10 Travel Journal Ideas to Copy: Pages for Every City You Visit
Not sure what to draw when traveling? You don't need a special talent for a travel journal, only a few page ideas you can repeat in any city. Here are 10 travel journal ideas to copy, each easy to fill in 15–30 minutes, with a pen, a little colour and whatever you picked up along the way.
Choose two or three for every city. The pages will start to feel like a series.
What you need
- A notebook with paper that takes your pen.
- One pen and one or two colours.
- Glue or tape, for tickets and small finds.
- A phone, for a photo of the page and the place name.
10 pages to copy
1. The ticket page. Glue in a ticket or a receipt, then draw a tiny scene from that day next to it: the tram, the station, the cup you bought.
2. A one-street page. Pick one street and fill the page with its details: a door, a lamp, a balcony, a shop sign.
3. A map of your route. Draw the outline of your walk or trip, add the stops and put one small sketch at each one. (A step-by-step version is in our route-map guide.)
4. The window-seat page. The view from a plane, train or bus window: a frame, a horizon, a few shapes passing by.
5. The first morning view. Draw what you see five minutes after waking up in a new place.
6. A café-table page. The cup, the table and one detail of the place. Date it, put the café's name in the corner.
7. A market or food page. One stall, or one dish drawn before you eat it.
8. A weather page. Rain, sun or fog, with a caption: where and when. Try drawing one view in different weather: the same street in morning sun, in afternoon rain and in the evening light.
9. A collection page. Five small sketches of one theme: doors, hats, balconies, cups. A good page for a day with little time.
10. The last page. Your favourite moment of the trip, from memory, drawn on the way home. It is usually the one you remember best.
Draw it, then pin it on the map
Travel pages are best when they remember where they were made. In SketchMap Atlas, a free app for sketchers, each page gets a place and a date and goes on a world map, so a trip becomes a path of pages.
How to fill a page quickly
- Draw first and glue later; tickets can be added in the evening.
- Use a pen. You can't erase on a trip, and neither can the memory.
- Leave a margin for the place and date.
- Take a photo of the page when it's done.
- Don't draw faces. Silhouettes at a distance are enough.
Keep the pages together after the trip
The notebook ends up on a shelf and the phone photos sit between screenshots and cat pictures. SketchMap Atlas keeps the pages together: photograph each one, add the place and date, and it is pinned where you drew it. There are folders for each trip (up to 3 and 30 works on the free plan), an ideas chest for places you want to draw next, and the option to hide any page from the shared map so that only you see it. Old paper pages count too: add a scan with an approximate date.
If you're heading somewhere new, you can browse the map without signing in to see how other artists drew it, including classic sketches by old masters placed where they were drawn. The Atlas is young, so you may find more classics than neighbours' pages for now, and you can be one of the first to add yours.
More to explore
- the route-map page guide: a step-by-step version of idea 3.
- What's in My Travel Sketch Bag?: a bag page and what to carry.
- Routes: follow routes other artists drew through a city.
Questions
What should I put in a travel journal?
Small drawings of what you see, with the place and date: a ticket, a street, a window, a market. You don't have to cover everything.
How many pages a day?
One to three small pages are plenty.
Do I need to be good at drawing?
No. A page with a ticket and a doodle already counts.
Illustrations in this article are AI-generated (Google Flow).
