Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan
I recently went on holidays for two weeks in Japan, along with colleagues from Dalton Maag; in part to attend ATypI 2019 but mostly to discover Japan and experience a country that to me sounded both foreign and familiar. The trip was amazing thanks to the Japanese extreme niceness towards clueless tourists like me, the excellent food, tea, sake and other delicacies, and the traditional temples, pristine gardens, crazy cityscapes that coexist within meters of each other.
We visited Kyoto and Tokyo, and although we adopted a relaxed pace, I had only time to make a couple drawings.
Our street in Kyoto. The crazy electrical wiring is actually very common. We lived next to a very cute and quiet jazz bar held by an older couple, a bike shop that also sold a selection of Japanese records, and a temple that felt like a scene from Spirited Away.
A nice tree from the same garden.
A view from the Hama Rikyu Garden in Tokyo.
Vallée de la Loire, France
There’s a river in France called Loire along which the King’s court used to live and build castles to show off their wealth. Most of the castles can be visited today, including their very well kept parks and gardens.
View of Chaumont-sur-Loire. This castle hosts an International Garden Festival, with more than 20 different spaces to visit, all designed around a central theme. I drew this from a photograph, on a small piece of watercolor paper made on purpose for postcards.
During a long week of holidays, we visited about 10 castles in the area, and we stayed in a Gîte de France, the French equivalent of AirBnB that has existed since the fifties.
Below is a view of the facade of the old countryside house were we stayed. I painted this while taking a “day off” from the holiday, leaving my castle-frenzied friends to visit another two castles while I read comic books in the sun and practiced drawing.
Berlin, Germany
I sketched a hallway of Berlin’s Tegel airport on the way back from Typo Labs 2018, using the Font Fiction booklet from Underware. I don’t think the tote bag of goodies included any blank notebook that time.
London, United Kingdom
I have been living in London for two years now but in the end I only did a few drawings of the city. What I like most is drawing nature because it’s easy, the plants can be wonky and they don’t look strange, whereas architecture requires more care to avoid making non-euclidean buildings out of a Lovecraft novel.
Some benches in Brockwell Park, near Brixton. I added a bit of watercolors and white colouring pencil, on craft paper. I have a sort of “technique” to draw plants now: I try to spot a detail that is representative, like the shape of a leaf or a flower, and then make many tiny copies of that to build the foliage.
A view from Ruskin Park at the start of Autumn. The trees were really starting to wear crazy colors.
Storm clouds gathering above Coldharbour Lane. I painted that from memory after coming home from work, so the windows on the left are quite cartoon-ish and the house of right is actually from across my street rather than Coldharbour Lane. So this one’s mostly a lie (but I could also have not told you anything).