You Spend Thousands to Travel the World in Style. This Travel Writer Has the Secret to Actually Remembering What You Saw.
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For almost as long as people have been roaming to far off places, they’ve been sketching what they saw along the way. The impulse to capture what one has seen for memory, to show loved ones back home, and to do it as an extension of one’s artistic creativity seems almost ingrained in our DNA. Many people discover their talent in an exotic cafe or on rugged mountain trail. For travel writer Shikha Shah, the first drawing of her second career as an artist came before she had even landed.
On a long flight to Bhutan in February 2023, Shah opened her supplies -- at that point just a few loose pieces of paper and a beginner watercolor kit -- and began sketching a map of the country, tracing the geography of a destination that had long been on the bucketlist. Not meant to be a great artistic endeavor, it was simply a way of orienting herself before arrival, of starting the trip by studying its mountain passes, distances and contours by hand.
By the time she returned home, Shah had ten watercolor sketches from her travels in Bhutan, along with a new understanding of how she wanted to move through the world.
Shah is an Indian freelance journalist with more than 15 years of experience writing about travel, food, culture, art, architecture, wellness and luxury for publications including BBC Travel, Travel + Leisure, and Condé Nast Traveler. In more recent years, her work has taken on a second form: pen and watercolor sketches made in the places she visits like Spain, Egypt, and Vietnam.
The Trip That Changed the Way She Traveled
Shah says that she had always been creative. She took art classes as a child and loved working with her hands, but art slipped into the background as travel writing became her profession. Then, during the lockdown of the pandemic and unable to travel, Shah began painting from memory and imagination: white domes in Greece, autumn in Japan, Peruvian mountain landscapes.
She also stumbled upon a movement online called urban sketching. “It was a life-changing moment,” Shah says. “I realized there was a global community of people documenting everyday life through art, sketching outdoors and capturing fleeting moments.”
When travel resumed, Bhutan gave her the first chance to try her art in the field. After the map on the plane, she began drawing the details that captured her attention: Bhutanese architectural motifs, prayer flags fluttering across mountain roads, monasteries in the hills and wooden vessels with silver carvings used to store ara, the traditional local beverage.
“As a beginner, I was quite slow,” she recalls. “Most of the time, I could only manage rough pencil sketches outdoors before finishing them with watercolor later in my hotel room after long days of wandering and sightseeing.”
The sketches may have been simple, but she maintains the experience was not. It gave her a new way to remember a trip, not as a sequence of stops, but as a collection of moments she had observed closely enough to recreate.
What Makes a Place Worth Sketching
Shah does not arrive at a given destination with a strict list of subjects she intends to draw. The process is more instinctive, as she is drawn to what is local and lived-in: markets, folk art, people, street scenes and the small details that she knows only when she sees them.
“It could be anything, from a traditional Thai temple, to a croissant-and-coffee ritual at a tiny Italian cafe, to a meaningful interaction with a vendor at a fresh produce market in Georgia,” she said. “I think what makes something feel ‘mine’ to sketch is the connection I feel toward it.”
In Vietnam, one of her first sketches was the Saigon Central Post Office. Coming upon the 19th-century French colonial building with yellow facade and green windows, she was struck by its symmetry, sunlight and sense of daily motion -- the way it functioned as both a landmark and as part of the city’s daily routine.
Her next sketch was smaller in scale. Sitting at a cafe in Da Nang with her parents, watching the people and the motor scooters in the street, she sketched the glass of egg coffee that sat on the table in front of her. “It was such an ordinary moment, yet it felt very special to me,” she said.
That contrast is central to her work. A sketch may begin with a famous building, but it may just as easily begin with a drink, a market stall, a vendor or the angle of light on a quiet street.
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Why Sketching Makes Travel Slower
Shah has described travel sketching as a meditation. When she sits down with a sketchbook her attention narrows, even on a busy street or in a crowded park.
“As I draw, time seems to slow down,” she said. “There’s something therapeutic about observing something in silence and translating it onto paper. The act of sketching demands complete presence.”
Painting adds another layer to the meditative aspect of her process. Choosing colors, mixing them and responding with each brushstroke becomes, as Shah puts it, a quiet conversation between artist and material. The process is intuitive, portable and often shaped by the variables like weather, which seat happens to be available, or even the curiosity of strangers.
In August 2025, Shah traveled to Phuket for the AsiaLink Sketch Walk, a gathering of more than 800 urban sketchers from across Asia. One afternoon in Phuket Old Town, she was seated on a folding stool along Phangnga Road, sketching the facade of a pottery studio in the intense heat.
As she worked, two smiling schoolgirls returned with a bottle of water and two warm chocolate cookies from a nearby bakery. They also insisted on taking photos of Shah on her phone while she painted.
“As artists, we often become so immersed in the process that we forget to document ourselves within those moments,” Shah said.
The exchange became one of her favorite examples of what sketching can bring into travel: not just a record of a place, but a reason for someone else to take the pause with you.
Watercolor as a Travel Language
Shah works in pen and watercolor, a medium she calls one of the toughest and most unforgiving to control. But watercolor also dries quickly, travels easily and brings softness to the structure of ink.
“Unlike bold mediums, watercolor feels more like a whisper rather than something shouting for attention,” she said.
What she loves most is its transparency, the way light passes through layers of pigment and reflects off the paper. Pen gives the shape and the Watercolor lets the scene breathe.
“It’s a medium you can guide and collaborate with, but never fully control.”
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The Sketch That Stays With Her the Most
Among Shah’s most meaningful works is a sketch of a bookseller on Kolkata’s College Street, known locally as Boi Para. The area is one of the world’s great book districts, a maze of secondhand stalls, publishing houses and books stacked along narrow pavements.
Shah first noticed the vendor after an evening at Indian Coffee House with her parents and husband. They had been sitting over coffee, sandwiches and fish cutlets in the historic cafe, surrounded by high ceilings, white-uniformed waiters, and faded walls. Outside, she saw the bookseller seated on a stool among towers of books.
“There was something very cinematic about the scene,” she said, recalling the Bengali signboard, old paperbacks and muted motion of the street around him. “I knew instantly that I wanted to sketch him.”
The image for her, though, holds more than the memory of the vendor, she said. It brings back the evening, her family, the coffee house, the smell of old books and the specific nostalgia of that busy Kolkata street.
A Lesson for the Non-Artist Traveler
Not every traveler will pack a watercolor kit. Shah does not think they necessarily need to in order to experience traveling the world in a deeper way. The larger lesson of sketching, she says, is learning to pause.
“I used to be the kind of traveler who wanted to tick off every must-see spot, have a packed itinerary from morning to night,” she recalls. “It often left me exhausted, and probably the people traveling with me too.”
Sitting in one place for an hour with her art made her notice what she would have missed by moving through quickly. It also made her aware of how often travelers rush to capture a moment with a photo before they have truly absorbed it.
“You don’t have to do everything a destination is known for,” Shah said. “Sometimes it’s enough to do fewer things, but experience them fully. Linger at a cafe a little longer. Sit quietly at a scenic spot without needing to document it. Read a book by the beach. Wander without a plan.”
And for travelers who have always wanted to sketch but worry they are not good enough, Shah recommends treating the sketchbook less like a portfolio and more like a personal album. The point is attention, not perfection.
“You don’t need to be ‘good enough’ to start,” she says. “You simply need to be curious enough to pause and courageous enough to put pen to paper.”
