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Travel Artist: Sketchbook Drawings and True Stories from the Road
176 pages, Hardcover
Published October 7, 2025
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October 15, 2025
James Richards is a travel artist who is in the elite of the Urban Sketcher world. I loved his first book (Freehand Drawing and Discovery), which was part instructions, part intro to urban and landscape sketching, and part shared journal. His artistic style is accessible, and I learned a great deal from that book.
This book is more personal about his career, his travels, and his location sketches. Again here, his sketches are loose and accessible. He makes you want to book a trip and get out your sketchbook!
I also want to mention this is a high-quality publication. It is beautifully hardbound with colorful illustrations on every page. The mix of illustrations, text, quotes, and white space on the page are brilliant. You can tell someone with real artistry oversaw the layout and final product. I especially enjoyed the highlighted quotes. Here is one: “Keep it loose. Relax. Imperfection is a virtue. Avoid the temptation to start with a careful pencil under-drawing…….”
With all this I appreciated, I did have one big disappointment. Throughout the book, he repeatedly refers to his wife as “the grownup.” This reads less like a charming quirk and more like an old cliché — the idea that men never really grow up and women are left to manage them. The more he repeated this trope, the more outdated he seemed. It left me with a different impression of him than I’d started with.
This book is more personal about his career, his travels, and his location sketches. Again here, his sketches are loose and accessible. He makes you want to book a trip and get out your sketchbook!
I also want to mention this is a high-quality publication. It is beautifully hardbound with colorful illustrations on every page. The mix of illustrations, text, quotes, and white space on the page are brilliant. You can tell someone with real artistry oversaw the layout and final product. I especially enjoyed the highlighted quotes. Here is one: “Keep it loose. Relax. Imperfection is a virtue. Avoid the temptation to start with a careful pencil under-drawing…….”
With all this I appreciated, I did have one big disappointment. Throughout the book, he repeatedly refers to his wife as “the grownup.” This reads less like a charming quirk and more like an old cliché — the idea that men never really grow up and women are left to manage them. The more he repeated this trope, the more outdated he seemed. It left me with a different impression of him than I’d started with.
Displaying 1 of 1 review