This summer my boyfriend and I took a two month trip around the world. We drove from Austin to Chicago, then flew to France. After two weeks in France we flew to Italy, then to Berlin, and then Budapest, where we then caught a flight to Tokyo, and stayed in Japan for three weeks. We left Japan for Hong Kong, stayed for a week in the fragrant harbor city, and then flew back to Chicago on the fourth of July.
I love to travel, and have been lucky to do more than a fair share of it in my lifetime. For this trip however, I wanted to make a project out of the experience.
When I do editorial illustration for NPR, one of my favorite parts of the job is accompanying journalists on interviews and creating fly on the wall verité drawings. These notes help me remember the scene as I saw and felt it to be when I go back to my computer to create a final digital illustration.
The other inspiration I had floating in my head was Rebecca Solnit's atlas of New Orleans, called Unfathomable City (also Infinite City, which focuses on San Francisco). The book is tall and thin, with thick colorful pages. It is a collection of essays and cartography, a collage of voices and views, and it painted the most vivid printed portrait of a place that I have ever read. I am fascinated by urban planning and city life (as my documentary, My Way is the Highway, will attest). Because my boyfriend and I were going to be in a variety of places around the world with unique architecture, food culture, and geography, I wanted to make sure that my project created a framework to think critically about the differences and similarities between the places we visited.
Ultimately, I remembered the words of my great uncle, a photographer. When I went to study abroad in Hong Kong in college, Uncle Bob counseled me to take a photo every day. I did. I didn't have to try too hard - I tend to take more pictures in places that are new to me, and Hong Kong is definitely not short of visual stimuli. Looking back on the photos, they paint a microcosmic view of life in the city, of cultural differences that are notable to an outsider, of contrast and juxtaposition that is too difficult to describe in words (like crazy construction techniques, beautiful sunsets, and hilarious umbrella vending machines in the subway station).
What I arrived on, then, for my 2019 World Trip project, was a hybrid: an atlas, a journal, and the big challenge - a drawing a day. It was invigorating. As the weeks went on, my sketchbook filled. Sometimes the drawings were of details, others tried to capture a setting in full, some prioritized people while others focused on architecture.
As we visited different art museums, I tried to incorporate elements of different cultures' art styles into my own sketches.
I posted my drawings on instagram, and found that my drawings were a very good way to keep my friends and family in the loop about where I was in the world.
What I learned from the experience is that routine sharpens creative muscle. My eyes were fresh each morning, and as the trip went on I was better able to pick out a special moment of the day that I wanted to keep. My drawing also got much quicker as I practiced more! Thus the project was valuable experience for my abilities as a cartoonist and an illustrator, and my little book is a substantive answer to offer in response when someone asks, "how was your trip?"
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