Travel Sketching

enter image description here A beach in Devon

I've been keeping sketch books in exactly the same format since Easter 1995.
I'm currently on the sixteenth book.

These are Daler-Rowney 148x130mm hardback 150gsm cartridge paper sketch books. They have accompanied me on just about every trip I've taken since then.

The drawings cover everywhere from South Korea to North America to South Africa, as well as mundane drawings of British beaches and hospital walls.

I claim absolutely no artistic merit in them, and I'm unsure if they can even be classified as 'Art'.
Wikipedia defines art as "... a diverse range of cultural activity centred around works utilising creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience,generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty." So maybe it is art with a small 'a'.

The drawings, sketches, whatever are a repository of memories.
By sitting, concentrating on a scene, and committing it to paper you will allow the scene, the sounds, the smells to enter your brain in a strange way that means when you look on your scribble 20 years later those marks evoke the same sounds, smells and memories.

To be fair though, the memories are helped along by notes (a story) about the drawing, what we are doing, the location, or our day, on the opposite page. You can see this in my drawing of The Statue of Liberty below.

I have no consistent style and I am no slave to the tenets of the Urban Sketching movement. I prefer to draw from 'life' but may use a photo if it suits my purpose, and I will sometimes abstract elements from a scene.

I feel that the results of my labours are evenly split - 33% are dire and shouldn't deserve to be kept (but are), 34% are acceptable and serve their purpose, 33% are good and I'm proud of them.
100% were fun to do.

My tools have been refined over the years to that which can be carried in a small zipped pouch.
Watercolour pencils are a staple, fine line waterproof pens essential, a couple of graphite pencils (F, HB & 2B usually). A fine Pentel waterbrush and some tissues.
Recently I've taken to including a couple of ink brush pens, but my pack varies with my mood.

Occasionally I'll experiment. Here's one such - it's a sound picture of words & phrases heard while sitting on a bench on the promenade at Hastings. I couldn't see the speakers, so I did a Sound Picture of what I could hear enter image description here