Travel Sketching

My bags are littered with sketchbooks. Small ones in my purse, larger ones in my school bag, and ALWAYS one in my travel gear. Even when space is tight I make sure to pack some sort of small art kit, even if it’s just a few markers and tiny watercolor set. Sketching on site allows me to really be present and notice small details of the day around me while working on a page back at the hotel gives me a chance to reflect. Some trips I do more pages than others, but I always love looking back at my sketchbooks, remembering small moments from trips I may have otherwise forgotten.

The Gear

Micron Pens: my go-to for adventure sketching. I usually have a handful of sizes and colors to fit whatever mood or drawing. I love micron pens (or other similar brands like faber castel) because they create a great line without bleeding through the paper.

Watercolor set: the classic. A quick wash of watercolors can bring any pen drawing to life. I either use a small Winsor Newton set I have refilled multiple times, or this cool flip set that has small amounts of many colors in a very convinient form! The side of this one even has room to store a fillable water-brush.

Watercolor pencils: these are a great combo for all of your wet and dry drawing needs! Use them just like colored pencils, or add water and use them like watercolors without the mess!

Markers: I often tote around a pouch of markers for quick drawings. I like how quickly and easily you can apply color. My kit usually includes a bunch of neutral greys and browns for shading, some landscape colors, and a few bright splash colors. I try to keep it to around 12-15 markers or it gets impossible to find the right color when i need it.

Gouche: most recently i have discovered how much i enjoy gouche as a sketch media. It allows you to work a little more opaquely than watercolors, and use light over dark colors. After trying the viral Himi gouches from Amazon I started buying tubes so that I could make a custom set to travel with.

But what about......(insert favorite media) By all means, use whatever materials make your heart flutter! I know some days I'm just in the mood for pastels and nothing else will do. But here are a couple of materials I usually leave at home.

Oils and Acrylics: Generally too messy and too many bits and pieces needed to make them work. Also, once out of the tube you're racing the clock before they dry up. Or what do you do with leftovers? Lastly, both of these kinds of paints count as liquids in your carryon.

Pastels: While chalk pastels are one of my most favorite mediums, they tend to be too messy to travel with. I worry about breakage in my bag, and smearing on the page when I pack my sketchbook back up.

Colored Pencils: Nothing inherently wrong with colored pencils, I just want to take them ALL to have lots of color choices...but don't really want to carry them all around with me. If you can create a limited palette colored pencils would be great!

The Sketchbooks

When I first started dragging a sketchbook along everywhere I realized just how hard it is to find a blank book that doesn't have lines, or has paper that will hold up to a variety of sketching media. So i started making my own! I stitch designs into repurposed leather, and often try to match the stitching to the location even if just in colors. Then I bind in either. heavy weight multimedia paper to allow for painting, or sometimes a thinner drawing paper better suited to colored pencils and markers. I love making these sketchbooks because I can make them whatever size I want and I know they are rugged enough to go out into the world.

Need to find leather to repurpose? Try using old jackets, pants, or purses found at your favorite thrift store! Or be on the lookout for free leather couches/chairs for enough leather for a class set!

If making a sketchbook isn't in your plans, I also really like Moleskine and Leuchtturm books. The paper is nice, and I like the elastic that holds it shut. They both have a pocket in the back to help collect bits and pieces of travel ephemera.

Tips for Travel Sketching

By no means is this an end-all-be-all list of sketching tips. If you're reading this you probably already like to sketch and know some of the basics. But here are a few things I have found to be handy or helpful, especially when I am drawing on site.

1. Stick to your style. Switching up your style completely when you are possibly limited for time may lead to you getting stressed out.

2. Pick something small. Try to find a quiet corner, a small vignette, or even just how your coffee sits on the table at the cafe. These small details are often overlooked when bigger flashier sights are nearby, but can help you remember all the details of the day.

3. Pick something big. Look for the key building in the square, a grand vista, or the facade of a cathedral. As you draw, try to get the gist of the image first before worrying about getting every angle or detail correct. Your photos can do take care of that! Go for the overall feeling of the space and place, the mood, the lighting. you can always add in a few key details as time allows.

4. The infographic approach. Each page doesn't have to be a finished vista, or even completely covered. I have pages that are just a bunch of drawings of the new foods I've tried scattered across the page. Other times I'll pick multiple things I liked about one place and add them all to a single page infographic style.

5. Try collaging! A lot of my travel journals are full of all the small bits of paper that you seem to collect when traveling. Train tickets, museum entry stubs, fliers and the like. I'll glue in bits of these things and draw or write around them.

6. Most importantly, you're doing this for FUN. So have fun with it! If it gets too stressful, flip the age and start again. The paper is not precious, and you can always collage over any pages you're displeased with later on. Travel skteching is for you, about your memories and impressions, not for a gallery. This is on the fly sketching, so don't be worried about perfection.

Bonus Tip: I start getting excited about a new trip way before I ever even thinking of packing my bags. I want to learn about the places and people we'll be encountering and meeting. I want to know what local customs and traditions are, especially if we'll be there around a holiday. Frequently I will start a travel sketchbook well in advance and use it first to record any early research or findings about the place we'll be visiting. For example, I wanted to make sure I knew the difference between a Buddhist Temple and Shinto Shrine before heading to Japan, and used a couple pages to work through the comparison.

Student Travel Sketching

I'm super pumped to bring travel sketching to my students! We use sketchbooks in class regularly to plan out ideas, brainstorm, and of course for our Observational Drawing Wednesdays. While we use traditional sketchbooks for classwork, this year all of the students going on our Peru trip will be making a mini travel art kit, complete with their own leather sketchbook.

My students right now love using micron pens, which is a great tool to just tie right into your sketchbook. But I want to give them a chance to work with color without carrying around eight million markers or colored pencils. After doing some super serious research on pinterest, I found that a lot of people make these adorable watercolor kits out of altoids tins. I can't wait to see how they do!