What a travel sketchbook actually goes through before it hits Instagram

Last month, I opened my sketchbook in an alley in Kadıköy, Istanbul, and the wind knocked over my coffee. It was Turkish coffee, not an Americano, so it was even stickier, and half the page was covered in brown stains. I'd been drawing a fish stall next to a mosque, and the brown stains looked curiously like the texture of a stone wall, so I ended up putting pen to paper over them again. In the final version I posted on Instagram, nobody notices the stain. It just looks like an atmospheric texture.

This is more or less how my process works. Behind results that look clean and deliberate, there are spilled coffees, torn pages, and practice sketches with completely botched proportions. I wanted to talk a bit about what goes on behind the scenes.

The sketchbook is already dirty before I even leave

During the research phase before a trip, I jot notes directly in my sketchbook. I've tried digital note apps, but writing by hand ends up being faster. I scrawl down things like the architectural style of my destination, the direction of the light (whether to draw the east façade in the morning or the west one in the afternoon), and which days local markets are open. My handwriting is a mess with arrows shooting off in every direction. No one else could decipher it.

For example, before my last trip to Jordan, I used Google Earth to figure out the angle at which light falls inside Petra's narrow gorge, the Siq. On one side of my sketchbook I sketched the approximate position of the sun and the direction of the shadows, but when I actually got there, the gorge was far darker than expected, so those notes were only half useful. Still, that half was enough to make sure I didn't miss the window around 9 a.m. when the light sweeps across the red sandstone walls at the entrance to the gorge.

At this stage, the sketchbook is already far from clean. It's covered in coffee stains, reference photo printouts stuck on with adhesive tape, and Post-it notes plastered everywhere. From being carried around in a bag, the corners get crumpled, and sometimes airport security asks me to take it out. Apparently the metal binding sets off the X-ray.

What happens on location

Most on-location sketches fail. To be precise, there's a fairly large gap between the scene I pictured in my head and what actually ends up on the paper. When I'm sitting in my Dubai studio, I have it all planned out ("this composition, this colour palette"), but once I'm standing on site, people walk past, the light changes, and there's an unexpected construction barrier in the way.

When I went to Baku, I set up on the waterfront to draw the Flame Towers. The key was the light reflecting off the glass façades at sunset, but the wind happened to be strong that day and the paper kept blowing around. I held the sketchbook down on my knees and quickly roughed out just the outlines, but looking at it later, the proportions were badly distorted. One tower looked about 1.5 times bigger than the others. Even so, the pencil notes I'd jotted down about the colour combination I captured in that moment, the point where the orange of the sky blended with the blue of the glass, turned out to be decisive when I created the final illustration later on.

On location, I usually do three to five quick studies per spot. Of those, one is usable, two if I'm lucky. The rest are either practice or get discarded because the weather or lighting conditions weren't right. When I say "discarded," I don't mean I literally tear them out. I leave them in the sketchbook. They might come in handy as reference for other work later.

After returning to the hotel

This is where the real work begins. I spread out my on-location sketches and notes along with reference photos taken on my phone, and start the digital work in Procreate. I photograph the field sketches and place them as a layer on the iPad, then draw over them.

In this process, I have to choose between what I felt on location and what the photos recorded. Photos are accurate but lack emotion; sketches have emotion but lack information. Usually I follow the composition and mood of the sketch while borrowing details from the photos.

Honestly, what takes the most time is colour correction. The colours you see under hotel room lighting are completely different from what you saw in natural light. When you're trying to recall a building under the overcast skies of northern Europe with eyes accustomed to Dubai's intense sunlight, the colour notes you jotted down on site ("this wall is closer to a cool grey, not a warm grey") are essential.

Completing a single final illustration typically requires 3-5 field sketches, over 10 reference photos, and around 4-6 hours of digital work. Finishing one in a single day while travelling is nearly impossible, and most of them get completed back in my Dubai studio.

Before posting on Instagram

There's one more thing I do right before posting. I check the finished illustration on my phone screen. Something that looked fine on the iPad's large display can have its details muddled or its colours look dull within the small square on a phone. So at the last minute, I often bump up the contrast slightly or strip out unnecessary details.

Writing captions is another dilemma. Do I tell the story of the spilled coffee and the torn practice sketches behind the work, or do I keep it clean and just introduce the location? Most of the time I go with the latter, which is actually why I wrote this piece. The stories that never make it into an Instagram caption have been piling up.

For my next trip, I'm thinking about Fez, Morocco. I'm already half excited, half anxious about what kind of mishaps will happen sketching in the maze-like alleys of the medina. My sketchbook already has "Fez, leather dyeing workshop composition?" written on a fresh page.