The 2015 Summer Invitational: Pimp Your Sketchbooks, continues with Paul Hoppe, who lives and works in Brooklyn.

For the DART Summer invitational, I’m sharing the travel sketches I made during a month-long trip to Europe this summer. While my everyday sketchbooks have become mostly utilitarian, this was a great opportunity to start a fresh book and dust off my location drawing chops.

It seems it’s always easier and more fun to do this stuff when you’re not in your usual surroundings. These pages were done all on location between June and July, in London, Berlin, and other towns and cities in the south of Germany. I tried to do at least one drawing per day, whether it was an exciting landmark, or just a train compartment. 

Because it needed to be easy and portable, the sketchbook was small, the tools simple. As the trip went on, I got more comfortable with the coloring. The final image (above)  is a gift for friends that I stayed with in Karlsruhe, done on watercolor paper.

Drawing while traveling really does give you an additional channel through which to experience the trip, and it was great practice. Now I hope I can keep some of this momentum back home!

Paul Hoppe is an illustrator, cartoonist and children’s book author. His work has been published in many newspapers and magazines, such as The New York Times and The New Yorker, and his children’s book, Hat, has been published in seven languages. In 2013, he was honored with a retrospective at the German Consulate General in New York City. Born in Poland and raised in Germany, he is now based in Brooklyn, New York. Blog: http://paulhoppeblog.blogspot.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/HoppeIndustries Instagram: https://instagram.com/hoppeindustries/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Paul-Hoppe-Illustration/136183409777781

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