Sophie PeanutSophie Peanuts real name is Sophie Baxter, she use Peanut as her online name.

Sophie started painting and drawing when she was little and has always been very creative, Sophie is passionate about storytelling, whether pictures or words. Sophie likes to spend her free time sketching out and about Urban sketching as she calls it, on the streets, in cafes or on public transport, she also likes to illustrate recipes for her cooking.

Sophie works with mixed media, mainly Pens, pencils, watercolour and digital media, just in the last few years Sophie decided to show her work online and she started to get illustration commissions, all from herself taught art and just practise and drawing in her sketch books daily.

These are a few of her sketch book pages and it shows how you can use your sketchbook, be rough and also annotate and write in it too.

In this sketch she has many sketches on one page from different visits to different places, on the top left where some sketches of people in a cafe; on the right is a view from a camping trip. The bottom is a family picture.

This next page from the sketchbook is a visit to the Dr’s, where she had a longer wait in the waiting room than predicted, so Sophie drew her fellow patients and also a self portrait, her she has just used a pen she had in her bag, it looks like a fine liner or thicker biro.

This is a sketch of her children when she took them out to a cafe, here she has spent a bit longer on the sketching and used watercolours too, but again it looks like a pretty rough sketch, just using lines that need to be there to differentiate what the objects are. A few more lines are used on her children as that’s the main focus of the sketch.

Here is a lovely sketch with watercolour, also I can see coloured pencils in this one and black pen, this is a great colourful sketch and this could lead onto a finished illustration very well.

The two illustrations below are finished artworks by Sophie; here she has illustrated some recipes, you can see her use of mixed media here and how well they work for her and her style.

Again the illustrations are used with pictures or sketches of just the elements she needs, for example with George’s cookies, she has just illustrated some hands at the top, not his whole body, and it’s about taking out what’s not necessary.

Comparing Sophie’s work to my own, we both use mixed media in our work and very much the same items watercolours, coloured pencils, black fine liners and watercolour pens. I would say Sophie’s style is much looser than my own, but it is something I’m working on. I would like to be able to work more loosely and more naturally rather than very exact.

I find Sophie’s work a little busy though; I think mine work is much simpler and neater. Sophie obviously spends so much time just drawing in her sketch book and has done so since she was young, so this is what I need to achieve from now on, I think this would help with working more loosely and to practise which will help my drawing skills and refine my style. I think working rapidly to begin with is a good start to start drawing daily and takes up little time, then from this you could move onto a more refined sketchbook practise once you would be ready. It’s a great way to sketch out and about and also to get ideas down if you where travelling.

I also found the Illustrator Moira Hay’s who also produces rapid quick sketches to start her process, here are some examples of her work. Moira’s work is very different from Sophie Peanuts though, Moira’s is more about processes that she uses after her sketches to make them colourful or add texture, but the basic sketch is still the same.

So this sketch is of Chiswick Park, looking towards Chiswick Bridge, west London, and Moira has used pencil, water soluble crayons in this quick sketch.

This is a sketch of Dovey estuary west Wales, Moira has used mixed gouache, fibre tip pen, and white correction fluid.

This is a sketch of a old refreshment kiosk at Hampton court in surrey, Moira has used pencil and the original sketch has been inverted and coloure-biased in Photoshop.

So as you can see Moira uses different processes for her sketches to get different effects and techniques to achieve unusual pictures.