I don't remember how I stumbled on Amy Stewart's newsletter, It's Good to Be Here. I've been a fan of her Miss Kopp lady detective novels for years, and have enjoyed many of her countless other books about plants, trees, and, forthcoming, birds. So when I did come across her newsletter, I was intrigued. And when I discovered that it was mostly about sketching, with a lot of emphasis on travel sketching, I was sold. A prolific writer of historical crime(ish) novels and books about nature, plus an inveterate traveler and artist? Yes please. (It's like she's living my dream life--or as she might put it, wrote my dream job description.

Her posts include a lot of thoughts on creativity, introduction to other artists' work, and a ton of tutorials on various aspects of painting and sketching, which I enjoy a lot, because they're short and down-to-earth, and she doesn't present only "perfect" works of art--she is happy to share videos of art attempts that don't go exactly as planned, and she has the perfect attitude when that happens: oh well. One of the perks of being a subscriber is that she will occasionally do a painting (and painting tutorial) from a photo sent in by a reader. I recently sent her this photo that I took from the wall of Dubrovnik on our last day in Croatia two years ago:

Here is the painting she did from the photo:

I love how she used red ink plus a very limited color palette. It really conveys the depth of the endless red roofs of the city with the Adriatic Sea in the distance, plus the energy of this ancient city. Her tutorial is here, and here's my attempt at the same:

I used a maroon Micron 0.5 pen, rather than a fountain pen, so I didn't quite get the variation in line, but I think it worked well enough, and I really love how the color is softer and earthier than black ink. I would never have thought of using purple for shadows, and it was liberating for me to sketch in the buildings in a slap-dash fashion, rather than using pencil and neat, straight lines (what in real life is neat and straight anyway? Certainly not a Medieval city!).

Here is the painting I did of a similar view (from a slightly different perspective) in my travel journal:

This was also done from a photo, after the fact (I gave up on drawing/painting onsite after the first couple days of our trip). This image was done in all watercolor over pencil--no ink--with a wet-in-wet technique. I like it fine, but it doesn't have the energy the other one has, the texture of the tile roofs is totally lost, and it took much longer to paint (wet-in-wet takes forever to dry!), so it would be impossible to do in real life. I'm excited to try some on-site sketching using a similar technique, with red ink and a few quick swipes of color.

In last month's newsletter, I wrote about my ambitions to both travel more and document those travels more regularly and skillfully. I've kept travel journals for many years:

Some notes about these journals: All in the top row are in Moleskine Cahier blank books. These are thin enough that I can usually fill them up in a week or ten days, and they are light and small enough to be portable while big enough to not feel cramped. But the thin paper is not great for watercolor. The first one on the next row is Field Sketchbook, with heavier paper, smaller in size but with a lot more pages (and a ribbon bookmark and elastic closure, which I love!). The middle one is a landscape oriented watercolor sketchbook whose brand I can't recall. Great for watercolors, but not great for writing (partly because I didn't want to "waste" watercolor paper with words). I couldn't keep up with painting while on this trip, which was jam-packed, so I ended up writing daily in a Moleskine Cahier and then I did watercolors from photos after we returned and summarized my notes from each day into a single page. It took two years. The third is a handmade blank booklet, about half the size of a Cahier, which I bought at a farmer's market in Charlottetown maybe the second day of our trip.

My mode of travel journaling is always to write a lot and put in sketches and ephemera in varying amounts. I really do love my past travel journals, especially seeing them laid out together like this. But I also want to up my game--more and better illustrations, more on-the-spot sketching (rather than after-the-fact), neatly lettered headings (since neat handwriting is probably too much to hope for at this point).

In preparation for a trip to Quebec City in August, I watched several online videos on travel journaling and urban sketching from Amy Stewart's newsletter It's Good to Be Here and The Piegeon Letters. I spent quite a lot of time looking for the right journal and assembling my kit.

I ended up with a very small (about 4.5 x 7 inch) book by Clairefontaine that has about 40 pages (of thin paper). I also picked up a pack of Tombow dual brush pens--and then a second pack, because I realized the first one didn't have a blue--as well as an Ivy photo printer (it makes the cutest little stickers of phone photos!). In addition, I brought many pens, two sets of colored pencils, a ruler, a glue stick, washi tape, a set of Vivia Colrosheets watercolors and water brush, two binder clips, a pencil sharpener, a kneaded eraser, two pencils, a white gel pen, and an envelope for ephemera. Plus a small shoulder bag for toting *some* of the supplies with me when we were out and about. 

​I brought *way* more stuff than I needed, and most of it stayed in the hotel room. 

The first photo shows roughly what I brought with me each day (minus the Ivy and the glue stick--those stayed back at the hotel), and the second photo shows what I brought in my backpack on our last day when we visited Montmorancy Falls.

I still did a lot of writing (that's not gonna change), and did most of my journaling in the evening when we returned to the hotel room. (It was hot as blazes the whole time we were there, so we usually declared defeat and retreated to cold showers and A/C by 6:30 p.m. This gave me plenty of time to document the day's events while C watched TV. Only once did we head back out into the inferno for dinner.)

I did manage to do *some* on-the-spot sketching: the street lights and wine glass in the second row (photos 1 and 3); the St. Laurence River from the quay on Île d'Orleans (third row, third picture), a spot in a formal garden where we stopped to rest and pretend the shade offered some respite (fourth row, middle picture), and Montmorancy Falls, which I sketched while we waited in line for a gondola ride to the top (sixth row, middle picture). 

New things I tried:

• Tombow pens: fun and more convenient than watercolors but not the color range.
• Lettering: still needs some work but much better than past efforts.
• Photo stickers: so fun! 
• Collage: also fun!

Thins I want to work on next:

• More sketching on site.
• Keep practicing 1-point perspective!
• Page layout.
• A more streamlined kit.