Sketching travel thumbnails from a moving train
PART OF MY COMIC STRIP PAGE LAYOUT SERIES
I’m bundling this article under my comic strips layout series, but it’s more a series of thumbnail sketches, although they do have a grid layout in common. The inspiration for this blog post comes from Andrew James on Instagram, an urban sketcher from Wellington NZ. I saw his video, and thought it was a wonderfully simple idea to practice speed sketching the landscape.
Capturing a Journey with Thumbnail Sketches
Andrew lays out the steps for capturing thumbnail sketches during a road trip. It’s a simple formula:
- Draw little squares
- Look out the window
- Sketch fast
- Repeat
Inspiration from Amy Stewart
I did some research to see if other artists were using this approach to travel sketching, and I came across a video from Amy Stewart, who visited New Zealand and used thumbnail sketches to capture travel scenes when she was short on this. Here’s the video:
Sketching Thumbnails from the Train
I quite often travel by train in the Algarve, and usually I sketch people on the train, but sometimes it’s not that busy or I’m just not inspired by my fellow travellers. So this idea of capturing little thumbnail sketches of the journey outside the window, is really appealing.
I plan on taking some train trips between France and Belgium this month, so this will be a good opportunity to put this sketching approach to the test, just using ink lines and maybe a little tonal shading with a Tombow pen.
But before I try it on a fast-moving train, I went to YouTube to find a local Algarve train journey between Olhao and Tavira, and slowed the video right down to .25 of the speed. Then had a go at sketching some scenes from the window. It was very challenging even at quarter speed! I think my first problem was I made my squares too big.
If I’m going to sketch during a real train ride, I need to have my back to the front of the train, so that I’m looking back at the scenery, and have a chance of seeing views for a longer period of time. If you’re facing the front of the train, the scenery is whizzing past way too quickly to be a fun sketching adventure.
I’m going to have a go at sketching thumbnails on the next train ride I take, and see how I do. Hopefully it’s a rickety old local train, and not something high-speed! If it doesn’t work out, I can always revert back to sketching my fellow passengers.
