Dive into my latest sketchbook tour, where I explore wonky cats, blind contour drawings, and experiments with various media. From my love affair with loose, splashy techniques to my ongoing struggle with coloured pencils - I hate them.

We're doing another sketchbook tour today. It's another Sea White of Brighton sketchbook, 140 GSM A4 landscape. I actually don't like this format very much. As always, I've started it with a quote, this one from Suzanne Valadon: "I paint with the stubbornness I need for living, and I found that all painters who love their art do the same."
I started off drawing a gorgeous jug. We were on holiday, and the cottage we were staying at had this beautiful old ceramic jug. I drew it over and over again in all different ways - blind contour, just the negative space, just the colour palette. I took a bunch of photographs of it as well. It's such a beautiful, interesting jug. I don't think I captured the texture particularly, but it's a good exercise.
This spread was inspired by Helen Wells, a fabulous artist who also has a channel here on YouTube. I love the way she uses texture and detail in her work, and I found it super inspiring. So I was just playing to see if that was something I might enjoy, if there was anything from her technique that I could incorporate into my work. I did a couple of pages based on that. The answer, the long and short of it, is no - that level of detail made me want to scream. I'm a very splashy, throw-paint-around kind of painter, and this repetitive detail - I hated it.
These were just some faces, practising keeping loose. This one I really like, but then it bled through from the other side. So I had a couple of photos of it that I just taped in. These are more faces drawn with the pipette of an ink bottle. It's one of my favourite tools to draw with - you get such lovely loose marks.
Here we have a cat, of course, in oil pastel on painted black paper. I painted the paper with gouache, and then some more faces. Then we have, of course, a wonky cat. This was drawn with my right hand (I'm left-handed), and it was part blind contour, which is kind of my favourite way to draw with the wrong hand. I just think you get really interesting marks and textures. I love him. I think he's fabulous. Really interesting, wonky face. I love wonk.
This was a sketch for a painting I was in the middle of. I ended up painting over it - it didn't work, it didn't do the thing. And then this was just a colour pencil sketch of some flowers that Lars bought for me. Very quick. I'm really struggling with colour pencils. I keep buying them, but I don't love them.
This was just watching some soft pastels and seeing how they behave with water. I love these. I love the neutrality and the quality of the marks here, really nice. And then this was just a little, very boring, pastel landscape, just trying out the materials, seeing what they can do.
This is one of my favourite spreads. You may have seen this on Instagram or around - wols in gouache and neocolor II. I love this one. They're some of my favourites.
Then we have some portraits of Lars. I don't think I can do a sketchbook without some portraits of Lars. He's my favourite subject to draw, because he's so handsome and so lovely. I also have a ton of photographs of him, so I can use those. That's my husband.
I was following along with August Wren, Jennifer Orkin Lewis, and Gail Kabaker. They did a workshop on women and flowers, which sounded really appealing, but I wasn't in the mood, and it just got muddy. I don't really like how these turned out.
This was an experiment for one of my favourite paintings. Before I did the reductionist method (I think it's called reductionist, can't remember), I was wondering about just drawing on top of it, and having the background as like a rug.
These were fun. This was a blind contour exercise, but you're using your own face. You're just running the tip of your finger around the contours of your face and drawing what you can feel as your finger goes around your face. I love the results of these. I think they're so funny.
This was from another Domestika course. I love them for trying new techniques and forcing me out of my comfort zone. This one was Felix Scheinberger - I think that's how you pronounce it. He's a fabulous illustrator. Does really interesting work. I'll link the course below, and if you don't know his work, do go and check him out.
These are just other exercises from that course, doing composition. This was colour swatching, colour wheels - so pretty. This is from an Emily Powell workshop, just doing colour mixing and playing with the emotions of colour. There's another bit of colour swatching, playing with neon. You can't really see that on camera, I don't think - bright, bright neon pink.
This was an interesting page. There's a collaboration between Tracy Emin and Louise Bourgeois called "Do Not Abandon Me". I highly recommend you go and look it up. I'll link it below. Louise Bourgeois did some loose watercolour outlines, like shapes of figures, and then Tracy Emin drew on top of them. You ended up with this really beautiful effect. I love the look of it. So I did some here with cats. Cats are very important to me. I identify with them very strongly. This is an idea that I haven't taken anywhere yet, but I feel like there's something there, something interesting. A thread that I want to pull on.
Lars bought me the whole set of Pitt artist pens and a bunch of flowers as well. So I drew the flowers with the pens. Then I caught COVID, so I was on the sofa. These are just layers of 30-second life drawing poses, just capturing shape and gesture and movement. These are some very bad life drawings. Testing out some graphite pencils.
I don't know what this is, I abandoned it halfway through. Watching colour pencils. More colour pencils. Another wonky cat. Oh, I like these. Oh, I forgot about these. I did both of these with colour pencils. And actually, I really like both of these cats. These are really lovely. I love the wonky eyes.
These are some very wonky foxes. Some more wonky foxes. These are all from Emma Carlisle's Patreon. She has the most amazing Patreon. I'll link it below. Lots of birds. They all look like they're looking at this one's bum for some reason. Exhibitionist bird. That's a very fat bird.
Some more owls. I prefer the other ones, but I think these ones were only 10 minutes each, so just scribbling stuff down. More birds. This is obviously a bird session. And wonky monkeys, some more wonky monkeys. These are all timed sessions from Emma Carlisle's Patreon. Another monkey. Some notes. There, wonky tigers. A more wonky tiger. That is a particularly wonky tiger. I know what happened with this one. I was like, "Oh, can't be bothered. I don't want to draw anymore. I've had enough." Yeah, just lost the thread.
Colour swatching, mixing, playing with materials, playing with textures. Another wonky cat, doing mark making, trying to find interesting ways to use materials. Just the Pitt artist pen thing. Oh, look, these are the original sketches for "I'll Watch Over You and Keep You Safe". I just print them out on the computer when I get to a certain stage with painting, and I'm not sure what to do next. And then I'll just kind of play around and see what we can do.
And there's another - if you watched my last sketchbook tour, you'll know that there are always flowers from Lars. Whenever he brings me flowers, I press them and I put them in my sketchbook. So there's always a little sweet treat as I'm going through.
And there you go. That was quite a quick one this time round. There are a few things that I'd like to go back and revisit from this sketchbook. Actually, one of them is this idea - I don't really know what at the moment, but I feel like it has potential to turn into something really cool and interesting. So that's something I might play around with. It might be that this was it, this was the idea, and it's done, and we can move on. But I think there's something there, and I'd quite like to pull on that.
The other thing was these colour pencil cats - they were a real surprise. I'd completely forgotten that they were in here, and it sort of made me rethink my hatred of coloured pencils, which mostly comes about because I don't really know how to use them to their best advantage. I find it very difficult to be loose with them, but I can see here that the marks I'm making - maybe I just need to persevere and keep going. There's also some mixed media, there's some marker in here I can see, and a couple of other things as well.
So those are the things that I'd really like to revisit from this sketchbook. I think that might be a really interesting exercise. If you've liked this video, please do give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already - it really does help the channel be seen by more people. If you like the sketchbook tour, then check out this video up in the corner here, and that will give you another sketchbook tour. Hope you have a great week, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye!

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