Travel Comic (part 1)

Another long overdue post! I started out the year wanting to try and blog more, what started out as a monthly goal turned into a quarterly goal, and well, here we are.

A QUICK RECAP

It’s my second spring in Oregon and this winter was (thankfully) a lot milder compared to the previous winter. Even so, daytime highs have been lingering around 40s since late November, so by March and I think a lot of us were eager to shed our winter coats.

With the nicer weather, I allowed myself to slow down and spend more time admiring nature. On walks with my dog, I love keeping an ear (and eye) out for birds hanging around our neighborhood. I’m also starting to note down places I liked. Even though I missed the boat on #pleinapril this year, I’m thinking it will still be fun to re-visit these places in the near future to paint on-location.

Quick paint studies of some of the birds spotted around our neighborhood

TRAVEL COMIC

Since last year, I’ve started to be more intentional about journaling my life in the form of comics. I’ve been keeping up with the practice for the most part, but the comics are mostly rough sketches of small separate moments. This year I wanted to push myself to make a travel comic from start to finish. I’ve made short comics about a portion of a trip before, like this one, but never one about the entire trip.

In the beginning of the year, my husband and I went to Sydney, Australia for the first time and throughout the trip I took notes of things I wanted to remember from the trip. I was excited to get started on the comic as soon as we got home, we saw so many different things! But in thinking about all the things I wanted to include, I began to overthink the layout and put it off. Ultimately, I came to accept that making a polished travel comic was not going to happen, and maybe that’s okay, I decided I don’t need it to be perfect. I realized I was setting expectations too high for myself and that the comic could just be a way for me to explore how to visually journal my travels, without needing to make it too detailed. I proceeded to scrap the penciling phase altogether and draw directly with pen in my sketchbook. If there really was a mistake I can’t overlook, I covered it up quickly with whiteout. The first page turned out alright, so the next day I kept going…and going…and even though I spent three times the amount of time I intended to on this comic (15 hours instead of 5 hours), I’m glad I got it done.

And so, here’s part 1 (of 2) of my Australia travel comic covering highlights from our first 3 days in Sydney.