Hatching the plan

Having tackled the drudgery of life for an entire year (also known as living!) we decided to get our lungs some antipodean air and come back ably renewed and refreshed to pick up the yoke of 2015. By the way, Happy New Year folks!

Seeing it through

That innocent decision birthed in a moment of romantic wanderlust was followed by endless reading, preparing, planning, discussing, arguing, booking, packing and apprehending. The process was tedious and grossly unromantic. But we didn’t give up. Not because the smell of adventure kindled our vigour. The flight tickets were non-refundable.

Front cover of my trusty Moleskine Japanese Album. I gave it a facelift!

Making a decision (at least trying to)

When things started falling in place, this is what the itinerary looked like : We’d spend 25th Dec to 31st Dec in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia and from 1st Jan to 10th Jan we will hire a car and drive around scenic routes in the South Island of New Zealand. So naturally, even before deciding what to wear, my one track mind was thinking of ways to capture the experience in pages. It made lofty promises of filling sketchbooks and loose sheets with astounding art and demanded I buy suitable art supplies to be able to achieve that. We debated day and night, weighed pros and cons, charged each other with a salvo of arguments, defended with smart retorts. It wasn’t easy. ( Yes, I have a fertile imagination and a very active inner dialogue). But we came to a decision.

Justifying that decision

Back cover of my Japanese Album decorated with stickers I collected from various locations – some bought, some handed for free by museums, souvenir shops, tourist info centres who thought it was ‘such a neat idea’!

It would have to be Moleskine’s Japanese Album with 50 pages, 165gsm.

It ticked almost all the boxes. The idea was to carry something handy that fits in the bag easily, isn’t heavy and definitely not intimidating for my subjects. A smaller page would also mean lesser time investment when filling it. But most of all, I was hunting for something, where I could illustrate the entire trip, the whole 19 days in one continuous sheet of paper, where daily events can merge into one another and the observer can see everything without having to turn the page! Wouldn’t that be fun! As you can see from the picture below, the Japanese Album fits the bill! The only quibble is that the paper isn’t great for watercolours, but accepts light washes. I took that in my stride coz, the aim was not to produce elaborate frame worthy paintings, but to document the journey by illustrating my thoughts, misgivings, explorations, observations.

I unfolded the sketchbook and laid it on the floor of my study.

Going for it

I documented every single day on the trip starting 25th December 2014 and ending on 12th January 2015. It took a bit of getting used to initially both for me and my husband until with a bit of discipline it became second nature. Every single morning I’d sense the potent urge to record my observations for that day and my travel partner would learn to give me time and space, sometimes patiently lingering in the background or finding things to do on his own. In that sense, the 50 pages worth of memories that I hold in my hand is a collaboration.

In the first two pages I drew every single item that went inside my blue Herschel daypack that I carried on the trip, for sketching on the go. It weighed slightly less than 5Kgs, although I learnt to downsize based on what I wanted to carry on a particular day.

This is what I packed in my backpack for sketching on the trip

I’ll share the rest of my sketches from the trip on this blog, accompanied by little stories. Should be fun! Regurgitating and reminiscing begins.