A Sketching Walkabout in Thailand

Drawing Bangkok Temples

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The plan was to fly to Nepal where I would video-document a volunteer village water development project with travel group Crooked Trails. Since I had a connecting flight in Bangkok, I arranged to spend a few days seeing the fabulous temples and golden Buddhas there.

In spite of Bangkok flooding at the time, I sat at a little floating coffee house to make sketches of Wat Arun and other temples across the Chao Phraya River - pen and ink and a few watercolor ones in my little moleskin sketchbook. After drawing 3 or 4 actual places, I wanted to change it up.

The walkabout drawing

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Most of the temples are so complex that it makes one dizzy attempting to draw these intricate and exacting symmetrical structures. I suppose this is why I drew this more as an expression of movement, pattern and complexity rather than of a specific temple.

It is a process of "collecting" shapes and elements as I wander through the city, trying to capture the liveliness and diversity of Bangkok. A decorative rooftop caught my eye, lattice patterns, signs, whatever had interesting forms in it. The drawing evolved somewhat on its own. It is a blending of intention and surprise. I was definitely conscious of overall form and relationship, but I didn't have a plan. It filled itself in. Some areas worked better than others. Then later back in my room, I refine it more and drew over the pencil with ink pens.

The vector drawing

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Later I wanted to see how it would work with color. I scanned the sketch and redrew everything in my vector program. This allowed me to refine elements and details, and to stretch the image wider. I created a specific color palette for it, blending all the seemingly random elements into a sense of order and relationship in what otherwise could be just chaotic.

Steemians, thanks for checking out this post. Please follow me at @mrsomebody and comment below your thoughts!