Why My Best Pattern Ideas Always Start in a Travel Sketchbook

On the slow magic of sketching on the road, and why a pencil beats a camera every time

Some of the best ideas don’t happen at your desk. They happen when you’re somewhere unfamiliar, slightly tired, watching the light do something you’ve never seen it do before at home.

I’ve been back at my studio in Sheffield lately, going through travel sketches from our recent adventures, and I keep being struck by how much more useful they are than any photograph I took on the same trip. There’s something in the act of sketching that a camera simply can’t replicate.

The sketchbook that started it all

The Things a Camera Can’t Capture

It’s the slower pace that does it. When you photograph something, it takes a fraction of a second. When you sketch it, you’re sitting with it for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. You notice the way morning light falls across a landscape. You observe how local flowers cluster differently than the ones growing in your garden back home. You start to really look.

That quality of looking is what I’m always chasing in my pattern work. A photograph is a record. A sketch is an understanding.

Colour notes from the road, these swatches find their way into everything.

When the Sketches Come Home

These travel sketches are now feeding directly into my Africa pattern collection. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t happen quickly. Sometimes it takes months for a sketch to find its way into my digital work. I used to find that frustrating. Now I think it’s part of what makes the designs feel authentic rather than reactive.

Still making its way from sketchbook to pattern

There’s a slow burn between “I drew this on a Tuesday afternoon somewhere far from home” and “this is a repeat pattern going into a collection.” That distance, both in time and in translation, is where the interesting things happen.

The Artists Fuelling My Travel Sketchbook Obsession

I’ve been spending time recently with other artists’ travel journals, and it’s become one of my favourite ways to think about my own process. There’s something so generous about a sketchbook: you’re seeing not just the finished observation but every crossing-out, every colour swatch tested in the margin.

Right now I’m particularly taken with Katie Moody’s google map inspired studies and Quentin Monge’s incredible watercolour work. Both have a quality of committed looking that I find genuinely inspiring.

What inspires you when you travel? I’d love to know about the moments that make you stop and reach for a pencil, or a phone, or whatever you use to capture things. Feel free to drop a comment below.

Until next time.

Michelle

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Michelle Walker is a surface designer and illustrator in Sheffield, UK, creating hand-drawn collections for children’s licensing. She writes Postcards from the Studio, a fortnightly newsletter about colour, pattern, and the quiet moments where creativity sneaks up on you.

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