Scandalous Swatcher
I practice painting and drawing quite recklessly. I choose what to use and when based on vibe, I mix my colors on a whim right on the page, and I gasp find swatching a chore (a lot of people find it therapeutic). I want to go out and make cool scribbles! Also, as a penny-pincher, an irrational part of me keeps saying I shouldn't waste the materials on swatching (and waste it on shoddy mixes anyway? Good job brain!). Even when I actually do my swatch like a good little student, I don't refer to them anyway.
My artist friends are understandably horrified, and they're amazed I only botched things a quarter of the time (they obviously didn't see the rest). I'm not doing this to impress anyone, and truthfully the takeaway from almost every sketchbook page is "I should have tested the colors/stroke widths/... elsewhere". I'm just lazy and approaching my art with wanton disregard (the second takeaway is 'perhaps I should consider sketching it before diving in'). Mostly.
You see that I'm not calling myself an artist.
I'm not justifying my bad habits, but my sketchbook is for me (and perhaps a couple close friends when they come visiting) so there is no stake in ruining a page or two (or a whole sketchbook really). My wallet will take the brunt with the amount of sketchbook I burn through, but there is no difference between a nice painting and a bad painting since I'll get a new one when I'm done anyway.
That being said, I was actually looking for a pocket-sized book that could take watercolors fairly well, toothy enough for all the other mediums I use, just slightly off-white, has a sturdy cover, not too many pages, could lie flat, not far-off from the paper I usually use, and cheap enough so I could paste the swatches I have already done and make it a dedicated swatches/art supply notes (Buy again? No? Things I like and dislike from a product). I finally found it. I was liking the new sketchpad I started, looked it up, and they had an A6 version. It just arrived.
See, why do the swatching twice if I can do it just once in the format I want? I archive sketchbooks when I'm done with them, so I don't want to have to dig them from the closet whenever I want to look up a swatch. A separate portable format would be easier for this lazy bum. My previous favorite paper was too expensive for this purpose. This book is spiral-bound with a rubber band, so I could flip through and fix the page to the one I need. The cover is also sturdy enough so I could lean it on something while I paint and don't want it using precious table space.
Fingers crossed I'll get around to get swatching the rest of my stuff before the quarter ends... (I don't even have that many supplies, but I do have quite a lot of water-soluble products that change color quite dramatically and pens of various widths. A catalog would really come in handy. You'd think I'd do this before filling three books).