My CA-TX sketchbooks flip through

Here is a quick flip-through of the three Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbooks which I filled during my recent 3 week trip to California (the Bay Area) and Texas (Austin and Dallas). To take the pressure off producing 'good sketches' I chose the Alpha books over Moleskine A4 landscape watercolour books which I normally use for big overseas trips.

As a result of using the more casual Alpha paper I was a lot more experimental with my sketching ie. attempted to do a lot of super fast sketches!) It was so good to simply focus on doing sketches 'just for me' without any expectations - more about it in this article: http://www.lizsteel.com/five-reflecti...

Having three different sized books wasn't something I particularly planned - it just happened that way. But it was good to have the additional challenge of changing formats a number of times during the one trip.

I intend to share more details about many of the sketches from the trip, but I think it is important to see my sketchbooks in their entirety first. I'm much more interested in creating a record of my travels and thinking about the book as a whole, rather than creating individual masterpieces.

The trip included attending a business conference, so you will see lots of written notes from the six excellent talks at seanwes2017. I will write a separate article on my blog - http://www.lizsteel.com/- explaining the conference and sharing some of my takeaways.

Please let me know if you have any questions or if there are any specific sketches or aspects of my travel sketching which you would like me to discuss!