It’s time to (finally) finish this mega series of articles from my big trip to Europe in July-Sept 2025. It has taken me months to put these articles together – a true labour of love – but I’m so happy to have done it. Yay!

Sharing highlights from my sketchbooks alongside photos of people and scenes I didn’t get a chance to sketch have created a very important record of an incredible 9 weeks of travel (my first overseas trip since 2019!)

And as always, I like to share a few reflections… 

1. People

 
It’s always about the people! Without a doubt spending time with family and friends is always the most important part of my travels and this trip I was very social from beginning to end!

I started with three very special weeks with my sister and family, plus church friends in Stornoway and Glasgow, Scotland, and then my time with sketchers began.

This included…

• Sketchmeets in Glasgow (Scotland), Speyer, Mannheim and Potsdam (Germany)
• A week with Kerstin, Vivien and Ingrid in Heidelberg area
• Two one-day workshops in Ladenburg and Heidelberg
• A week in Dresden and Berlin with Esther
• The Urban Sketchers Symposium in Poznan
• A week with Suhita in Poland including meeting with USKers in Wroclaw and Warsaw
• The Swiss USK Symposium in Geneva and a day in the French Alps with Frannie. 

Wow! it was non-stop for the entire 9 weeks.

Thanks to everyone who was part of this grand adventure!

I knew that it would be really special to see people again after 6 years but I didn’t realise just how much I had missed hanging out with people in real life.

There are no words to describe how wonderful it was to have three weeks of quality time with my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew (so many hugs), or the precious time with church friends or the inspiration I received from sketching in person with sketching buddies (old and new).

2. New materials

 
I really loved doing lots of mixed media work during the trip and playing with new materials. So much so that I filmed an hour-long review video for my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon.

But here are some of my main thoughts:

• It was particularly enjoyable to create interesting textures while doing landscapes in Scotland – using a combination of water-soluble and non-water-soluble media under and over my watercolour washes. These included Neocolor II, Neoart, Distress Crayons, Tempera Sticks and Markers.
• The three (slightly unusual) changes to my everyday palette worked great! I replaced Van Dyck Brown with Bloodstone Genuine, and added Michael Harding Warm Light Yellow and Schmincke Naples Yellow Reddish. I loved the challenge of using these opaque colours and enjoyed creating softer washes.
• Making a decision about my preferred form of graphite was something that didn’t happen on this trip! I constantly changed the graphite I was using – including ArtGraf Stick and Tailor Shape – before going back to a simple 2B Castell 9000 pencil. I really loved doing ink and graphite sketches of complex urban scenes during the second half of my trip.
• I enjoyed using Neocolor II in different ways including combining them with markers during my week with Suhita in Poland. And my love of all things Caran d’Ache was only increased after the incredible factory tour we had in Geneva.
• In terms of fountain pens, I became obsessed with Sailor 023 ink in my TWSBI Eco with stub nib and also enjoyed using De Atramentis Fog Grey in a Parallel Pilot Pen for super quick drawings. En route I picked up a Heidelberg special safari pen, had the nib of my beloved Red Joy pen converted into a fude nib (thanks Marek) and tried a Little Fat pen by Majohn. 
• I was very happy with my decision to use Stillman and Bird 8×10″ softcover Alpha books. They were the perfect size and format and the paper (being not too precious) gave me a degree of freedom to try new things and do quick sketches during my travels. I completed 8 books in the 9 weeks (exactly the number I expected to fill) and posted 4 books back home at the half-way point (thanks Kerstin!)

Why mixed media? Even though watercolour will always be my favourite medium to use and doing paint-only sketches is super satisfying there is something special about mixing media and focusing on creating texture. I found that it makes me see my subject in a new way and creates a unique sense of play. I particularly enjoyed doing mixed media work in Scotland as in previous trips there, I wanted more ways of capturing the texture of rocks, bracken and heather in the Scottish hills in watercolour. I also liked having options for quick sketching – something that was really important when going on day outings with the family.

As I look back on all my sketchbooks a few months after the trip…

I love how varied my sketches were and there are so many ideas for me to explore further in my morning sketch sessions now that I’m back to everyday life.

3. Balancing work

 
My big overseas trips are not vacations – they are intensive periods to develop my art and often involve teaching. I love having the opportunity to make sketching to main goal of each day but this has to be balanced with other aspects so that energy levels can be maintained.

Teaching vs Downtime

This trip had three separate teaching engagements  (and I loved every one of them!) and lots of time meeting new sketchers which often involved sharing techniques and materials. As mentioned above, this time was non-stop and I only had two solo days in Berlin during the whole time!

I was a little worried about the lack of downtime beforehand – especially considering my three teaching weeks. But I think I’ve learned how to pace myself and find moments to recharge even when with others. I no longer push myself to sketch when I’m in teaching mode – accepting the fact that I’ll never be able to do my best work when I am focusing on other people’s work! 🙂 So I’m happy to report that I never felt the exhaustion that I used to experience on big trips. I was still going strong during the Geneva Symposium but was ready to go home at the end of 9 weeks!

I’ve also learnt not to load myself with lots of SketchingNow tasks to do while I’m away! In 2019 (my last big overseas trip) I spent a lot of time working – preparing for a new online course when I got back (as discussed in this article). So I intentionally paused as much of my ‘back-home work’ as I could. Huge thanks to Chantal for all her help keeping things going while I was in Europe!

There is a lot of work associated with 9 weeks of non-stop sketching!

For starters… there is nightly homework to finish the pages of my sketchbooks. This involves adding minor finishing touches to some sketches, writing notes and then adding a layer of sketchbook design to my pages (designing where to add text, adding borders etc). When I flip through the sketchbooks from my 2019 European Trip I’m disappointed to see how many incomplete pages there are.

So I’m very happy that this year I did finish all my sketchbooks (with the exception of erasing pencil guidelines).

The reason why I achieved this is because I was sharing my sketchbooks with my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon. When I was in Scotland, I filmed myself finishing pages to share with them and having an overhead camera filming for an hour long session was a great motivation to get it done! 

But I definitely fell behind during the second half of my trip. So I found that having two livestreams scheduled for in the first few weeks after I returned home helped me to find the time to finish my sketchbooks. 

And then there is the question of how to share my sketches!
As I can do up to 12 double-page spreads in a single day it’s a lot to share!

These days I want the sketches from my travels to be easily found in the future (I’m always referring to them inside my SketchingNow courses) so I’m posting less to Instagram. I decided early on in the trip that it would not be possible to keep up with blogposts en route. Writing articles is only possible when I’m on my own (with serious downtime) and require many hours and a degree of concentration that is hard to maintain while traveling and teaching! 

So instead I focused on developing a more meaningful and immediate way to share my sketching adventures – recording video clips during the day and then each week putting them together into a 20-30 minute weekly update video for my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon. (Preview/watch them all here.)

It was amazing to be able to share these behind-the-scenes, on-the-go real-time demos – showing the decisions I made regarding how to capture a scene, how to decide what techniques to use and how to solve problems mid-sketch. It turned out to be a unique style of instructional videos and so much more satisfying that simply sharing a finished image. 

Last week I re-watched all of them  before writing this article and they brought back so many more memories than just looking at my sketchbooks do. The cameo appearances of my niece and nephew and a few sketching friends brought a huge smile to my face as well. I also appreciated being able to re-watch my mixed media techniques as they are constantly changing and I often forget exactly how I achieved a certain effect. So it’s incredibly useful for me now to watch these demos again and remind myself of what worked and what wasn’t so successful. 

In addition to these weekly update videos, I also did three livestreams going through every single sketch in my 8 sketchbooks – answering questions along the way – and shared a weekly reference photo that people could sketch as well.

It was such an interactive way of sharing my adventures and also it was good to see  how all my trip prep decisions panned out.(a series of 7 videos I recorded in the 2 months before my trip). Although I took more supplies than I needed I did use everything at least a few times.

All of these videos and livestreams are available to anyone who joins the Sketching Adventure Community whether for 1 month or with an annual subscription (which gives you two months free! – see more here.)

This form of recording my adventures was definitely a highlight of my trip and it’s something I want to develop in the future. So I just want to thank everyone from my Patreon – having you part of this trip was an extra layer of inspiration! I loved all your comments and questions which often helped me to clarify what techniques I was using the most.. 

I don’t know how sustainable it is to continue creating detailed blogposts as I have done this year and with so few comments I’m sure how many people are interested in reading them. (Apologies that I haven’t been able to send out the full version of the articles via email lately – I’m hoping that will be fixed soon!)

But as I’ve mentioned above, I’m so happy that I have been able to put them together as a record of what was an incredible 9 week journey!

So just to finish this article…

Here is an index of all my articles from this big trip

 
Trip Prep

• Lots of trip prep making decisions about materials
• Thinking about maps
• Thinking about designing pages in an Alpha 8×10″ book

My 9 week trip in Europe

• One day in Glasgow
• Isle of Lewis and back to Glasgow
• Teaching in Germany
• Ladenburg and Heidelberg
• Speyer, Mannheim and Schwetzingen Palace
• Dresden
• Berlin
• Poznan and the Urban Sketchers Symposium
• Wroclaw
• Warsaw
• Returning to Berlin
• Geneva and the Swiss USK Symposium
• Final day in the French Alps (and heading home)

What an adventure! I hope you have enjoyed all these articles!