Travel Sketching Can Change Your Holiday Experience

When you are planning for a holiday, there are many things to take into consideration to make it memorable and for it to go well without any hitches. Making a travel sketching can change your holiday experience to make it worthwhile and to go at it fully prepared. Below are tips on the best travel sketches or travel plans for your next holiday experience.

Insurance

Anything can happen while you are on holiday and you may need that urgent medical help. Do not let any illness or injury spoil your holiday. Check to see if your medical insurance is in order and if your medical policy applies away from home and in the place where you are taking the holiday. If your policy does not cover you, arrange with your travel agent on how you can acquire vacation insurance.

Plane Seat Selection

While this may not seem as a very important issue, it is best to select a good seat position when traveling. Choose a window seat that provides you with a better view of the surrounding areas outside of the plane or an aisle seat that gives you unrestricted access to the bathroom and your overhead baggage.

Language and Culture

While taking a holiday to any foreign country may be fun, it would be more fun if you learnt a few words of the native language and their culture. You will meet many people like tour guides, hotel staff and other residents and learning simple words like “thank you”, “good morning”, “I’m lost”, “where is the embassy?” and so on will prove important in case you need to use them.

Luggage

Many people do not know what to pack when going away for holiday. Pack only the essentials and if possible pack light. You do not need more than one suitcase, but then again all this will depend on how long your holiday will take. Airports are busy places and security is tight. Packing light ensures you do not take too long going through the checks and it means less baggage fees. Packing less also means you are most likely to lose fewer items or lose nothing at all. Bulky items like shoes should not hold too much of your packing space and carry as few pairs as you can.

Seasonal Time To Take The Holiday

When drawing your travel sketch for the holiday, be very sure on the seasons. If you are a summer person, then choose a summer holiday time to take your holiday. If you are a winter person and probably love to watch and participate in winter games, then a winter holiday will suit you better. If you love a certain activity and your holiday destination offers that particular activity, choose a time that coincides with your activity.

Read Reviews

Do not take a holiday blindly without reading as much as you can about reviews of your holiday destination. Do not only rely on the positive reviews, which are mostly what you get to see online. Read deeper and get all the facts about the people, the hotels, the food, the perception of outsiders and everything else that would interest you. This will give you an idea on whether to proceed with your holiday or look for a place with better reviews.

Your Favorite Video Content

Yeah you need it as well! A lot of countries in the world still have poor Internet access and speeds are totally horrific. The best way to enjoy things you like to watch is to bring them on your laptop or tablet. I personally recommend taking a look at the newest production of Nubiles called Daddy’s Lil Angel (where step-daughters are having backdoor love with their step-dads!).

Wrapping It Up

The tips above are some of the many tips that would help you make the perfect travel sketch before your next holiday. Make it memorable by planning to save on disappointments and costs.

Travelogue Created Through Comics, Sketches, Illustrations and Collages

How do you keep record of the places you’ve traveled to or lived in? Do you store photos on your hard drive or the cloud and pull them out to look at them from time to time? Joe Secco turned his experiences in Palestine into a non-fiction graphic novel. Others like artists Maria Rivans and Andrei Autumn turn them into art.

 

After years of traveling and experimenting with different ways of documenting my travels, I’ve found that a combination of many media works best for me.

 

I use a combination of travel sketches, comics, illustrations and collages to keep my memories of a place safe.

Comics

Comics travel Korea

I enjoy using comics and caricatures to save funny conversations, funny observations, striking faces etc. on paper. I think comics work really well in capturing simple, hilarious exchanges between two people next to me on the bus, for example. I remember Adrian Tomine’s New York Sketches 2004 as a wonderful example of what I want to do with my portraits of people I see on the streets and the streetscape in a new place.

Comics are also great to quickly save dialogue. When the couple at the table next door are having the most delicious conversation you can overhear, a quick comic is great to capture that. I always carry a small palm-sized sketchpad with me for such emergencies.

Travel Sketches & Illustrations

Journal blog sketh

Journal blog sketh

I feel travel sketches of places, landscapes, buildings, interesting things are more in-the-moment than photographs are. You’ll probably think me weird if I say that I actually prefer sketching a scene to taking photos of it. In the act of sketching, I’m using all my powers of observation. I’m noticing details that I may not notice when I use my camera.

For ladies who enjoy sketching, I highly recommend carrying a sketchbook in your suitcase. You could fill in the sketches with watercolors, color pencils or markers, as this blogger does. Sometimes I like to leave my sketches black and white and simply ink them, when I don’t want the color to interfere with the scene. Here are some beautiful examples of travel sketchbooks and illustrations.

Collages

I also really like this idea of a collage of sketches and penciled illustrations with notes. Of course, it is also possible to create collages with photos and memorabilia.

How to Pack for Travel Sketching

All you really need for travel sketching is interest, a love of travel, a love of sketching and some simple gear. Since you want to travel light, look for sketchbooks that are not too big. Look for strong binding and quality sketch paper like the Moleskine pocket notebooks. This one has pockets in the flap where you can save scraps of notes.

 

A sketchbook with a sturdy cover can also double as support if you’re drawing with the sketchbook on your lap.

 

Sketching Kit

Travel Sketching Kit

I personally carry two sketchbooks. One is around 5.5 inches on its longest side. Another is large, around 9 by 12 inches, which I always keep in my suitcase for larger illustrations or drawings that I want to enlarge.

I also carry a mixed grade graphite pencil set, eraser and sharpener. A set of 2B, 4B and 6B is enough to sketch on most mediums. Color pencils also make a good addition for quick coloring of scenes. I also carry a thin liner pen (sketch pen and fountain pen) for filling in details and drawing outlines.

When buying watercolors, look for compact sets that also have compact mixing palettes. You might want to carry a set of oil pastels or charcoal sticks depending on your choice of medium.

You can also find a nice sketch kit bag or these lovely little journal bandoliers to carry your art supplies with you without misplacing anything.

Travel Sketching

Travel Sketching

Once you’ve got into the habit of sketching your travels, you’ll find you never want to take another photo again. You’ll get closer to your subject, spend more time in a location letting the atmosphere soak in while you sketch, and maybe strike up a friendship with people who look over your shoulder to see what you’re doing.

When your travels are over, you can bind all the various mediums into a single scrapbook or collect them all in a single folder. Now that’s a better travelogue than a photo album, isn’t it?

 

Do you have stories of drawn and illustrated travelogues that you care to share below?

Memories Come Alive – Preserve The Golden Moments In The Form Of Collages

Preserving memories of golden moments from holidays exactly as you experienced them is not easy. Photographs carry some of the essence of a moment. But not all. Videos can capture a moment visually, but they don’t have the same kind of immediacy as old-fashioned scrapbooks.

I like something tangible, something that I can feel and pick up and see whenever I want to refresh my memory. Something with a narrative, and many links to the past that I can pore over for hours and recall warm memories.

Memories and Objects

bukhansan-park

Bukhansan National Park

And often my memories are attached with some object I picked up when traveling -for example, a sketch gifted by a South Korean acquaintance of a beautiful 600 year old temple in the Mt. Bukhansan National Park near Seoul. Whenever I look at the sketch, it immediately brings back the scent of the incense, the sounds of the forests during the 2-hour meditation sitting on the porch of the temple. This sketch was far more intimate and evocative than a photograph, I think, and I immediately added it to my scrapbook collage, with some notes and photos taken at the temple.

 

 

I think a collage is a fantastic way of preserving the golden moments of your holiday. If you haven’t made one before, I strongly encourage you to do so.

 

When done well, collages can even become works of art that are not just jumbles of photos. I want to share with you some ideas on how you can make a travel collage.

Travel Collage Ideas

Scrapbook collage

Scrapbook Travel

Browse Pinterest for ideas and you’ll be amazed at what some creative people have done with their travel scraps and bits. You could make it as spare or as full of items as possible. I really like this lovely way of saving the route of your journey on a map, embellished with objects that possibly make sense to no one else but you. But the whole has a pleasing effect that even strangers will pause and wonder at.

I personally like to save as much of my trip as I can. I save receipts, tickets, underground railway passes, maps, flight tickets, baggage tags, bookmarks, pamphlets along with photos and anything else that reminds me of the place I visited. This could get crowded. Here you can see one way of scrapbooking. It may or may not work for you.

You may prefer something prettier like this.

Enlarged, framed memorabilia

Martha Stewart offers an idea to turn your travel memorabilia into framed pop art. You could scan a ticket, maybe a currency note, a flight ticket, the scan of your visa or passport etc. Martha Stewart suggests candy wrappers, food labels, menus etc.

Digital collages

Collage Monuments

I personally prefer old-fashioned collages for their character. But many people prefer digital collages. They’re great because you don’t have to worry about your scrapbook getting wet in a flood, burned in a fire, lost when you move home. If you have thousands of photos you want to preserve, you won’t have to rent storage to keep them. You can make digital collages with many free and premium tools online.

I hope this post will inspire some readers to create collages. If you do make something you’re proud of, feel free to share below!