Xanthe Burdett is a London-based artist who works primarily as a painter, but her work, which is concerned with nature and the body, also extends to drawing and installation. Here, she shares her sketchbook practice, how she translates her drawings and composition ideas using Renaissance methods, and some of her tricks for approaching a fresh new sketchbook when you find yourself feeling precious about the blank page.
Inside the Sketchbook of Xanthe Burdett
I usually have a few sketchbooks on the go at once. I’ll use them to scribble something down very roughly as a new idea for a painting arrives. Or do a series of compositional drafts when I’m working things out. I prefer smaller sketchbooks – usually A5 – that can be chucked in a bag and taken into the woods to sketch trees or to museums to draw from tapestries and paintings. I like to move pretty freely within a book, I’ll often return to older pages and layer them with new drawings and ideas.
For a few years, I made my own sketchbooks. I do a lot of community facilitation work alongside painting which meant that I had piles and piles of leftover art materials in my flat. After my partner gifted me a bookbinding set I started using up the spare paper to bind very simple sketchbooks. The ones I make are landscape and roughly A5, some of them are a bit wobbly as I was cutting down A3 paper by hand and then binding it with a greyboard backing, string binding, and a paper cover. I have made some A6 books that I can slip in my pocket and use on the go, but they can be tricky to open flat with the binding so I mostly gave up on them.
I do buy sketchbooks too, last year I completed the Painting MA at the Royal College of Art and didn’t have time for bookbinding, so my MA sketchbooks are the super cheap A5 ones sold in the college shop.
I’m not precious at all about my sketchbooks. I actually prefer my wobbly homemade ones to expensive hardback books with luxurious paper as I’m more relaxed using them and trying things out. I work with a mixture of graphite pencils, colour pencils, and watercolour, with some charcoal and collage here and there. I do a lot of layering in my paintings and lots of these ideas are germinated in my sketchbook. I particularly love using watercolour for its transparency and capacity to layer over drawings. Pretty much all the materials I use in my books are gifts, hand-me-downs, or leftovers from projects I’ve run. I still use the Daler Rowney travel watercolour palette my mum used and gave me as a teenager. The pans have been replaced a few times and it’s falling apart but I like its familiarity.
I’ve recently been getting back into drawing with a dip nib pen. I love the immediacy of ink and the fine lines you can get with certain nibs. Over the pandemic, I bought a lot of vintage drawing nibs and really spent time working on ink drawings. Not being able to rub anything out made my lines far more confident and fluid – working in brown ink and studying old master drawings was a really important period in my practice.
I’ll use my sketchbooks also as notebooks: jotting down ideas, titles for paintings and lists of materials I need to buy. I like to paint over these written pages with layers of studies and imagined images in watercolour. Working this way takes away any preciousness or fear around a blank page and helps me treat my sketchbook as an evolving document.
I tend to use and refer to my sketchbooks most intensively at the very start of a new painting or body of work: I’ll work out rough compositions and figures, mostly drawing from imagination. When I’ve got a bit of a starting point I’ll work with models to get photographic references or draw from historical paintings. I usually then make paper cut-outs of the various elements and play with moving them around and photographing them to solidify the composition before drawing them full scale on large paper taped to the wall. At this point, I’ll develop the composition further and then, when I’m happy, use this final drawing as a traditional cartoon – transferring the drawing onto linen.
This method has roots in the Renaissance and allows me to experiment with and develop a drawing before I begin to paint. I love the physicality of drawing full-scale figures and the quality of the line you get on the linen from the transfer. As I paint in transparent layers sometimes the transfer marks will still be visible in the finished painting.
My sketchbooks are a place to be completely free without any expectation of sharing what’s in them or polishing anything. I also value them as a record of the time spent recording something from life. Spending time drawing and painting outside helps ground the colours I’m drawn to in the studio – Raw Sienna, Italian Green Umber, and Lemon Yellow for this cold bright February. It also means I have pages of references to branches and tree shapes that will often appear in the paintings.
Sketchbooks are very personal so it’s hard to give advice about how to develop them – I find it helpful to think of mine as a working document rather than a portfolio of perfectly drawn things. I like the weathered look a book gets after you’ve been using it for a while – some of mine are full of splatter marks from being referred to during a messy part of a painting, one page even has shoe prints on it.
If you’re struggling to get started on a book or finding yourself being too precious, my advice would always be to get out and draw from life – out in nature, in a museum or even just the things on the nearest shelf you can see. Drawing games are also a great way to get over the blank-page block – I will often draw things using continuous lines, without looking at the page or in time limits to warm up and just have fun with drawing before I start on more complicated ‘finished’ works.
My sketchbooks act as portals to the landscapes and figures I’ve drawn – time does strange things when you sit and observe something closely and try to capture something of it. Opening up an old book can take me back to a place more vividly than any photograph and I love seeing the seeds of ideas that have gone on to shape and change my work preserved in these pages.
About Xanthe Burdett
Xanthe Burdett is an artist from Devon living and working in London. Her practice is led by painting but also encompasses drawing and installation. She graduated from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024, and received her BA in Education, English and Drama at Cambridge University.
Recent shows include I am the I am Palo Gallery New York, When the Curtain Falls at Blue Shop Gallery, Omnipotence of Dream at Salford Museum and Palimpsestic Impressions at Arusha Gallery. She was one of the inaugural residents on the West Residency, the winner of the De Laszlo Foundation Young Artist Prize and shortlisted for the Jackson’s Art Prize.
Materials
Daler Rowney 12 pan watercolour travel set that was my mum’s
Watercolour Fan Set 42 colours
Walnut Ink 25 ml
Artway Indigo concertina sketchbook
Rosemary & Co Brushes Red Dot Pointed 6 and Synthetic Series 313 2/0
Further Reading
A History of the Artist’s Book and How to Make Your Own
Inside the Sketchbook of Gemma Thompson
Developing a Daily Drawing Practice with the Royal Drawing School
Matisse’s Cut-Outs and What You Can Learn From Them
Shop Sketchbooks on jacksonsart.com
