Sun, Sand, Sea and the Salesmen

Back home from vacation in tunisia. So how was it? Let´s put this straight. This is not the best combination for trying to spend your vacation sketching. Almost tempted to say, not best combination to spend vacation at all, but i don´t want to sound like grumpy old man (do i already?). But hey. It was a family holiday, wheather was good, water was warm and kids seemed to enjoy themselves a lot. When it comes to sketching it was a bit of a struggle, always trying to hide from sun compared to other people trying to catch bit of that bronze skin. Enough said, when we came back home, compared to my girls, my skin was like i went to completely different place 🙂

For the ocasion, i bought a hardcover Moleskine sketchbook, A4, landscape format, with 200gsm paper. It´s not a cotton paper (has a percentage of cotton though) so limits are obvious, but i could hardly complain. Paper has a nice texture, you can paint on both sides, dries flat and i liked the binding especially, since you can open the sketchbook completely flat without using any force. Also, since it´s a landscape format, you can paint really wide which opens interesting posibilities when it comes to composition and landscapes. This wide format was something i wanted to try for some time and instantly felt in love with it.

As for the other tools, i took couple of brushes, Platinum fountain pen, pencil, white gell pen, eraser, wooden stick, bottle of ink with bith of gauze in it (i will come back to this in other blog post focused on ink drawing), couple of metal clips to hold my sketchbook open and ofcourse a portable watercolor set. Didn´t take much space and it was all i needed. There was plenty of water and yes, sea water is absolutely fine to use, didn´t notice any difference whatsoever.

You can´t come home from Tunisia without having a couple of sketches with palm trees.

We also had a chance to visit a local city of Monastir. That´s where i could finally feel bit of the atmosphere, history and culture of the country, together with the specific architecture. We didn´t have all that much time to look around but it was enough to see the central Mausoleum of Habib Bourguiba (the first Tunisian president), impresive architecture surrounded by cemetary with a huge promenade leading to it. Below is a photo of described place. I intentionaly used the panorama function, because i knew i would paint it on similar format. Following, there is the sketch and also a painting i did when i came back home. You can also watch the whole painting process on youtube.

There were times when i didn´t feel like painting sea, sand and palm trees so i just found a picture i liked. This is the famous Pantheon in Rome. Might turn this into a painting in studio later as well. The wide format is quite special in some aspects i think.

Here are couple more assorted sketches.

Lastly, the best sketch was of thing i didn´t like i am afraid. Here come the omnipresent salesmen. I don´t blame them. They live from tourism and many of them speak more than 5 languages so they can do buiness with people from all over the world. It is what it is.

Other than that, it was an interesting experience that left me with a lot to think about. What is your experience with sketching on holiday and what are some of your faforite places to go? Would love to know.