Fancy a peek inside my sketchbook? Join me for a delightful romp through six months of creative practice. Expect life drawings, wonky cats (as always), potato prints, my favourite art supplies, and the evolution of my I Feel Your Eyes On Me Like Beetles piece. Warning: contains A LOT of boobies (and one very weird dog).

It's a beautiful day in the studio today, and I have the windows open for the first time this year. There's spring sunshine, a cool breeze, and it feels like summer is just around the corner. What a relief after a long, long northern winter! I've just been pottering around the studio. It's Sunday, and I'm alone in the house - Lars has gone out. I've been looking through some old sketchbooks, and I have another one that I want to share with you today.
Before we dive in, I do want to give you a little heads up that there's a lot of life drawing in this sketchbook, which means there are a lot of boobies. There were also some willies, but I've blurred those out to protect everybody's delicate sensibilities. I'm not really sure how YouTube feels about naked drawings anyway. If you don't like boobies, maybe give this one a miss, and I'll be back with more cats and things in another video. There are still cats and things in this one, because I can't fill a sketchbook without putting cats in it. But yeah, just so you're warned, that's what's going on.
This sketchbook is a Royal Talens Art Creation sketchbook. They're lovely - they've got beautiful, smooth, creamy paper. They're one of my absolute favourite sketchbooks to use. The quote for this sketchbook comes from Andy Warhol's Popism, his account of the 60s: "People are always so boring when they band together. You have to be alone to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting." For a consummate hermit such as myself, that's music to my ears.
The first sketch is a café sketch. I didn't intend to sketch that day, and I hadn't been out for a really long time. I was going to this place to scope it out - they had a collective that I actually ended up joining. This was the first time I went and I was absolutely petrified. I was shaking in my boots and sketching, and yeah, this was a bit of a disaster.
The next sketch was back at home, in my old apartment before we moved to this lovely place we have now. It was my apartment where I lived by myself - books, telly, plant. It's really nice to have that sketch; it makes me remember what that place looked like. This is just the view from the sofa.
Here we have some quick life drawing warm-ups. Two minutes. I really love this - it's amazing what you can capture in two minutes. This is Trixie Divine, who models a lot for Emma Carlisle's Patreon. I think it was one of Emma's Patreon sessions we were using. These are some more quick warm-ups. One minute. Oh my goodness, this one was so hard. She was continuously moving, and trying to capture what she was doing while she was moving was just almost impossible.
There are a lot of two-minute poses in here. Any time you see a little number, it's from this particular exercise, and it's one I do a lot if I feel rusty or if there's a subject I want to master. I love this one - it's just done with an ink pipette, which is one of my favourite things to draw with.
I was getting super frustrated with my life drawing and portrait drawing, and after doing 100 poses, this is what came out. It's an absolutely beautiful drawing - just three minutes. I'm so happy with this one. You can tell the improvement - it's just a day later. I actually used this as inspiration for my "I Feel Your Eyes On Me Like Beetles" collages.
These are some more Trixie sketches. I like this one too - it's watercolour marker. This is the one on my newsletter sign-up page if you've seen that. I really like this - it's actually inspiration for another painting, a massive one, like 120 by 160 centimetres. The pose came from this sketch.
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Here are some little kitty cats. I love him, he's so grumpy. This is just watercolour marker and pastel pencil. This one is one of my favourites - I love this sketch. I love his expression, I love the pose. Yeah, it's really nice.
These are some potato prints. I've been reading a lot of Mark Hearld books, and he does a lot of stuff with printing. Yeah, I got some potatoes after reading that and just started potato printing. I don't know if that will ever go anywhere, but it was fun.
This is another every-minute-on-the-minute Emma Carlisle session. She throws me every time she does that - it's so difficult! This one is super cute. Another lemur. This was a Henley School of Art life drawing session. I've never drawn a man before - I don't know why I always draw ladies. This was incredibly difficult. This one's nice - I like his face here, and I like the way the pencil has made the texture. It's quite cute. He was really hard to draw, and he had lots of tattoos which looked gorgeous but were incredibly difficult to capture in the time.
This is a 20-minute one. I was tired and bored and didn't want to draw a man anymore, so I just played around with colour. I actually quite like how this one turned out.
Remember I mentioned my "I Feel Your Eyes On Me Like Beetles" piece? This was the original sketch for that. It's a three-dimensional collage piece. I'll put a picture of it up on screen. It was all about the feeling of alienation and being a stranger in a strange place, walking into a room and having everybody's eyes on you - that kind of visceral feeling of being perceived.
This is another Emma Carlisle exercise. These are horses that were drawn upside down. This is actually an ink blot, but I kind of like how it looks a bit like a saddle.
This is another one of my favourite sketches. I love this one. It's done with a bamboo pen and ink, I think, or maybe liquid watercolour. I'm not sure - I think it's ink.
Oh, Lars challenged me to draw a dog. So he picked the weirdest looking dog ever - a Borzoi, I think. It's funny looking.
These are more Trixie sketches, just little warm-ups. I really like having them all overlapping on the same page. See, this is what happens: you do a ton of drawings, you draw and draw and draw, and a lot of it's rubbish, and a lot of it just doesn't come out right, especially if you're doing timed drawings because there's no time to really finesse anything. And then all of a sudden, you'll come out with something like this. This is one of my favourite drawings. I love it. It's mixed media - I think this is acrylic gouache, watercolour wash, some liquid watercolour, some ink, neocolor. A whole selection of stuff.
At the back of the book, as always, we have colour swatches. These are liquid watercolours that I'm mixing. These are magic pencils. I have this one, which is all the colours, and then I love it so much that I got a set of different ones. But they're not quite so exciting - the differences aren't quite so extreme.
This is trying out my glass dip pen. These are bamboo dip pens. I really like this - I love his face, and I really like her posture as well up there. There are often pages in my sketchbook where Lars has just had a fiddle.
So that's it - another exciting adventure through the pages of my sketchbook. This one is January to June 2023.

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.

Remember: surrounding yourself with art that makes you happy is an act of self-love.

Go on, treat yourself!