The Tour Bus

Today my parents and I took a tour to Central Taiwan. We took off at 6:45am and didn't came back to Taipei until after 10pm. While we were on the bus (about 8 hours), all the tourists except me had fun with karaoke whose volume was turned all the way up. It was a living hell.

When everyone was listening to the knife guy's sales pitch in a closed curtained store (and my dad ended up buying a set of 8 knifes because of the price), I stayed outside taking photos and sketching. Not a great one (When will I produce a great one?), but my mom seemed plenty impressed.

This trip made me realize one thing: During a trip, it's difficult to allocate a 2 to 4 hour slot to do my usual drawing/painting. Sketching, on the other hand, can be accomplished at small chuck of time that usually gets wasted away anyway. Not having to sketch first with a pencil seems to free me from being a perfectionist, too, not that my colored paintings are that perfect. If you compare the drawings of my Keen sandals, you probably notice that the pencil one is more alive and the later technical pen one is more cartoonish (even though the technical pen produced the desired effect for the later coloring, unfit for pencils).

Because lines produced by a technical pen is final, I'm not that comfortable skipping the pencil sketching step for my colored pieces. However, one of the Japanese art books that I acquired in Taiwan recommended exactly that. His paintings are far from perfect, but somehow they are full of energy and happiness. Once I'm more comfortable with my pen sketching, I'll give that brave technique a try.

Media: technical pen.