My winter visit to Italy – Sketchbook tour

Hello everyone, hope you are all well. This is an exciting blog, I will be sharing my Italy sketchbook from my most recent trip. There is a lot of mountain related artwork haha, I really went all out. Drawing mountains was a bit of a challenge, capturing the shadows and the contrast was certainly a test on my art skills.  It’s been many years since I’ve been to Italy in the wintertime, and in the meantime I forgot how beautiful it is. The Mediterranean light has a very particular quality to it and I could recognize it anywhere.  You will see lots of the work from this trip capturing sunsets. 

All the locations of the artwork depict various locations around Northern Italy – Milan, Como, Torino, and Macugnaga. I also included a few still lifes from my Grandma’s apartment and a couple of drawings from the flight. 

I think the highlight of this trip for me was visiting Macugnaga – A tiny town that faces the East wall of Monterosa. I will never forget this day trip. When you are in Macugnaga you are surrounded entirely by mountains and the peaks are a whisker away. The trees were so massive, there was one in particular that seemed as old as the mountains. I couldn’t stop sketching, the colors kept changing throughout the day, I tried to capture these changes to the best of my ability. This trip to Italy was very inspiring for me, I picked up lots of new books: Some novels, children’s books, and some graphic novels. While I was out and about in Milan, I found a historic stationery store (Cartoleria in Italian) named Petinarolli that makes handmade books and has lots of ancient prints and maps. It was quite touching to see bookbinding still thriving in Italy.

Most of the work you see was made with gouache and colored pencils. For this trip I decided to pack my Caran d’ache Neocolor II crayons, which was a fabulous choice. These crayons allowed me to work fast and with a limited color palette. There were also some works where I used ink. When I travel, I love to draw with fountain pens for making line variations (They are my favorite drawing tool). I decided to bring less art supplies this trip, which worked well. Less choices allowed me to be more focused.

Anyways, that is it for now. I’m really enjoying blogging, I’m a bit tired of Instagram and most of those social media sites. You really don’t have any control with how they operate and how they use our work. With that said, I will be blogging more. I hope you all enjoyed this blog! till next time.