A Live Online Travel Journal Workshop with Danny Gregory

You've been to beautiful places. You have photos to prove it. But photos don't tell you what the coffee tasted like, or how the light hits the cobblestones at 8 in the morning.

A travel journal does.

Paris in a Day is both too much and not enough. That's the honest truth of it, and it's exactly what this workshop is about.

In three hours together, we're going to spend a day in Paris — sketching a café, wandering through the Louvre, crossing the Seine, watching the Eiffel Tower fill the right side of the page. You'll leave with a finished journal spread that captures the whole day. More importantly, you'll leave with a way of traveling you've never had before.

The problem most travel artists know well:

Your travel companions want to move on. You've found something worth drawing, but you have three minutes, not thirty. So you either rush and feel frustrated, or you put the sketchbook away.

This workshop is built around that exact problem. It's not an urban sketching sit-down where you claim a bench for three hours. It's on-the-move drawing — every technique designed to work under real-world constraints, in a crowd, on a moving boat, with whatever fits in your bag.

What you'll take away:

Everyone photographs the Mona Lisa. Nobody looks at it. The act of drawing forces you to actually look — to notice, to be present in a way that photography never quite demands of you.

The techniques in this workshop will change how you experience every trip after this one, not just trips to Paris.

And something unexpected tends to happen after you've spent a day studying a city: you come home wanting to draw your own neighborhood. Travel sharpens your eye, and that eye doesn't turn off when you get back.

Here's what you'll take home:

• How to capture a scene quickly enough that your travel companions don't have to wait
• How to draw without self-consciousness — even in a crowd, even under pressure
• Contour drawing, blind contour, continuous line, and brush drawing as tools for seeing, not just mark-making

• Quick watercolor approaches that work in the real world, not just at a studio desk
• How to use writing to deepen what your journal actually means to you
• How to compose a complex, multi-scene page on the go — so it looks intentional, not accidental

Why this is different:

This isn't just about drawing skills. It's about making art when you're traveling with non-artists, under time pressure, with whatever fits in your bag. The constraints are the point.

We also treat handwriting as a design element equal to the drawings — the finished spread is part journal, part sketchbook, part map.

Danny has kept travel journals for over 30 years on six continents, and edited An Illustrated Journey, a best-selling collection of travel sketchbooks from artists around the world.

And this workshop is designed to be a fun, creative morning with lots of creative travel companions.

This may not be for you if...

You're brand new to drawing and looking for fundamentals (we have courses for that), or if you want slow, highly polished work.

Travel journaling is fast, improvised, and honest — that's what makes it good. If you’ve already signed up for a live artist-led workshop in Paris this summer and have your flight and hotel booked, you could use this class as a warm up.

Meet your instructor