As you may know, drawing is my number one passion, I love drawing and get an enormous amount of peace and comfort when I’m alone drawing. I also love travelling and exploring new places and trying different food. For a long time, I’ve wanted to combine the two together.

Challenge yourself

Whilst traveling around the Balkans this summer with my girlfriend, a promise was made to myself to draw in the places visited. Even though I did not draw in every single place explored, the exercise was for the drawings to feel spontaneous, so they were quick impressions and not spent too long doing them. I also kept materials to a minimum of 2 pencils, a sharper and eraser to be exact. The lack of tools was actually an incentive to not thinking too much about how to approach each piece, it was basics but I just got on with it.

what was different then?

What is interesting when looking back at them is that I drew mainly buildings and facades and the odd island. This is quite different to the work I have mostly done in the past. I also noticed that I was viewing the surroundings in a different way after studying them with my eyes and drawing them with my hands. I fully accepted mistakes on the paper, but the importance was to maintain the sharpness in capturing the shapes, the tones and the atmosphere.

It felt good to be less self conscious and to be fully engrossed in the drawing and surroundings.