First, I am loving the things and thoughts this approach is bringing up from my brain.

Second, I've been using some of the most popular tools and stuff in the last year or so, and have come up with a few favorites.

a) To my utter surprise, I prefer to use the Sharpie Pen, in either black or blue. This is indeed surprising since I prefer to write with fountain pens. Not only does it create nice writing to look at, it is much kinder to my hands. I don't cramp up with fountain pens. However, with sketchnoting, ink must dry super fast and fountain pens are not very good at that. I tried many gel pens, even the Uniballs (several different models) preferred by so many of the sketchnoting gods. Those are indeed nice, and I would use them in a pinch, but I like them less then the Sharpies Pens. I also like much less the regular fine-tip Sharpies, because even if they have colour, they tend to bleed. Bleeding bothers me because I like to use both sides of paper. Bleeding makes me angry.

In a similar vein, I have found that I do not need an expensive copic marker for shading. Many gods of sketchnoting prefer those, understandably, but I do not take those notes in order to publish them. I will never be a professional sketchnoter. At most, I need my sketches to be clear enough to be used in class. As such, I have found that a 50¢ Crayola pip squeek marker in "kitten grey" is quite enough for the little shading I'll be doing.

b) This leads me to paper. It is true that the form factor of the small Moleskine (Modo i Modo) sketch notebook is wonderful for sketchnoting. I was quite surprised by the realization I preferred to work on a smaller size. In watercolour, we learn to work big; but here, the small size forced one to compress one's thoughts further and make the sketch better. The Moleskine paper is strong. Ink rarely bleeds through (except the regular fine-tip Sharpies) and they take a line well. I'm not convinced by the paper's colour, however. It's a beautiful creme that makes text look great. I'm not sure that it makes sketches look good. It certainly makes the sketches harder to scan. I have to work on the sketches more in Pixelmater, because I have to tone down the creme to make the sketches pop out. I would rather have done my sketchnotes directly on white paper, so I don't have to go through an entire additional step in edition. I have a couple small sketchbooks by ScoutBooks I got as freebees from Squarespace. The paper is pure white. I'll try those and see if I like that type of paper better. I'll then look into getting notebooks of a similar size with similar white paper.