10 Tips to easily fill your travel journal!
My sketchbook spread from my birthday trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico
As I finish my second travel journal I want to share some tips with you on how to lower the barrier to create on the go – or at the very least create art inspired by your journeys and vacations!
I personally like to split my sketchbook by themes so that is why I have a sketchbook dedicated to my travels, but there are no rules with sketchbooks so there is no need to have a dedicated sketchbook to this!
Below are 10 more tips to help you create beautiful sketchbook spreads inspired by the places you go!
1. Pack Light and start small
I find packing small and light to be essential when figuring out what supplies to bring with me for doing urban sketching/painting on the go. Whether you are going on a multi-week trip or just an afternoon outing, you don’t want to be weighed down by all your supplies, and when you finally settle in to create you don’t want to be overwhelmed with possibilities of what to use.
At my most moderate I bring:
A Watercolor sketchbook
A small watercolor palette that holds 20 colors
2-3 waterbrush pens already filled with water
A pencil, eraser and sharpener
Waterproof black pen
White gouache/white gel pen
3-4 Zebra Mildliners (I especially like dark blue, gold, and soda blue)
Clips
Paper Towels
And I pack it all an adorable pencil case ANGOO (except the notebook)
Starting small in sketchbook size and limiting how many supplies you bring can also really help if you find painting on scene overwhelming, like I often do. It lowers the pressure and also speeds up how long it takes to fill a page!
2. Consider quick drying materials
I am a big advocate for using watercolors for urban sketching if you are looking to add color. Watercolors can be super quick drying depending on how much water you use, you can easily vary the value, and you can quickly mix a huge variety of colors using little paint and little space. They are also cheap to invest in and pair well with so many other mediums!
I painted this spread in watercolor and white gouache on the beach in Santorini and I made sure to be light with water to shorten drying time.
3. Bring materials you’ve been meaning to use more
Once you get a little more comfortable with creating outside of your studio, consider changing up your traveling supplies to include some materials you have been meaning to play with more. With limited supplies, including some you may not be as familiar with, you are improving the odds of you using them. For me I brought my Neocolor crayons that I got last year on vacation in Marseille, but to be completely honest I barely used them because I was afraid of them melting in the hot sun. So now that I am home finishing up the spreads I am making it a point to incorporate them into my spreads.
4. Take lots of reference pictures for later
Filling your travel sketchbook does not mean you have to paint everything on location, I hardly ever do! I am more likely to sketch out a plan on location, add a title and a few elements, but almost always finish the spreads back at home.
I also like to include things in my travel sketchbook that I see while I am not sitting down with my sketchbook, so this is where our wonderful phones come in. I am not joking to say that I come back from some trips with up to a thousand reference photos for my art. I take pictures of anything that catches my eye, and I am particularly drawn to design elements like tiles and patterns. Even if you do create a piece completely on site, it is always a good idea to snap a few references photos if you want to change anything later, or maybe even make more art!
A sketchbook spread from Marseille I created back at home from these 4 reference photos
5. Collage Collage Collage!
Last year I saw Ohn Mar Win paste a square ticket stub in the center of her sketchbook and then make a stunning landscape using the collaged paper as a house. And eureka! I loved it and I started doing it myself.
Collaging pieces of paper, etc. from your journeys makes the spreads so incredibly personal and adds so much dimension to the art! So now I hold on to scraps of papers (tickets, receipts, business cards) to add to my sketchbook. Some easy things to grab/keep to collage:
-Museum or activity entry tickets
-train/bus tickets
-stickers
-business cards
- beer or drink bottle label (one of my favorite!)
-paper napkins with logos on them,
- sugar packets, etc.
You then have the option of including the collaged material in your art like I did with the Marseille Cathedral spread below,
In another spread based on my time in Marseille, France I collaged the museum ticket as part of my illustration of the Cathedral
Or leave them be to create a more scrapbooking spread feel like I did with my Athens spread with my ticket to the Acropolis and a beer bottle label I peeled off during our lunch.
6. Don’t limit yourself to landscapes
I feel like painting on location or outside automatically infers painting landscapes or cityscapes, but I find it much easier and enjoyable to parse the spread apart and fill it with the little things I see throughout my travels. Instead of trying to capture the whole thing I focus on little parts of the scene and as mentioned above, I am particularly attracted to design elements and capturing the food I eat while on my travels
One of my favorite travel spreads I have created based on a long weekend in Mexico City. And instead of painting landscapes, I made a “scrapbook” spread of the different activities from my vacation.
7. Pre-prep your sketchbook to get over blank page hesitations
Emma Carlisle likes to prep her sketchbook pages before drawing on them with random streaks of paint and marks. This really helps to get over the inhibition a lot of artists feel over the dreaded blank white page, and can also give you practice working over tricky materials. I don’t do this with all my sketchbooks but particularly find it helpful for my travel art.
Prepping your sketchbook is also a very freeing exercise, for this last notebook I even dipped my fingers in the watercolor to see what marks that left. It makes it a fun surprise on location to turn the page and see what background you are starting with! Below are examples of working over prepped pages from Emma Carlisle (Jaguar and long landscape) and my own work (Hampton Beach and Condado Beach).
8. Don’t feel like you have to create a spread a day
There are no rules for your sketchbook and I feel like we all need weekly reminders of that. Your sketchbook spread doesn’t need to look immaculate like the artists on Instagram, they are for you and you alone if that’s what you want. So don’t worry about filling each page with the perfect aesthetic, writing and drawings. Some ideas for spreads that aren’t just a recap of your day, week, trip, etc.
-Favorite meals
-Doors and houses
-Favorite things from a trip
-Street art that you saw
-Tile designs (my personal favorite!)
Some of the different tile designs I saw during my travels in Spain. You can see I am working on a prepped page with the orange and pink paint peeking out below.
9. When in doubt, make a map
This one is a go to for me, it reminds me of when they had us draw maps in elementary school and I get really excited about adding all the borders and landscape elements. Some of my last few vacations have been cruises so making maps of the different stops seemed like an obvious but required spread for me, but the maps you make don’t have to be super geographical or even accurate.
Other things you could make maps of while on vacation:
-Your hotel room/air bnb
-The street you are staying on
-The walk you took
-The museum you visited and its exhibitions
-The garden you walked through
-the dinner table from that amazing meal you had
A painted map of my cruise stops from my trip in April of 2024
10. When still in doubt start with a border
You may know that I am obsessed with tile design, and element design in general. So I find myself (and my husband and mother!) taking photos of different tiles and designs all over the world. I then use these photos to add borders to my travel sketches. It helps to break up the page and I love trying to recreate all the beautiful designs that I capture on my travels.
Which idea do you like the most and what will you incorporate into your travel spreads? Comment below!
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