Friday. And this was not a modern suit! He looked like he was going to pitch paper sales to an oil baron. Like some kind of retired Mid-Atlantic radio announcer who broadcasted illegal boxing. I felt like he was going to ask me if I wanted to stop by the soda fountain after work. Instead his first statement to me was: "Well hello there! What do you do for fun?" (a deeply strange first question, but there we are), to which I replied "For fun? I'm buying notebooks!"
After some conversation, it turns out he's known my boss for 70 years (which I doubt, because I think that's about how old my boss is), and was in our building talking to the tenants upstairs just the week before. It was a fun coincidence, even if talking to strange stationary salesmen can be off-putting. The moral of the story is this: buy local! These guys were clearly desperate for business, and I'm sure there's a shop near you who's in similarly dire straights. Plus you might meet an overbearing stranger, which is always nice.