Dive into the colourful world of my sketchbook in this behind-the-scenes tour! From blind contour drawings of my husband Lars to experimental watercolour techniques, I'll show you the good, the bad, and the gloriously messy. You'll see how play and exploration feed into my final artworks, and maybe even pick up some ideas for your own creative practice. Whether you're an art lover or just curious about the artistic process, this peek into my creative playground is sure to inspire!

Hello and welcome to Zuzu's Haus of Cats, the show where I take you behind the scenes of my life as an artist. I'm Eli Trier, and today I want to give you a little insider look into my creative playground, and that is my sketchbook. I wanted you to see all of the good, the bad and the ugly that goes into a working artist's sketchbook. The sketchbook I'm going to show you today covers about a year. So it runs from July 2021 to August 2022. Usually my creative practice kind of jumps between making work on canvas and then spending a lot more time in my sketchbook. But my sketchbook is a constant companion in my practice, I could not live without it. So I hope you enjoy this little tour, and what I really hope is that it gives you permission to be a bit less precious about what goes into your own sketchbook. So let's dive in, and I will see you in the sketchbook pages.
Okay, so I'm gonna take you through this sketchbook today. This is a Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook, 195 millimetres, which is just under 20 centimetres square. And the paper weight for this one is 160 GSM, which means grams per square metre. I don't know what that is in pounds, if you're American, I have no idea. So this has white paper. Usually I like to work on cream paper. But for some things, I like white paper. Let's get started.
So I always like to start off my sketchbooks with the date, and I like to choose a quote that sort of guides the sketchbook and sort of has just like a message for me around my art practice, and this one at the time, "Be a good steward of your gifts, protect your time, feed your inner life, avoid too much noise. Read good books. Have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can, walk, take the phone off the hook, work regular hours." I just think that's so lovely, and I think it's such a valuable message for anyone who's trying to have any kind of creative practice, like you really have to go inward and do the things that make you feel good.
So here we go. I was just playing with materials. Just mark making. My sketchbooks are very much a kind of exploration of whatever takes my fancy. Like, a lot of the time I just need to push some paint around, get some colour down. Like, that's what feeds me. I'm never, ever going to be one of those people who has, like, a perfect, like final artwork style sketchbook. I've so much admiration for the people who can do that. It's not me. This is just a working sketchbook, playing with ideas, playing with materials, all of that kind of stuff.
So you can see here, I'm just working with, like, really loose brush strokes, splattering on, seeing how the paint responds. This is just watercolour. This is using some like resist methods. So I think there's some salt on here, and some there's probably oil pastel there. These are from when we go up to a little cabin in the woods by the sea up in the north of Zealand. And these are from that trip up to Asserbo. So I was doing blind contour drawings of Lars. I draw Lars a lot when we go away. Just some candlesticks, more blind contour drawings of Lars. It's amazing, actually, how accurate you can get when you're not even looking at the paper. You're just kind of following the lines of your subject. Like these both really, really, they have his essence. I love that.
More just materials sketching. I really like this sort of gold, mustardy gold colour with this green, yeah, scribbles, mess. And then these, some of these, actually, these were just like play. But when I did my recent Tussie Mussie exhibition, we actually took some of them and turned them into limited edition prints. I'll see if I can put that up on the screen here, because they look absolutely beautiful, really, really lovely. Hang on. I can show you. These are just some of the test prints that we did. So you can see this one here. This one is that one there. And we kept the scan where you get the torn edges of the page like that, oh, just makes it look so good, so exciting.
So these are just watercolour, I think, and then some places I've used oil pastel, and you'll see some of these come through in, like, final canvases later on. So they're just it's just play. It's just play like, some of them are gorgeous. Some of them are less successful. Some of them are just like colour combinations I'm trying out. Both of these are not successful at all. These are, like, probably my least favourite pages in the whole sketchbook, but I learned stuff, and that's the most important thing.
I love, oh gosh, I love the way this colour just bleeds. And one of the things I love about watercolour, which you don't get so much with acrylic, is the fact that you're sort of co-creating an image with watercolour. It's such a kind of loose medium that it's going to do what it does, and you have a certain amount of control over it, but often you're just kind of pushing it to do some weird shit all by itself. And I just, I love that. I'm more and more looking to kind of try and do that in my acrylic paintings as well.
Yeah, so these are all the same watercolour. I think that's some kind of maybe a Pitt brush pen there. Love this one, that yellow and blue is just... and then I think I was getting bored with the whole concept here. This is another sketch of Lars drawing by the fire at our cabin in Asserbo. And what I actually did here was I did these are two separate drawings. So I started drawing him here, and then I got bored of that, and I started drawing his legs, and they kind of accidentally came together to create one, what looks like one image. I just I love that, that makes me, that makes me so happy.
This is just doing some kind of dry brush experiments, seeing kind of how colour runs out. This, for some reason I had a biro with me, and I don't know why. I'm just drawing with a biro, but I have no idea. Anyway, I started with that and just... no, these. This is much more my speed, just loose, different materials. Again, I think this is, I don't know, I think it's oil pastel or some kind of crayon. I think it must be oil pastel and watercolour. It's another very, very loose sketch of Lars just kind of capturing him while he was going out to chop wood. And again, it's weird, like there's not much there, but it has like his his essence, I guess. And he picked me a daisy while he was out. So I do that in lots of different ways.
This is, again, oil pastel, watercolour, watercolour, biro. I don't know where the biro comes from. But yeah, it was fun just kind of seeing all the different ways. I really like this page, actually, seeing all the different ways to capture that. I think this is my favourite drawing that I did on this trip, just like really loose line work combined with a tighter sort of lettering. I really like lettering. I haven't done a lot of lettering recently, but I really enjoy it.
Oh, The Creative License is a book by Danny Gregory, and that's kind of like where I got started with drawing years and years and years ago. I started doing, like, illustrated journaling, and I had taken the Creative License book on this trip with us, and I was just kind of copying out kind of sketchbook page layouts. I was interested in the idea of making a beautiful... as I said in the beginning, I'm not the kind of person who could make a beautiful like finished product sketchbook, but I was playing with layouts just to see if that was something that I wanted to do. And I think I like this page more than I would ever actually enjoy trying to create something that's structured.
This is like a cat ornament that I've got. I said here, like I didn't like it. I rushed it, but then now I like it. I think it's charming. Line work looks like... here I was just kind of trying to do some journaling, like art journaling, like capturing my day and that kind of thing. It's nice. The drawing of my orchid about to have babies. By babies, I mean flowers. It was a book I read, Stories of Your Life and Others. This is the book that... it's a book of short stories, sci-fi short stories. And I don't know if you saw the film Arrival, but the original story is in this book. It's very good.
This was some life drawing. This is actually like in-person life drawing I went to. This was from the first class, not my first life drawing class, but my first class in this particular, this particular venue, the place called Absalon in Copenhagen, and they have a weekly life drawing class on Sunday. Really, really beautiful model. And this was just, it's funny, because this is not generally how I do figurative work, but I feel like, if you know, like the basic structure of how the body is created, so where the joints are, how to create volume, how the rib cage sits, all of that sort of thing, then you're much more likely to be able to play with the proportions and distort things and just generally, kind of mess it up in a deliberate, intentional way, which is always sort of my intention whenever I'm drawing or painting, like I really want to play with that, play with that proportion.
So this is just some very basic, like back to basics, fundamentals, how does the body sit? How do the joints sit? So they're not wildly wonderful drawings, but they're... it's learning. It's all learning, learning, learning, learning, some lovely postures. She does some really nice poses. Actually, I can't remember the name of the model, but she was great.
This is just brush work, seeing like, mark making, seeing the different marks I can get with different types of brushes. I really love these sorts of spreads. Like, it's the perfect thing to do when you want to be creative, but you don't have the energy to like, think of something to draw, like, to just have a play and and move paint around, get colour on the page. Like, sometimes that is the most nourishing thing you can do. And I think they look lovely. Like they kind of, they're like, colour swatches like that. Those sorts of pages always makes me... they make me so happy.
So again, brush sizes, different kind of thicknesses, what's the smallest mark, what's the biggest mark, all of that. And these are all just in watercolour. There's some line work. I really love this page. I really like these. They've got that sort of wobbly, wobbly illustrative quality that I love. I mean, I used to be an illustrator, and that's always where my heart is really. I'm always looking for that kind of wobbly wonk.
These are, I want to say, pareidolia sketches, but that might be completely wrong. If I, if I've got that wrong, I'll put it in here while I'm editing. But they're basically, you just make a blob and then you make an image from the blob. I really like this one. This is such a good thing. And this one, this was my profile picture for a while. It's really good fun. If you've never done it, just make random blobs and then turn them into things. Again, it's a lovely thing to do, lovely exercise when you want to be creative and do some drawing, but you don't want to, like, make an image.
This is from a Domestika course I did with Laura McKendry. She was talking about watercolour. I can't remember the exact course, but I will link it if I if I remember. But this was just like, seeing how watercolour reacts with water and the different effects you can get. So what I was talking about earlier, about like controlling the chaos. This is kind of where you can understand how you can control that chaos to a certain degree anyway, and it just makes beautiful, beautiful pages, beautiful effects. I love watercolour. It's such a joy to use.
And again, this is looking at like tonal variations in watercolour, like how dark you can get versus how light you can get. Doing the same thing here. This is all from the Laura McKendry Domestika course, going light dark. Posca pens. Just like trying those. I actually use those a lot now, but this was the first time I'd kind of got them, just kind of trying out the colours and all the rest of it. This was just a sketch of my dining table. Tonal studies. These are really cute. I like these. I'd like to do more of these actually.
The theory, the theory is that when you use colour a lot in your work, colour is the thing that kind of gets all the glory, but your your tone and your value, how you're using value, so lights to darks, that's the thing that is actually doing all the work. So the people who are best at using colour are the people who sort of understand tone more than anybody. So if you if you understand tone, then it doesn't really matter what colours you're using, as long as you've got that kind of light to dark tonal variation, you can make a lovely image that looks balanced and has a good kind of depth of field and and, yeah, so tonal studies always a useful exercise.
These are beautiful, again, it's just playing like this is my favourite thing to do in my sketchbook, is just play with materials, see how they work. I think you don't have to be making final images in your sketchbook all the time. You can just make lovely things, like they're visually appealing. I wouldn't say this is final artwork, but it certainly feeds into final artwork kind of further down the road.
This is more of that Laura McKendry course, and this is thinking how different colours kind of bleed into each other. So complementary colours, or colours in a tonal range, or colours on the opposite side of the colour wheel, look at that. Oh, orange and blue. Orange and blue is just one of my favourite, favourite colour combinations of all time. Is it really lovely, just some very loose birds, just kind of doing a few brush strokes, and yeah, then adding in some details, doing the same things. It's just yellow stroke, two blue strokes. And then we make a bird, red Cardinal there in the same principle.
This is a watercolour. And I think that colour pencil. I think colour pencil for details. Some kitty cats. I really like both of these. I love this one. Love his little nose. Oh, it makes me happy. Yeah. Again, using the principles from kind of here and from here, and then actually, kind of using those in an image. And these fish. These are lovely. These are really lovely too. I'd like to do more of these. Actually, I like drawing fish. I have a whole section of my Instagram saved posts, which is just pictures of fish. I don't draw them as much as I would like to, but I think I might do more of that in the future. But again, using these kind of watercolour principles, just kind of messing around and then turning those, using those in a final, final image. It's just a sketchbook page. But you know what I mean.
These less successful, oh, colour swatches. I really like this colour palette here. There's something really fresh and lovely about that. It's a swatching. I got a set of Neocolor IIs. It's just swatching those out dry and they're water soluble as well. This is just some colour test. I did a... I made a what's it called a book? I made a book for Lars' birthday. Lars is my husband, called Reasons Why I Love You. And these are just some colour tests and lettering and stuff.
And then, oh, my lovely husband always brings me flowers. He just picks them on the side of the side of the road, and he brings them to me. So whenever you... whenever I go through a sketchbook, you'll always see dry flowers that I've taped in. This reminds me of him when I'm going through these. And this was actually him. He was just messing around with colour and doing some... I think these are actually supposed to be that way around. I was teaching him, like blank contour drawing and stuff. He wasn't that interested, but I had fun.
And that's it. That's that for that sketchbook. There's some really... there's some really lovely things in here, some really kind of fun things in here. There's a lot of stuff that became other stuff and fed into other stuff and taught me stuff, and, yeah, lots of stuff.
So I really hope you enjoyed a little peek into my sketchbook. I'm hoping to do some more of sketchbook tours in the future. So if you want to see those, then make sure that you subscribe, and then you'll hear from me. I have new videos every week on Thursday, so keep your eye out for that. I hope you have a wonderful time playing in your own sketchbook this week. Mwah, bye.

Shop Prints From My Sketchbook

Fallen in love with any of the sketchbook pages you've seen? Good news! I regularly offer my favourite sketchbook pages for sale as zines, and gorgeous, high-quality prints. Pop over to The Gallery to get on the list for the next shop update.

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