There is an odd thing that happens when you commit to drawing in a new place: everything becomes new and exciting. Things that might appear ordinary at home can take on an extraordinary sense of wonder when you look at it for the first time: street food stalls, small side roads with crossed wires, religious monuments. There is an endless list of new things that can be seductive and awe-inspiring, providing fertile ground for drawing and painting. But this is also kind of an illusion. As a visitor, as I was to China, I felt a responsibility to go beyond these surface-level artefacts. But the surface is shiny, the surface is new and with only a few weeks in one province (Yunnan) how much could a sketch artist like me really get to know a place?
This is the main thought that preoccupied me for several weeks in Yunnan this month and, to be honest, gets under my skin every time I travel. You see, I always take a sketchbook with me travelling and feel a compulsive, sometimes disruptive urge to draw and paint at the most inconvenient moments. But most of the subjects I choose are perhaps chosen superficially; through the rose-tinted glasses of a fresh arrival. I don’t know this place, not really, and so I choose to draw things because they looks nice - completely unaware of the significance. Usually after several weeks I will start to scratch away at the surface and uncover something. But in truth I have to go through a long period of getting the conventional, mundane or obvious pictures ‘out of my system’ first. This is where I think the idea of slow travel and sketching can work well together.
I spent three weeks in Yunnan, China’s most southern province in July. This may seem like a long time to dedicate to a single region, but in China Yunnan is still very large. It has a population larger than Argentina, with geography that spans from Thai-style tropics in the south to Tibetan Himalayas in the north. It has more ecological, cultural and linguistic diversity than most countries. With this in mind I start to wonder how well I can truly document it? How well can I understand and paint what I see with any clarity? The challenge in this part of China is not necessarily the logistics of travel or even the language - but the challenge of trying to capture something impossibly complex with just an ink pen and a set of watercolor paints.
Now, I have travelled before. I’ve even travelled within China and very close to Yunnan when I lived in South East Asia. There is a lot of crossover, visually at least, with other places I’ve been. Scooters remain as essential as the horse once was, street food lines streets and back alleys. The warm, somewhat care-free attitude from people is a marked difference from some of the pressure I saw in other parts of China. But even armed with this knowledge, and perhaps because of it, I understood that it is not possible to visualise these complexities accurately. Anything I do is likely to be a reflection of my own thoughts, prejudices or perspectives. When I chose to paint a temple - I do so because I feel, in part, that is a key aspect of place. But I could be completely wrong in this. Or, more realistically, I’m missing a lot of nuance.
Over several weeks I travelled from the provincial capital Kunming north, to places I had read about: Dali, Lijiang and the improbably named Shangri-La. The latter probably best sums up my feeling that you can’t know a place from drawing alone. The town has an epic, cliff-side Tibetan Buddhist monastery, and has a name that conjures a mythical, utopian paradise. But Shangri-La as a town is an invention: renamed by local government in 2001 from the far less-romantic Zhongdian to promote tourism. The city centre was also entirely destroyed by a fire ten years ago and then, but rebuilt in flash - like a mythical creature back from the dead. Walking the streets you would not know. So what to make of this as a sketch artist? Unsure, I sat for the morning and just painted the monastery because ‘It looked pretty’. But as I painted it my thoughts wandered to other things.
It is hard to fully grasp a new place when we arrive so perhaps it is the responsibility of a sketch artist to just accept this and instead document our own visual journey as it evolves. Looking back through my sketchbook of Yunnan, as I do while writing this, I see an evolution: a movement from expected illustrations to something more unique. My illustrations move from typical temples and sites, to things that reflect more of reality; urban coffee culture in Kunming, motorcycles and cosplay. The things that drew my attention at the start have now shifted to something a little deeper.
But reaching this level of depth is not without it’s challenges. Every country or new places has it’s own unique set of conditions to navigate - especially with the added complication of on-location sketching. Cities in China in 2026 are largely places of convenience, with an amble supply for coffee shops, metro systems and easily-signposted sites. But with this convenience also comes people. Lots of them. If I found a point of interest it was likely that several thousand other people had also ‘discovered’ it. Pulling out my sketchbook became a bit of a strategic exercise. In Shanghai for example I had over 40 people crowding around me, hoping to catch a glimpse of my work. This was both flattering and frustrating in equal measure. There was one point in Dali, where the sun was setting beyond the mountains catching the edge of the city wall and I thought “Wow, this would be great to paint”. But seeing the sheer volume of people who had also chosen that spot - I thought twice.
In a way this is helpful. It forced me to move away from these sites much faster than I had done any other country. The Colosseum in Rome or Park Güell in Barcelona: all places where pulling out a sketchbook can become a bit of a hazard. A week or so in, I was grateful that the crowds forced to me to look elsewhere for inspiration. A park cliff side cafe in Kunming, for example, or a side street photo shoot in Shangri-La. I came to savour these quiet moments more than I have done in other places.
Near the end of my visit, I hit on a novel solution for cutting through the challenges and aiming to go a little deeper: the Kunming Urban sketchers group. They were remarkably helpful in pointing me to various different locations that I could paint. They had a level of insight and judgement that was invaluable to a visiting artist. I was lucky enough to meet them as well - I was only in the city for a few days and they put on a special one-off event for me that I was grateful for.
Ultimately, I think travel sketching is almost an illusion. It provides a snapshot of a place, a fragment of a country. Each illustration is like a torn piece of a larger tapestry that only really makes sense in context. In many ways the first few sketches I did in Yunnan were like a warm up, much like a chef preparing his vegetables before cooking the final meal. With only a few weeks in one province in China, I’m going to confidently say that it’s impossible to truly capture everything on page. Instead, I think there is value to be found in accepting this. And at least, I can try and show my reality in painting, however incomplete that may be.