Sketchbook Traveler: Southwest

A portable art journal and field guide to enhance the pleasures of travel through painting, drawing, and writing. Encourages readers to deepen their engagement with the places they live in and travel through. Keeping visual journals has been popular for centuries among artist-travellers like Albrecht Dürer, J. M. W. Turner, Katsushika Hokusai, and David Hockney. Explorers like Jacques le Moyne, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Marianne North also recorded their journeys in sketchbooks and diaries. Topographical drawing was essential. Knowing what destinations looked like let voyagers know they had arrived. Carrying this concept to the next level, Sketchbook Traveler expands plein air painting beyond the range of easels and backpacks, providing educators with instructional concepts. It gives professional artists many new (and old) ways to hone mobile sketching skills. Inviting readers to explore their surroundings through drawing and writing, Sketchbook Traveler is a field guide to mindful engagement with personal experience in ways that make every day an adventure.This small yet sturdy sketchbook-and-journal combination is the ideal travel companion - ready to toss into a backpack at a moment's notice. Through drawing, painting, and writing prompts, it invites curious creatives to journey toward an expansive, more meaningful engagement with the world around them. Filled with inspiring quotes and blank pages to develop one's own visual journal, this portable canvas is perfect for recording places, observations, and impressions of the world we live in and travel to. In a mix of history, narrative, and art, author James Lancel McElhinney explores the American Southwest, a vast area of breathtaking natural beauty. AUTHOR: James Lancel McElhinney is a visual artist, author, and essayist known for travel journals and other works exploring American rivers and Civil War landscapes. Exhibited widely, McElhinney earned a BFA from Tyler School of Art and MFA from Yale; his art is represented in many public and private collections. 30 colour drawings