For my 40th birthday this year, Jochem organized a trip to London with the boys. Although the kids were both born in London, neither have been back since we moved to The Netherlands five years ago and I have really wanted them to see the old neighbourhood and get to know the city they will forever be tied to.

Jochem found a bnb right across from our old house, which was just lovely.

But first. The journey. We had wanted to go by train, but the prices were so exorbitant that we decided against our better judgement to go by plane this time. And boy, did our karma catch up to us.

I needed many wines to recover from that day.

The next day we walked around our old neighborhood towards Stoke Newington where we hit the playground and did a nice lunch. Then, off to Islington Green for some serious bookshop action. In the evening we ordered Indian food, which, even if it’s “just” a takeout is still better than any Indian food we’d be able to get in NL. Yummmm

The next day was Easter and aside from the Easter egg hunt, we didn’t plan our day very well. But the museum was worth the wait and so was the sushi.

For our final day we hit another playground, and hung around cafes all day eating cake, drinking coffee, and reading the books we got this weekend. In the evening we flew back home and got home incredibly late (hoping we wouldn’t get told off by the kids’ teachers the next day for them falling asleep in class, but they managed)!

We miss you already, London!

Another sketchbook tour! This one spanning from June 2023, until January 2024. Not the most creative couple of months for me as I was dealing with some health issues, but there's a couple of drawings I'm quite happy with nonetheless.

I also talk a bit about staying in your comfort zone vs pushing through, and how in some situations I am ok with sitting in my comfort zone as a part time artists (and especially when life happens). What is your view? Eager to hear!

Sketchbook: Seawhite of Brighton A5 sketchbook Materials: Tombow markers, watercolors, Luminance colored pencils, inks and gouache!

Music via Epidemic Sounds!

This year has been a slow year for painting. During the pandemic I felt like I was hanging onto my brushes for dear life, but ever since then life has sped up again, and creative work slowed down. It’s not always what I want, but at the same time it means more of the work has moved from my hands to my head, thinking through concepts before finding the time to put them onto canvas. I feel like this has helped me find a voice that’s deeper and more considered in my work.

Spring & Summer: Pebbles

The dark winter months produced very little, but as the trees finally started to sprout some new leaves, the paints also came back to life for me. We had a wet summer, and pebbles, streams, and rain were on my mind as I explored loose shapes and adding depth and reflections to my abstract works.

Late Summer: Lush Greens & a Commission

With some warmer weather coming in late August and early September, darker greens and pinks came into my work. I’m always amazed at how much the seasons influence my colors, but I don’t mind it. Even though we live in a city, it’s nice to be connected to nature. This piece, with many many layers, was done as a commission for a dear friend of mine living across the globe. It’s on its way to her home now and hope it’ll be a good fit.

At the same time I have decided not to do as many commissions anymore - I love doing them, but they’re also a little stressful (Will they like it? Will I want to make what they want?) and with work being insane at the moment, I think it may be healthier to take a step back.

On my Easel now

This piece on the left I absolutely adore and is a work I’ve been working on for ages. It’s had about six iterations, which are all layered somewhere underneath there, but finally is finding its ‘soul’. I couldn’t tell you what inspired me, but it feels like a culmination of the work I’ve done this year so far, and it feels very satisfying. On the right is a piece I made as a gift for another dear friend. She’s got such a caring and vibrant personality, and I wanted to see if I could capture that in a painting.

What’s next? I’ve bought two large square canvases. They’re primed and ready to go, but I feel with fall coming in for real (?) now, I need a bit of time to settle on the color palette. Stay tuned, I suppose.

I don’t know which is more unbelievable: the fact that we booked our summer holiday for 2023 before 2022 had ended, or that it wasn’t to a warm country. We had initially planned to go to Italy with the boys, but when my mom and stepdad asked to plan a joint vacation, we changed tack. My mom doesn’t do hot weather, and we missed the UK - always having felt bummed out that we’d never visited Cornwall while we still lived there.

And yes, it rained. A lot. But boy, did it not disappoint.

Cornwall is rough, wild, gloomy, magical, and some days we felt like the water was swallowing us whole from all directions.

I didn’t film every single thing we did, chasing instead to stay in the moment, but I filmed some. And I drew in my sketchbooks, mostly at night in the dimly lit dining room of the 17th century cottage we were staying in (which sounds romantic and kind of was but also was very damp and covered in moths, but that kind of give and take is expected after 370+ years). Here’s a video, including gloomy music and no talking, because after two weeks on vacation with two loud little boys, I think the whole world needs some quiet.

Some more scans below for your enjoyment. Click to enlarge.

Sketchbook: Seawhite of Brighton A4 eco sketchbook

Materials: Crayons, watercolors and colored pencils

Music: by Hannah Lindgren via Epidemic Sounds!

Another sketchbook filled. Big fan of the paper quality of this Odd Orange sketchbook, and it really invited me to experiment with materials and layouts. All in all super happy with this sketchbook and the work in here.

Sketchbook: Odd Orange A5 Landscape Sketchbook

Materials: Tombow markers, watercolors, Luminance colored pencils, inks and acrylic paints

Music: 'Das Hotel' and 'Claypots St.Kilda' by Sugoi via Epidemic Sounds!

I had forgotten to film a tour of two sketchbooks and it’s been keeping me up at night, y’all. Or perhaps I chose to forget as it’s not my best work in here. It does give an interesting snapshot of the vida lockdown!

Sketchbook: Seawhite of Brighton travel sketchbooks
Materials: Tombow markers, watercolors, Luminance colored pencils, inks and even some acrylic paints!

Music all via Epidemic Sounds!

It’s here! I came back from a work trip to find the print proof for my London zine, which has almost become more like a book. It’s 40 pages including the cover. I just kept adding pages, and in the end this is just a small selection. It’s a testament to how personal this zine, book, zine-book thing is.

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The drawings were made between 2014-2023, but most of them I started in 2019, when we knew we’d be moving away from London. While we made the decision to go and move closer to our families, I was absolutely heartbroken to leave. If I’m being honest, for a long time I had imagined never leaving, I felt so at home in London. We had even looked (loosely) at buying a house, but in the end Brexit/rent/childcare/and mostly a very sick child made us decide otherwise. We’ve not regretted the decision as much as it’s been a process of mourning for me, personally. We moved to Utrecht, Covid hit, and I grieved my old life. And, like many of you, I also mourned the time passing by in what felt like a vacuum. My kids growing older and more Dutch by the day, but us not building the life or support structures we’d moved ‘back home’ for.

So while locked down, I compiled this book of drawings from our life in London. It’s a love letter to the city, it’s people, and the nearly five years we spent calling the city home. There’s not much text, just places that meant something to me so I don’t forget.

You can pre-order the book now via my Etsy shop. Orders ship out around the second week of May.

While you’re there, feel free to add any of these other zines and prints to your cart:

Back when I first started my illustrated journal, I was very active on Flickr. Flickr, for those who are not ancient millennials, was (and still is) a photo sharing website. The platform was mainly focused on photographers, but we had a small yet active community of illustrators who would share their journal pages almost daily and we’d comment back and forth, exchange tips and tools, and sometimes even set up ‘traveling sketchbook’ projects. The connections we made resulted in many online and eventually also offline friendships. Years on, as Instagram took Flickr place, and Instagram changed, many of my journal pages are never beyond the occasional flip through or sketchbook tour.

Not sharing every drawing I make has given me a lot more freedom. I experiment more, and the pressure is lower to complete something from start to finish every day. But I also miss sharing my work. Posting a post on Instagram has become this ‘thing’ where I feel like I can only post the best of the best, and not every day IS the best. I also refuse to draw with the aim of having enough ‘content’. Drawing and painting is truly a practice for me, not a goal. So here’s a few (not all) of my recent illustrated journal pages that I liked creating and don’t hate the result. Into the silent void they go ;-)

It's been a while since I did one of these. To be honest, I tend to cramp up a bit when I film my process and end up not loving the end result, BUT I got a new camera setup for my birthday so I had to test it! Real time this was about 2 hours of drawing, including tea breaks and waiting for the watercolors to dry, but I sped it up for your convenience because there's a lot of fiddling around with the background.

Challenged myself with choosing a limited color palette, using the Odd Orange color stickers.

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Sketchbook: Odd Orange A5 landscape sketchbook

Materials: Winsor & Newton watercolor pans, Caran d' Ache Luminance pencils, Ecoline markers, Tombow Fudenosuke fineline marker

Music: 'Empty Briefcase' by Victor Lundberg, followed by 'Fast Forward, Pause' by Rebecca Mardal. Both via Epidemic Sounds.

Lots of different kinds of drawings in this sketchbook! Illustrated journal pages, on location drawing, live drawing sessions I did online, and random sketches from imagination!

Sketchbook: Seawhite of Brighton A5 sketchbook

Materials: Tombow markers, watercolors, Luminance colored pencils, inks and even some acrylic paints!

Music: 'I Love You Both' by Vendla via Epidemic Sounds!

Last weekend I joined my friends and a large group of sketchers for another day of 'urban sketching' in my hometown of Utrecht. The staff of the Stadsschouwburg (aka city theater) was kind enough to let us sketch inside (as it was and still is pretty cold), and we even had some fabulous lunch!

I don't love how my sketches turned out (I wasn't tremendously inspired), but the limited color palette I picked out on a whim, made things interesting. Back home I tested my new pan pastels as a bonus!

Huge thanks for my friend Ellen Vesters for filming me!!! It made the whole ordeal a lot less cringey for me. <3

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Sketchbook: Seawhite of Berighton

Materials: Tombow markers, Luminance colored pencils, Pan Pasels, Neocolor II

Music: 'Suncatcher' by Wendy Marcini via Epidemic Sounds!

I’ve been thinking about this ever since seeing this exhibit (which was the ‘Women’s Palette 1900-1950’ in De Kunsthal, Rotterdam).

Now, none of this was ‘news’ to me. Of course I know women are underrepresented in art and museums. And of course I’m well aware that so so many groups in society experience being excluded and not being represented well enough in many and more important areas of society. I know all this (and probably don’t know half of it, still).

But I guess it took tearing up at the sight of these women, professional artists, depicted in their studios, to realize that I too had fitted myself into a box I didn’t know was placed inside me. I honestly think, had I seen this exhibit as a little girl, my life may have gone differently. And I don’t even remember making this choice or ever verbalizing it.

I guess that’s the lesson I’ve learned: you can try to be aware of privilege or the patriarchal system all you want - it’s even more deeply ingrained than you think, and it’s causing us as a society to lose out on so much beauty.

Over the holidays, I took two full weeks off. A luxury, but I needed a break. 2022 was indeed a big year, with major building works, a big move, little holiday, and lots of work. With work in a good place, and a lovely + strong team (wo)manning the fort, I felt comfortable enough to take some time to truly relax.

And this, I did. I took some time to do nothing, enjoy my time with my men (big and small), and even see some art. As a result, I did lots of drawing, and by the end of the two weeks, I’m feeling more creative than I have in a while. See some of my pages below!

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I’m excited for 2023. I sort of bristle at saying this, knowing the current political / social / ecological / economic realities, but I also think having hope is important. So, yes. I’m excited to make steps in my art. I’m excited to make steps at work. It won’t be ‘quiet’, but it’ll be fun, I hope. I hope you have something nice to look forward to as well!

Happy New Year <3

Almost forgot to film this one you. I think I recorded it as an Instagram reel, but a) what is instagram even and b) wanted to also share a quick flip through here.

As I mention in the video, I really enjoyed this 'cheap' (none are cheap, but their cheapest) Moleskine sketchbook. The paper is quite thin, and it inspired me to be less precious about my work and experiment a bit more. Despite how thin the paper is, I was quite pleased with how much media it can hold graciously, and am actually thinking to buy a few more of these! Sketchbook: Moleskine A5 volant sketchbook Materials: Tombow markers, watercolors, Luminance colored pencils, inks Music: 'Hopefully Just Imagination' by the Magnus Ringblom Quartet via Epidemic Sounds!

2022 was… well, it was a year. While I’m usually quite nostalgically inclined, this year I can feel myself reluctant to look back.

Looking back at these sketches, I can sort of understand why. 2022 was a massive year for us. We sold our house, the renovations of our new house properly kicked off and were finished with literal hours to spare before we moved in. Work got insanely busy and then it got even busier. Abel turned four and went off to school. Schools and daycares closed. Kids got sick and sick again. We got sick. There were lockdowns. We got covid. Life continued.

Only very few of these events made it into my sketchbook in a meaningful way. The sketches I liked best and have highlighted below were usually done during weekends or days away, or rare moments of rest. Instead of reflecting on all that was happening in life, in my sketches I focused on recording the moment I was in. Which, let’s be honest, is a good coping mechanism - mindfulness and all that.

I’m now in week 1 of 2 weeks off over the holidays, and enjoying some much needed downtime after the hectic Christmas celebrations with the family. I don’t know if I’ll do much looking back, or even looking forward. I’m enjoying not doing much of anything. I hope you have a restful couple of days off as well, and wishing you a glorious 2023. May the shit show of this world calm down a bit, inshallah.

Sketchbooks (in order of appearance): Sakura A4 sketchbook, Pith A4 sketchbook, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook (A5 portrait).

Music from Epidemic Sound: 'Postcards from June' and 'Early Bloomer' from Magnus Ludvigsson.

Since coming back from Paris, things have been pretty full on in the Floor household. We’ve al taken turns being sick with one bug or another (#nocovid), and I don’t think we’ve had one decent night of sleep between the 20th of November and today. Oh, and our nanny quit. Because we’re horrible people. No kidding, she needed more time for her studies, which is fair, stay in school and all that. It’s been a lot of juggling care and work, and scrubbing barf out and off of things, and we’re all feeling a little worse for wear.

Despite all that, we managed to throw Jacob his first real kids’ party, we celebrated Saint Nicholas with the fam, and the house is looking somewhat festive for the upcoming holidays. I’ve been working away on a London zine, and feeling terribly nostalgic about our time there as I’m drawing our favorite London spots, but I don’t think that will be done before the end of the year as I keep adding more pages (and well, sick kids and no sleep). Either way, it’s a bit of a non-update, but perhaps you’re a parent like me just trying to keep it together during Bug Season, just know you’re not alone.

Hope you’re all holding up ok and life is slowing down for you a bit and you’ve some time to nest and reflect on your year. I’ll be back soon, hopefully with more sleep, less bugs, and a healthy level of mulled wine.

We moved into our forever home (that we spent a year remodeling) last summer, and my office / studio is as good as finished now! I'm just so grateful to have this space, and thought I'd share with you how I've organized and set up the place! This is where I work, paint, create my illustrated journals, and comics!

Fun fact that I forgot to include in the video: the room was designed by the architect to make sure there was exactly enough space for the drawing table! (Meaning our bedroom is a bit smaller, haha)

Last weekend was my birthday weekend! No no, it' wasn’t actually my birthday, but Jochem gifted me a weekend in Paris for my birthday and the day was finally here! We went sans the children, courtesy of the grandparents, and the sun was out. We spent lots of time walking around, sketching, drinking wine, and looking at art. I also managed to shoot some video for my first ever ‘vlog’, so I’d have something to remember it by.

The camera work still needs some work - it’s feeling a little Blair-Witchy to me, but it’s been so much fun to pull this together! A full sketchbook tour + update on which books I bought are still to come, but enjoy these sketches!

A long one this time, as you all seemed to enjoy the long form / chatty video last time instead of the quick sketchbook tour. Talking about how I draw trees (inspired by my 2019 drawings from France) and the Brussels trip! Materials: Pith sketchbook and Luminance colored pencils from Caran d'Ache. Some watercolor (Winsor & Newton) Music from Epidemic Sound - 'Lazy Art' by Martin Landstrom

This past weekend my dad and I spent a weekend in Brussels. Brussels is close to my heart, having lived there from about 2009 to 2013. I always used to say that 'Brussels makes a bad first impression, but an amazing second impression'. What I mean by that is that when you explore the areas around central station (or any of the other stations, to be honest), it's easy to get turned off by the brutalist architecture, the busy streets crossing right through the city center (although more and more areas are being made car-free), and the dirty stations. However, when you venture into other neighborhoods, the less touristy neighborhoods, Brussels actually is absolutely stunning.

My old neighborhoods of Ixelles and Saint Gilles are one of these neighborhoods. It's one of the areas I'd dare say has some of the most beautiful Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings, along cosy streets and stately avenues dotted with excellent restaurants, independent shops, and cafes. Leafy parks are all around, and if you spend a bit of time here, you'd know there's a pace to life here that's much less stressed and strained than in other places. 

So! After meeting my friends and former colleagues at the old office for work, drinks, and dinner on Friday, on Sarturday my dad and I embarked on a self-guided walking tour visiting two special locations on Saturday.

Hôtel Solvay

First up: Hôtel Solvay. Designed by Horta and built over 8 years, this private home was only recently opened up to the public (my guess is to fund the renovations) and boy oh boy. My dad described it as 'overwhelming' - which I'd have to agree with. Our visit was limited to 45 minutes only, and no cameras, so I took my sketchbook in and drew like a maniac to the soundtrack of Downton Abbey (picked by the owner, the tour guide said, which I thought was a nice touch). I don’t feel like I did the place justice, because this place was absolutely stunning!

Musée Horta

The home and workshop of the famous art nouveau architect Horta, who has built some of the most impressive art nouveau buildings around. I used to live quite nearby this place, and went many many times, but was incredibly pleased (and by pleased I mean out of my mind excited) that since my last visit, they'd opened up many many more floors and rooms. I spent quite some time drawing there, and although cameras weren't allowed, my dad took some sneaky photos of me at work.

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In between, we visited a few of my favorite shops: Schleiper (art supply shop of my dreams), Le Typograph (a great independent shop and printer that make and sell stunning stationary and sketchbooks), and the local second hand shop (which is massive and amazing!)

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After a nice dinner at my favorite restaurant La Quincaillerie, located in a former ironmonger’s shop in the Rue du Page in Brussels, designed by a student of Victor Horta, we went back to the hotel to give our legs some rest.

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The next morning we squeezed in a walk through the Ter Cameron forest to:

Villa Empain

A very interesting villa in true Art Deco style, built at the beginning of the 1930s by architect Michel Polak at the initiative of Baron Louis Empain. While impressive, we felt less connected to this building. Perhaps simply because the style is a bit more 'stern', but probably also because the building is being used as an exhibition space rather than focused around the architecture/original function of the space. I did very much enjoy learning about the building's history, and many of the textures and materials around the building.

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We then hopped on the train back to Utrecht, where I snuggled the boys and fed them Belgian chocolates.

Hope you enjoyed this little tour!