Join me for a delightful journey through the second half of my sketchbook! Discover how I experiment with different media, from pastel pencils to gouache, and explore my adventures in colour mixing. I'll share my unique approach to location sketching in Amsterdam, my struggles with landscapes, and my absolute joy in playing with colour. Plus, get a sneak peek at some pieces that might be coming to my print shop soon!

Hello! Are you ready for another sketchbook tour? Excellent, because today I have the second half of this sketchbook to go through with you, so let's get started.
Before we dive in, I just want to caveat this by saying that this is a working document. This is not final finished artwork by any stretch of the imagination. This is basically where I scribble down ideas, where I have half-developed stuff, where I start something and then get bored and go into something else. It's full of half-realised stuff, colour swatches, sketches - there's some lovely stuff in here, but it is a working document.
So, we're picking up about halfway through. This is the last painting that we finished on in the previous video. What we've got here is this painting, which you will have seen in the last sketchbook tour. I did mention that it would come back around again, and that's because I used the same image as reference, and then I repeated it multiple times in multiple different media. I don't know why, just for fun.
This time, it's done using pastel pencil. I love pastel pencils. I prefer them to soft pastels or chalk pastels, because I really don't like that powdery feeling on my fingers. With pastel pencil, you get all the lovely, soft blurriness of pastels, without any of that horrible chalky feeling on your fingers. I really like using them for life drawing as well, because you can sketch with them, and then you can smudge the lines, and you get some really nice effects that way.
The next version is done in colour pencil, using the Derwent Coloursoft. The reason that there are some missing here is because I took them out when I was designing my limited colour palette. The ones that I'm using as part of that colour palette are in a separate place, but these are the pastel pencils that I like to use.
The purpose of doing this kind of multiple times was just to play with the materials. It meant I didn't have to think about the subject I was drawing, so I could very clearly see what different materials do. I love to just play with materials. I've been using many of these for years, but there's always stuff that I've forgotten about or stuff that surprises me, and my sketchbook is a wonderful place to just play.
Sometimes it's a tactile experience. This one, for example, is done in oil pastels. Just the tactile joy, the sensation of putting the colour down on the page is enough to make me want to do a drawing. So this is a really fun exercise. All together, we have the painting in gouache from the last video, then we have it in pastel pencil, then in colour pencil, and then in oil pastel. Each one has different qualities, and I really like that. It's just fun to see how the same image rendered multiple times can give you such different effects.
Next, we have some life drawing warm-ups - one-minute poses. For these, I've used the Faber Castell Albrecht Dürer watercolour markers. I think this is the full colour range I have. They're lovely. They give you this really juicy, jammy line, and they're double-ended, so they've got the big brush pen end, which is the one that I use, and then they also have a little marker end, but I don't think I ever reach for that. Big juicy brushes - that's my jam.
This was a life drawing session. All of these drawings are horrible - I don't know what kind of day I was having. I was not in the mood. I don't think I had drawn for a few days. There's no cat down there. I don't know where they come from. Cats just explode out of any art material I'm using and cover the pages!
Anyway, this is a Draw Brighton session, I think. Draw Brighton have a fantastic Patreon, which is all online life drawing. So these are just warm-up poses. This one, I quite like. It feels like a more successful drawing. This is using the ArtGraf water-soluble graphite. It's really lovely for doing loose lines and things. I have this little tin, and it's just like pencil, so you get that kind of shininess that graphite gives you. I also have a graphite stick, which you can use a brush with and kind of wet the end, or you can just draw directly onto the page. It's a really nice material.
This next one is really cute. I like this too. The model had a beach theme. I think she was in her own home, and she had suntan lotion and a bucket and spade and some kind of fly swat or something - maybe a beach ball. She was sat on a towel. It was such a lovely session. I like that texture on her hair. I think that's from the ArtGraf.
This next pose was hideous. It was totally foreshortened, with huge feet going back up. I really, really struggled with this one. Oh, that's not a fly swat - it was a fishing net! I quite like her feet. Her feet are cute.
Moving on, this is from another Patreon. I got a bit obsessed with Patreon last year. I was trying a lot of mixed media stuff, a lot of techniques that were new to me, or mediums that were new to me. I just signed up for a bunch of Patreons and live drawing sessions and really threw myself in. I wanted to take myself out of my comfort zone as an illustrator. I had got very fixed in my approach. I had a style, and that was what worked for me. But when I started doing work in acrylic and doing big canvases, that felt very disconnected from what I was doing in my sketchbook and my illustration work. So I wanted to really shake things up a bit and try materials that I hadn't tried, and take myself out of my comfort zone.
Everything on these pages is just me trying new stuff and challenging myself. This one is from Shivam Chowdhury's Patreon. He's an amazing illustrator - really, really beautiful work. This session was with moving images. Drawing from a moving video is unbelievably difficult. I think I was doing these with one colour in each hand, just scribbling down the best I could. This guy, I kind of like. They were boxes moving in this lovely, rhythmic way.
Then I did the same thing with ballerinas. These are hilarious - I love them! Look at the face on this one. They make me laugh. They're so funny. This one's pretty, not funny, just pretty. These were done watching a video of them moving around and being at the bar. I'm just using Neocolor, and again, I think it was one colour in each hand. The results are interesting!
These are more ballerinas. They're super, super fast sketches from a moving image. These are done with my non-dominant hand. I'm left-handed, so my non-dominant hand is my right hand. I'm using that same ink pen - the nasty, crusty ink pen that I showed you in part one. It's this lovely colour that I mixed myself in a water brush, but it's crusty and gross. Maybe I should use it more. It's kind of stained the inside of the brush as well.
I love the looseness and freshness of these ballerina sketches. There's something really exciting about that. And then this was a chap doing tai chi. I really like how his face came out.
This next one is just a colour pencil sketch. I think this is the view from my studio window - just a really rough, quick warm-up type sketch. I'm using just three different colours for the view outside my window. I'll put a clip up here, or a photograph or something, so you can see, but it's literally these three colours. We've got the green shutters and the green roofs, we've got the red tiles, and then we've got this lovely, creamy yellow. The colour story is exactly the same. This is a really fun one to do, just standing and scribbling. I love it. It's actually one of my favourite drawings. It's got such a memory attached to it, and it's got some freshness to it. Yeah, it was fun doing all the tiles.
These next ones are very interesting. I really, really enjoyed doing these. I just picked some pictures of random people from Unsplash. For those of you who don't know, Unsplash is a royalty-free photo directory. You can download royalty-free photographs and use them as reference material. I just collected a bunch of faces that I thought looked interesting, hairdos I thought looked interesting, and just wanted to do some really loose, colourful faces.
I really, really love how these turned out. This one, she looks a bit psychotic. This one is one of my absolute favourites. This is actually going to be coming up in the print shop, which will be happening very soon. If it's already live, I'll pop a link in the description, but do go and get on my newsletter list if you're interested in being the first to know when that happens.
I had so much fun doing this, just really splashy, loosey-goosey. I didn't write down how long I took on each one. Then we have some more. This is just gouache - not the acrylic gouache that I'm using all the time at the moment, but I love these old wooden boxes. I think I inherited them from my grandad, who was also an artist. When he died, I got a bunch of his art supplies and these beautiful wooden boxes.
I use the Schmincke Designer's Gouache, and sometimes the Winsor & Newton Designer Gouache as well. It's water-soluble gouache, and I just mix up my own colours most of the time.
These next two follow the same principle - just finding reference images of random people. You probably wouldn't be able to tell who the people were from these paintings. I'm never really after likeness with any of the art I make. I'm usually after the essence of who somebody is or what they look like, or just the feeling that they give me. I really like both of these.
This one has an open mouth. I don't know if you've watched my podcast episode with Helen Wells, where I draw a portrait of her as we're talking. The image she gave me was her smiling with a big open mouth and lots of teeth - an absolutely beautiful photograph. But drawing people smiling with open mouths and teeth is so difficult to get looking normal and not completely batshit. It's notoriously bad. So yeah, we just do an approximation of that and move on.
Oh, this is quite a hefty chunk of this book - these are shapes from Amsterdam. When we go away, I don't really enjoy drawing on location on the whole. I am trying to find ways that I can do it where it doesn't overwhelm me. I'm autistic and I also have ADHD, which means that one of the things I struggle with a lot is sensory issues. It can be really, really overwhelming for me to be in a high-sensory environment. For that reason, location drawing can sometimes be just too much. It's too overwhelming. I don't enjoy it.
But one of the things that I have started doing more and more is collecting shapes. So I'm not doing drawings. I'm not committing to anything like trying to render a beautiful scene or anything like that. I'm just collecting the shapes that feel like the essence of the place.
This really came about on this trip. We went to Amsterdam in September last year, and we were on a boat trip, travelling around the canals. I just had this urge to collect the shapes - the shapes in Amsterdam are so distinctive. I didn't even have a sketchbook with me. I hadn't even brought one with me on the trip, so Lars had a little notebook in his pocket, and I was like, "Oh, I just want to copy down a couple of things. Can I borrow your notebook?" So I did these in Biro on notebook pages. They're just collecting the shapes from this boat trip. The view was brilliant being on a boat, because you sit in the same place and the view changes. The view passes you by.
When we got home, I copied out the shapes that I had drawn in Biro on notebook pages into my sketchbook. So these are the shapes of Amsterdam. These are the shapes that I was seeing as we were going past all these beautiful old buildings and through the canals. There's bridges and twiddly bits and turrets on the houses and all different kinds of window shapes.
Some of these look a bit like drawings. These are the windows, bicycles, bridges with lights around them. Some of them look like actual drawings, and some of them are just shapes - things that caught my eye, things that felt particularly Amsterdam. Nothing is rendered out or anything like that. It's literally just shapes.
And you know what? These shapes, for me, are so evocative of that place. They are so Amsterdam to me, and when I'm looking at them, even though I rendered this shorthand, I remember the exact bridge that we went under where I captured this shape. I remember seeing all of these different windows. I remember where this was. It's just like putting a line on a page cements it in your mind in the most incredible way.
So that's what I do now when I go out location drawing. I collect shapes, and it's much more peaceful. There's no sense of being like, "I've got to finish this drawing. I've got to complete this thing." Because you're just collecting shapes. It doesn't matter if it's good, it's not supposed to be good.
I have a real issue with art being 'good'. I think it causes more problems. It causes problems for everybody. Creativity is about the process, not the outcome. But that's a rant for a whole different day.
Right now, we're just collecting shapes, and that's lovely. So all of that was from Amsterdam, and then this is from another Patreon session. This is TJ Marston, who goes by Sketch It Studio on Instagram, I think. This was like a draw-along thing that she did, and I wanted to explore doing some landscape stuff. I felt like maybe practising some landscape stuff in the studio would help with location drawing, because landscapes are not a thing that I draw particularly often and I don't really know how I want to describe a landscape.
Whenever I don't know how I want to do something, I tend to see how other people are doing it, and then smoosh that all together and see what bits I like and what inspires me, and what bits I don't like and how I don't want to do it. It's a process of search and discovery, which is something you'll hear me talk about quite a lot. I think it's a really crucial part of the creative process - search and discover - and it never stops. It doesn't matter how long you've been doing art or being an artist, part of the job is search and discovery.
So this is not my original work. This is a copy of a TJ Marston thing, just to explore what she was doing and how she was doing it, and if that was something that I wanted to take with me into my interpretation of landscape. I feel like this is a bit too accurate, for want of a better word. I'm much more interested in... yeah, it's not for me, for whatever reason.
I did sort of do something similar here, but it just didn't feel right. You know, it's like wearing somebody else's shoes. There are some elements that I can take forward. I really liked her way of doing foliage, which is just plonking a lot of different greens down and then scribbling on top of them. That's a rendering of foliage I can get on board with.
I think the problem is I'm not excited by landscape. I like objects and cats and interiors. I'm a hermit, I'm autistic. I very rarely leave my house. I like things that happen inside. So this really is a stretch for me on about 11 different levels, which means that it's worth doing. It's always worth pushing yourself to do stuff that you don't think you'd be interested in, just to see and have a go. Who knows what could come of it? But yeah, this is not really my cup of tea.
This, on the other hand, makes me so excited. I love doing this. Given any spare half an hour and a bunch of paints, I want to mix colours. It's like meditation. It's my happy place, for sure. I think every sketchbook I've got has several pages which are just me mixing colours and trying things out. The process of the alchemy of putting this colour with that colour, and you come up with this colour - I think it's magic. I think it's absolute magic, and I love it.
So, yeah, this is just a joyful exploration of colour, choosing warm reds and cool reds and different yellows and things, and seeing the enormous variations that happen. Again, this is just that Designer's Gouache, the water-soluble stuff, and oh, they're just beautiful. Colour is my joy. These are such beautiful pages and the range of colours that you can get just from three colours. Isn't that magic? Isn't that an absolute fucking miracle? I love it so much.
These are two greens that I happen to have, and I'm mixing them with all different other colours - with black and with yellow and with red and Burnt Umber and all of that. Just to see all the different variations. This is mixing all the yellows with black and with white.
This is Burnt Umber. It's the colour I use for mixing most often. I use it in my acrylic work. It's one of my favourite things. I don't think I ever put colour on a page without first mixing it with a tiny bit of Burnt Umber, just to give it this gorgeously sexy tone. I love it.
When I'm painting, I'll have my sketchbook open. Sometimes I'm just cleaning my brushes. I really like how this looks, though. I love the brush marks. This has just got paper between because it's acrylic, so it will stick otherwise. This is just brush cleaning, swatching out some acrylic paints and playing with ink.
Oh, this is just some Sennelier ink that I got. So just swatching those out, there's colours. And this is more brush cleaning. I think these Sennelier inks are really nice. I really love them.
And here we have graphite scribbles, brush cleaning - they're not very interesting. Neocolor II swatches, seeing what colours I had, what colours I needed to complete the set. And this is the Coloursoft tin that I showed you, and then the pastel pencil tin as well, just swatching out all the colours. I love these pages. They're so beautiful.
And then this was mixing those god-awful ink pens that I mixed up, trying to get the colour balance where I wanted it. So it's just testing over and over again. And thus ends another sketchbook. I've even gone onto the board on that one, and there we go. That's the whole thing.
I hope that you've enjoyed part two. If you like sketchbook tours, I'm amassing quite a collection on my YouTube channel. There's a playlist which is right here, so you should go and watch that if you like sketchbook tours, and I'll see you in the next video.
If you like this, please do give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already, and then you'll never miss a thing. Thanks so much. Bye!

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