How to Sketch a Place You Have Never Been: The Urban Sketcher's Guide
By Dalton Scolman
A photograph records what a place looks like. A travel sketch records what it felt like to be there.
This is not a sentimental distinction. It is a practical one. A photograph shows you the view from the terrace. A sketch shows you what you chose to look at for twenty minutes, how the light was falling at that specific time, what color the shadow on the wall actually was, and what small thing caught your eye that would not have appeared in any photograph because it was not interesting enough to frame. The act of looking carefully enough to draw something is the act of being genuinely present in a place.
This guide covers how to sketch places you have never been: how to arrive somewhere unfamiliar and find your first subject, how to build a travel sketchbook that tells the story of a trip rather than producing isolated images, what the carnet de voyage tradition teaches about visual travel, and why the paint format that never slows you down is the one that produces the richest travel pages.
The First Hour in a New Place
Arriving somewhere new with a sketchbook creates a specific kind of decision paralysis. Everything is unfamiliar. Everything looks interesting. Nothing looks sketchable yet because you have not learned how to look at this place.
The most useful thing to do in the first hour is not sketch. It is walk.
Walk without the sketchbook open. Let the place arrive at you rather than immediately trying to process it into pages. Notice what keeps drawing your eye back. A particular quality of light on a certain kind of surface. An unexpected color combination on a building. The specific character of the street furniture or the shopfronts or the way people move in the public spaces. These repeated noticing are telling you what this place specifically has that your usual sketching environment does not.
After thirty to forty-five minutes of this attentive walking, one subject will have surfaced naturally. Not the most famous or most dramatic subject, but the one that your specific eye and visual sensibility found interesting. That is where to start.
This first sketch does not need to be good. It needs to exist. The act of committing to a subject and producing a page establishes your relationship with the place. Everything after that first page comes more easily.
What to Look for in an Unfamiliar Place
Unfamiliar places have one significant advantage over familiar ones: everything is new to your eye and nothing has been normalized into invisibility. The things you walk past every day in your own neighborhood without noticing become visible again in a new city because your eye has not yet learned to skip over them.
A few things worth specifically looking for in a new place.
What is specific to here. Every place has details that exist nowhere else or exist differently here than anywhere else you have been. The color of the local building material. The particular style of window shutters. The way the market is organized. The specific flowers on the balconies. These local specificities are what make a travel sketch look like it was made in this place and nowhere else. They are also what most visitors, including most photographers, overlook in favor of the famous landmarks.
The ordinary made extraordinary by light. A narrow side street at golden hour, an unremarkable alley with a single strong shadow falling across it, a market stall seen against the light: these subjects are made by the specific light conditions of the specific moment and will never look this way again. They are worth sketching fast rather than looking for a better subject.
The scale of things. Buildings in one city are different in height, proportion, and material from buildings in another. Streets are wider or narrower. Squares are larger or more intimate. The human scale of a place, how you feel physically in relation to its structures, is one of the hardest things to convey in a photograph and one of the things a sketch can express most directly.
The life happening in it. A street is never just buildings. It is the people moving through it, the chairs outside the cafe, the delivery bikes, the dog tied to a lamp post, the market vendor arranging produce. These elements are what make a street scene a lived place rather than an architectural study.
The Carnet de Voyage: Sketching as Visual Storytelling
The carnet de voyage, which means travel notebook in French, is a tradition of documenting travel through a combination of drawings, watercolor, handwritten notes, maps, and collected ephemera. Ticket stubs. Menu covers. Small printed maps with routes marked. A pressed leaf from the botanical garden. Words in the local language with translations penciled beside them.
A carnet de voyage is not a sketchbook in the conventional sense. It is a complete record of an experience: visual, textual, tactile. The finished volume tells the story of a journey in a way that a gallery of photographs or a folder of separate drawings never quite does.
The tradition has deep roots in European travel culture and has been revived strongly in the urban sketching community, which has embraced the idea of the sketchbook as primary document rather than secondary record. The French term carnet de voyage is used in the sketching community to describe this more comprehensive, story-driven approach to the travel sketchbook.
Building a carnet de voyage rather than just accumulating travel sketches changes how you approach the sketchbook. You are not trying to produce the best individual drawing of each location. You are trying to produce the most complete and honest record of your experience of each location. That means small sketches alongside large ones, quick five-minute impressions alongside slower developed pages, notes and lists and scraps of local visual culture alongside the observational drawings.
A page from a cafe might include a small sketch of the room, a few lines about the coffee, a sticker from the sugar packet, and a color swatch of the particular warm afternoon light through the window. None of those elements alone tells the full story. Together they do.
How to Build a Spread Rather Than a Single Sketch
The difference between a travel sketchbook that feels alive and one that feels like a portfolio is largely a question of page management. A sketchbook full of single full-page drawings, each carefully composed and finished, looks impressive but feels institutional. A sketchbook full of varied pages, some full spreads across two pages, some densely packed with small studies and notes, some with one strong image and significant breathing room around it, feels inhabited.
A few approaches that produce varied, alive travel sketchbook pages.
The anchor and context approach. One major sketch, perhaps a building or a panoramic view, anchors the page. Around it, smaller studies, notes, and details fill the supporting space. A large sketch of the market square plus three small sketches of individual stalls. A panorama of the harbor plus a close study of a single fishing boat. The major sketch gives the page structure and the surrounding material gives it specificity.
The sequence approach. A series of small sketches tracking one experience across time. Five sketches from the same window table over the course of an afternoon as the light changes. Three sketches from different stops along the same street. This sequential approach produces pages that feel like time rather than just space, which is one of the things photographs almost never convey.
The color field approach. Some pages work best as color studies with minimal drawing. A wash of the specific warm stone color, a wash of the shadow color beside it, a note identifying where they were observed. These purely chromatic pages are useful references and produce beautiful variations in texture across the sketchbook.
The ephemera integration approach. Leave space for things you collect: a folded-in map, a torn corner of a menu with the restaurant name, a stamp from the post office, a paper napkin from a notable cafe. These found objects add texture and authenticity that no amount of careful drawing can reproduce.
Finding Subjects Throughout the Day
One of the richest things about travel sketching is that subjects are available at every point in the day, including the in-between moments that most people experience as dead time.
The queue outside a museum. The airport gate before boarding. The train journey between cities, with the landscape moving past the window. The restaurant table before the food arrives. The hotel room in the early morning before going out.
These moments are where the most specific and personal travel sketching happens because the subject is simply what is in front of you rather than a famous view you have traveled to reach. A sketch of your hotel room window at 7am with the roofline of an unfamiliar city visible beyond it tells a precise story of where you were and when in a way that no photograph of the famous cathedral two streets away can match.
For these impromptu moments, the accessibility of your paint is the deciding factor. A sketch made in a restaurant queue requires paint that activates in seconds, works in a standing position, and produces meaningful color from the first stroke without any preparation. The more friction between the moment and the paint reaching the paper, the fewer of these moments get captured.
This is the specific reason that format matters more for travel sketching than for studio work. The Peerless DryColor sheets tucked inside the back cover of a travel sketchbook are ready when the moment is. Touch a wet brush to the sheet and the color arrives. No palette to set up, no water jar to fill. The Peerless Sidekick at eight colors in a format smaller than a passport is the version of this that never gets left at the hotel because it felt like too much to carry.
Color as a Record of Place
Every place has a specific color palette. Cities built from particular local stone have particular warm or cool undertones. Markets have their own color culture. The light at a certain latitude and in a certain season has a specific temperature and quality that is different from the light at home.
Developing a color vocabulary for each place you visit is one of the most specific things a travel sketchbook can do. Before settling into subject sketching, spend twenty minutes on a color study of the place: the dominant wall color, the shadow color on those walls, the sky color, the accent colors of signs and shutters and market goods.
These swatches seem simple and they are. But returning to them later gives you the mixing information you need to stay true to the specific color character of the place across the whole sketchbook. A blue that works for the sky in one city is different from the blue that works for the sky in another. Getting this right early makes the whole sketchbook more coherent.
For a wide enough color range to match the specific palette of any city you visit, Individual DryColor Sheets let you build a custom travel palette tuned to where you are going. Warmer stone colors and richer ochres for a Mediterranean city. Cooler grays and muted blues for a northern European one. Specific vibrant accent colors for a city with a strong visual culture of colored facades.
Sketching Speed and the Travel Context
Travel imposes time pressures that home sketching does not. You have a limited number of days. You want to see things as well as sketch them. Your traveling companions, if you have any, have different priorities. The light changes faster than expected. The famous square that looked ideal turns out to be full of tour groups.
A few things that help the travel sketching pace work.
Small is almost always better than large for travel subjects. A small, complete sketch made in fifteen minutes is a stronger contribution to the travel sketchbook than a half-finished larger page. The small sketch can be finished, set aside, and replaced by another at a different location the same afternoon. The ambitious large sketch often ends up abandoned when the conditions change or the time runs out.
Two or three shorter sketching sessions per day is a better rhythm than one long session. A twenty-minute sketch before morning coffee, another before lunch, a third in the late afternoon when the light is best: this rhythm produces a more varied and complete record than a single three-hour session that leaves the afternoon unrecorded.
Let the sketchbook be the reason to slow down rather than an obligation that competes with everything else. The most useful mindset shift for travel sketching is understanding that the time spent sketching is not time taken away from experiencing the place. It is a specific mode of experiencing the place that produces a more detailed, more personal record than passive observation does.
Connecting With Local Sketchers
Most cities with any urban sketching community have a local chapter of Urban Sketchers. Connecting with the local chapter while traveling is one of the best things a travel sketcher can do.
Local sketchers know where the interesting subjects are that tourists never find. They know the light at different times of day, which cafes tolerate people sitting for extended periods with sketchbooks, where the best markets are and when they run. A single morning sketching with a local group produces more useful location knowledge than three days of solo exploration.
Finding local chapters is straightforward through the chapter finder at UrbanSketchers.org. Most chapters announce upcoming sketchcrawls on Facebook or Instagram, and visitors are almost universally welcome.
The sketchcrawl guide covers how these sessions work and what to expect if you join one while traveling. Traveling to a city with the specific intention of attending a local sketchcrawl, or timing a visit to coincide with the Urban Sketchers International Symposium, turns a travel trip into a sketching trip in the fullest sense.
What to Do With the Sketchbook After the Trip
A finished travel sketchbook is a more valuable and more personal document than most people expect when they start one. The quality of the pages matters less than the completeness and honesty of the record. A sketchbook that has pages from every significant day of the trip, including the bad-weather afternoon and the disappointing tourist site and the unexpected lunch that turned out to be the best meal of the journey, tells a more complete story than a curated selection of the best individual drawings.
Photograph the pages before the sketchbook ages. Paper yellows and pages can suffer water damage or wear. A good digital record of the complete sketchbook, pages in sequence, preserves the narrative as well as the images.
If you share work online, the travel sketchbook is among the most shareable content in the urban sketching community because viewers who have been to the same place are drawn in by recognition and viewers who have not been to the place are drawn in by the sense of having been taken there. The sequential narrative of a sketchbook shared across multiple posts over the days of a trip performs consistently well in sketching communities on Instagram.
FAQ
How do I start a travel sketchbook if I have never done one before? Begin on the first day, not when you feel ready. The first sketch does not need to be good. It needs to exist and start the habit of looking carefully at where you are. Choose a simple subject: the view from your hotel window, a detail of the lobby, the street outside the first cafe you sit at. Small, simple, and quick establishes the practice. More ambitious work follows naturally once the sketchbook is started.
What is a carnet de voyage? A carnet de voyage is a French travel notebook tradition that combines sketches, watercolor, handwritten notes, maps, and collected ephemera into a complete visual record of a journey. Rather than producing individual drawings that function as finished works, a carnet de voyage aims to capture the full experience of a place: its color, its atmosphere, its specific details, and the personal experience of the traveler moving through it. The tradition has been strongly adopted by the urban sketching community as the highest expression of travel sketching practice.
How do I find time to sketch while traveling? The key is using in-between moments rather than reserving dedicated sketching time. Museum queues, restaurant waits, train journeys, early mornings before the day starts: these moments produce some of the most specific and personal travel sketching because the subject is simply what is immediately in front of you. Two or three short sessions of fifteen to twenty minutes across the day is a more practical travel rhythm than one long session.
What paint works best for a travel sketchbook? Paint that activates instantly, works in any position without a water jar or open palette, and produces vivid color from the first stroke without preparation time. Peerless DryColor sheets tuck inside a travel sketchbook and are ready the moment a wet brush touches them. Paired with a water brush that holds its own water supply, the complete painting setup for a travel sketchbook is two objects. No setup, no spill risk, no decisions about whether you have time to get everything out before the moment passes.
Should I sketch famous landmarks or ordinary scenes while traveling? Both, but the ordinary scenes are usually more personally valuable in the long run. Famous landmarks appear in millions of photographs and the expectations around them can make sketching them feel pressured. The unremarkable side street, the specific quality of light in the covered market, the view from the cafe table before the coffee arrives: these are the subjects that make a travel sketchbook feel genuinely personal and that you will return to most often in later years.
Pack the Sketchbook
The most important decision about travel sketching is the one you make at home before the trip: to bring the sketchbook and the paint, and to use them.
Not for the whole trip. Not for every moment. Just to have them available when something catches your eye and the time is there.
The Peerless Sidekick is small enough to live in the pocket of whatever bag you travel with. It does not add meaningful weight or volume. It passes through airport security without a thought. And it is ready to paint in the thirty seconds between sitting down somewhere and the moment something in front of you becomes interesting enough to sketch.
Bring it. Use it once. See what the sketchbook looks like at the end of the first day.