How my art style in travel sketchbooks has changed

August 12, 2023 Nohelia Vázquez

The majority of the art in my travel sketchbooks have been painted after I'm back home. This is due to several reasons: I get performance anxiety when I paint in public, I don't travel alone so I feel awkward taking an hour or more painting on site AND I get worried I'll lose my supplies or be made to throw them away at the airport.

For the NYC trip which was the first one I've documented, I had the added complication of having to take into account Covid rules that weren't clear at all. The requirements kept changing and the websites weren't updated all that frequently (and also enforcement of the rules seem to depend on the mood of the people working at the airport). After thinking about it, I did not take any art supplies with me and only focused on taking a lot of videos and pictures to use later as reference.

I had enough pictures to paint everything I wanted except for the High Line! We rushed through it on out way to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum (which I recommend visiting 100%) and didn't get to return to the area the resto of the trip.

I still think I managed to portray the area really well all things considered.

The Vessel, one of the things I did took decent pictures of

Bird eye view of the park, I wanted to document the track lines and the overall shape of the park

You can notice how afraid I was of ruining the pages by the fact that I added very few notes, and when I did, I used pencil. When I decided to create prints of the sketchbook, I ended up adding more notes digitally.

For my next trip to Central Europe, I took my art supplies with me. Most of the stuff I did at home, but I did paint on site. I also did a good job in picking the materials I took and for my next one the only extra thing I'll bring is a drawing tablet to make it easier on me to hold all the stuff on my lap.

These are the supplies I took with me:

Two round mop brushes, and a tiny round one for details. The white acrylic pen is for highlights and to make opaque mixes, sometimes I also bring a yellow and a red one. I use a nib to make really thin lines, a clip to flatten the pages I'm working on, a mechanical pencil and erasers for the sketching part, a tiny magical eraser sponge to fix mistakes, a small plastic cup to use as water container and a fountain pen to write notes

Some of the paintings I did of Budapest and Bratislava:

I finally started doing double pages spread. On this one you can notice that I messed up by not deleted some pencil lines before painting the sky, but I don't really mind it

I fell in love with the colorful roofs of Budapest and wanted to paint them so I did. This spread was the first one where I made a mistake writing, you can barely see the correction tape I used to cover it up but it still annoys me.

Very eye catching church in Bratislava, I mixed cerulean blue with white calligraphy ink to make it more opaque and pastel. The tiny note at the top is in pencil because I'm still not sure if I want to add architectural notes