What Exactly is Travel Sketching?

Travel sketching is when you have a compact drawing kit with you in your bag or pocket and can at any moment do a quick sketch of what you see, feel and noticed. Some people called travel journaling or sketch book art, but I call it travel sketching. 

Let me explain and elaborate in another way,…

I want to argue that “Travel Sketching” is different from Urban Sketching (shortened to just USK) as their manifesto insist that all drawings must be done from direct observation and sketching from a photo is considered not valid. This made sense because the founder of Urban Sketching, Gabi Campanario is a reportage journalist and had to sketch all his work on location. So Travel Sketching includes urban sketching, but is not limited to drawing everything on location because sometimes you just can’t.

As a travel sketcher, I will constantly be on the move, and often the circumstances may not always allow or it is impossible to draw everything on location.  As much as I love to, I certainly could not observe a herd of wild bisons on a stampede and draw everything on the spot. But I highly encourage drawing a scene in a market full of activities from direct observation because there is vibrancy, energy and movement the moment. And we can train ourselves to sketch with speed and accuracy.

A travel sketcher is someone who will be doing every type of sketching, location sketching, plein-air painting, and urban sketching, but the use of photograph to aid finishing your sketch, is definitely 100 percent allowed and encouraged. A travel sketcher’s sketchbook will reflect all the things that happens to that traveller, it will involve their mood, their energy, their interest in a unique way that only they can do. 

A travel sketchbook in my opinion can include whatever you feel like, sketches, writings, journaling, studies of something small, sweeping landscapes while on the train. It can be a collage, and it doens’t even have to be done in a sketchbook, if that’s not your thing. The main ideas of being a travel sketcher is always having the curiosity to observe and with a lot of drawing on the spots, they accumulate a rich rolodex of skills and techniques to express the world as they move through and within it quickly or… slowly. So the skills that we all need to be a travel sketcher includes the skill to interpret your experience into a personal visual narrative. And not so much if at all the skills to draw very well.

My 4 years worth of travel sketchbooks in no particular order (2018-2021)

A travel sketchbook can be very personal, a sketchbook you never need to show to anyone, or it can be very public, where you end up showing and sharing all the time. Either way I think it is a rich source of continuous growth, learning and joy.

Having said all that, drawing skills from observation is incredibly important as a travel sketcher, because we are on the move and sketching on the move means one has to decide quite swiftly what is interesting and do-able to sketch, and since we are not drawing in the comfort of our home or studio, the situation might not be ideal all the time. Overtime you will improve the quality and speed of your decision making and drawing the more you do.

I sometimes sketch standing up because the discomfort makes me work quicker.

It is a certainty that we won’t be making always good sketches, but when we look back at all the good and bad,  it triggers all the same, memories and feelings when that sketch was done, quite vividly. Trust me, this is not what happens when you look at vacation photographs. If your goal of a travel sketchbook is a perfectly sketched pages, that is not impossible, but it will change how you interact and spend your time. An imperfect sketchbook is always more fun, more realistic, and sincere. (See my sketchbook pages of my trip to Cambodia on March 2022 below)  

When I embrace the ugly stages in sketching on the road, of which a realistic travel sketchbook will have many. It’s like an insta- lesson in your pocket. Below is a sketch I did in a tiny little bar in Kyoto, the bar probably fits exactly 6 people, and bar owner Koji Yamamoto was amused with my badly done sketch, and so was I. If you ever go to Kyoto and end up at this bar, its called Booze K, you’ll probably see a sketch I did of Koji San pinned on his wall amongst geisha business cards and old polaroids. Travel Sketching is embracing the ugly stages because at the end of the day, ugly is in the eyes of the holder of the pen. Everyone else will be amused and feel joy seeing your sketches.

Travel sketching for me this year (2022) is concentrating on what stories are written in peoples faces, their clothes, their activity. In the big picture, the day to day looks mundane, but when given more focused attention, the mundane can often tell thousands of interesting tales. An example of this is the story about the Tuktuk driver in Siem Reap, while he was driving me around Angkor Wat, he also sends me photos of is whole family. I end up drawing them in my sketchbook because that’s quite a special moment, even if the interactions are mostly via text.

A sketchbook can record journeys of thousands of kilometres, rich with tangled treasures, textures, memories and impressions. Behind urban yet tropical lands, behind frosted glass or open windows, there are contours of crusty alley ways, damp corners from high humidity and heat that sits stoically and impenetrable. These are what fascinates me as a traveling artist.  

Felix Scheinberger says that when we use our sketchbooks in our travels, we are not tourists, we are more than a tourist. And I firmly agree with that. When I travel with my sketchbook, I am documenting, researching, observing, noting. I mean that’s a lot of things that contributes to a richer travel experience all around. I am addicted to it.

When drawing on location, you can see where your mood and mind is at, from a composition with a point of view to just a doodles to kill time. And It’s truly such a fascinating activity. 

Travel Sketching during a Pandemic. 

From around April 2020 to March 2022, I did not travel anywhere out of Singapore. There’s nothing like a world pandemic to push me to explore my own city the way I probably would never do otherwise. It’s a stark difference to my heavily travelling life before the pandemic. Living in Singapore has its downside, one of them is the smallness of the island city, and there’s this feeling of lack of options of the new and the novel. But here’s the silver lining, it pushes me to fully explore what is here, and how much I have not seen. I feel I’ve become a more well-rounded global sketcher because I’ve been able to experience my own city in such great depth, and had it not been for the closures of borders around the world, i would have never felt this experience of Singapore.

I spend a lot of time during the pandemic sketching everything around me, my kitchen supplies, my plants, and learned from other urban sketchers who were also stuck at home around the world and then my teaching goes online, and so my travel sketching skills continues. I decided to join different sketching groups and build my own community of artists on Facebook. Challenging myself to spend whole months sketching every day, has shown the limitless possibilities of learning this as my art, which I absolutely loved. 

My Travel Sketching Short Course in LASALLE College of the Arts 

After I came back from my 15 months of travel, I developed a Travel Sketching curriculum to be taught in  LASALLE College of the Arts, it started late 2019 as a 4 weeks twice a week class, one day on campus, and one day out on location. I’ve taught this class the past two years about 6 times, and 5 of which are in some kind of pandemic restrictions or full on lockdown and online. The travel sketchers community of students has grown a lot since then, and everyone really wanting to experience the art of travel sketching are welcome to join this quietly consistently growing community. 

In 2022, I revamped the course by adding one extra week, or two classes to be exact, after a lot of the students said that they feel 4 weeks are just too short. And the class on campus has become online, because the upside of teaching and learning sketching online, outweighs the need to be in a classroom because my demonstrations are more clear online.

So herewith are the content of my new 10 session Travel Sketching course: 

Session 1: Introduction to watercolour and ink drawing in travel context 

Session 2: Sketch-walk Objects in Space practice 

Session 3: Drawing Urban Landscape

Session 4: Sketch-walk Urban Landscape practice 

Session 5: Drawing Signs and Perspectives

Session 6: Sketch-walk Signs and Perspective practice 

Session 7: Drawing People Quickly 

Session 8: Sketch-walk People and urban speed drawing practice 

Session 9: Learning from your own work. 

Session 10: Final Sketch-walk applying learning. 

Check when the next course is, click here

Thanks for reading so far, hope to see you in the streets and in the parks with your travel kit! 

Susan 

A travel sketcher is more than a tourist.