The Sketchbook Won

Sketching on the reMarkable was supposed to be the big win. It almost is. But the line I wanted to make wasn’t quite the line that showed up, and a year in, I still can’t get past that.

About a year ago I wrote a post about switching over to this e-ink tablet, replacing my bullet journal and sketchbook with one device and falling hard for the whole distraction-free pitch.1 Most of that still holds up. Some of it didn’t.

The feel of sketching on the reMarkable is genuinely there… pen to paper, e-ink, lovely on the eyes, the tactile thing I kept chasing. But when I’m trying to study something or make a deliberate mark, there’s a tiny offset between where I wanted the line and where the line actually went. It’s small, but it adds to be something huge.

As artists, we spend years training our hands to make the marks we see in our heads. Ingraining that hand-eye-brain coordination into muscle memory. When you put pen to paper and the line lands slightly off from what you intended, it creates a disconnect. This happens both traditionally and digitally. but when it happens on the reMarkable, the disconnect is worse… and your brain switches to debug mode. Is it the pen? Is it the software? Is it me? The art and creativity side is lost.

This doesn’t happen with paper as severely. The only thing I ever have to think about with a real sketchbook is does my pen have ink, is my pencil sharp? If there’s a disconnect between what I want to draw versus what is goes on paper, I know its probably because of me and not the tool.

Paper just works.

I haven’t tried other e-ink tablets, so I’m biased. It might be better on the newer color reMarkable Paper Pro… but honestly, I’d trade the color for accuracy any day. I’ve also heard good things from other folks using the Boox and the Supernote, and I need to get my hands on one to try it out because I still do love e-ink as an alternative… I mean… i like it a lot.2

If any of you are sketching on a different e-ink tablet, what do you actually like about it compared to a real sketchbook? Genuinely curious.

I do still sketch on the reMarkable, especially when I want to work in layers. That’s where the digital workflow sneaking into sketching genuinely rules, and I don’t think I’d give it up. But when I want to do a simple sketch, or just focus on art, or know I want something accurate, I still reach for my sketchbook.

Almost everything else held up.

Typing with the Type Folio is still the daily driver, and still faster than I can handwrite. I brain dump random thoughts, to-do lists, half-formed ideas on it constantly. I’m still drafting Substack posts on it (including this one right now.), as well as a bunch more future dev logs posts and ideas for the game we’re making.3

The bullet journal has also stayed on the reMarkable. My bullet journaling is half brain dump and half list, and it gets chaotic fast, which is part of the point. I keep coming back to this ability to be able to cut and paste a section further down the page or onto the next day so that today still reads clearly. That’s kinda a neat thing to be able to do with your handwriting. I know it’s probably against the spirit of traditional bullet journaling, but we all tweak our system to make it work for us. They also recently added handwriting search. I don’t convert my handwriting to text unless I actually need to, but being able to find something I scribbled three weeks ago is a nice bonus.

My productivity system and sketchbook got integrated. It didn’t get replaced as I imagined it would.

I still use digital tools for parts of my bullet journaling. And the pull of paper hasn’t fully gone away either. I had an idea of printing out my 2025 daily bullet journal just to have the physical archive on the shelf.

So I stand in the same spot I did in the first post. You don’t have to pick one or the other. Keep the best of both worlds. Use the reMarkable when you need it, and reach for the traditional sketchbook and paper when you need those. We keep searching for the one tool, the perfect system that replaces everything. At least I do anyway. But sometimes the search itself becomes the problem. The reMarkable didn’t replace my system. It supports how I actually work now across digital and analog.

That’s more useful than a total replacement ever would have been.