Travel sketchbook: Montreal edition

Last week my fiance and I visited Montreal for a quick weekend trip, so today I’ll be sharing some sketchbook pages from my travels! This newsletter will be more photo-heavy than most, so be sure to click through to the full post if the email gets cut off in your inbox.

Traveling always begins with packing materials. I decided to bring my 12x12 cm Royal Talens sketchbook along with some Tombow and Kuretake brush pens, Prismacolor and Luminance colored pencils, and Neocolors. I’ve made the mistake before of bringing too many materials and getting overwhelmed with choosing colors, so I made sure to test colors in advance and pare down my palette this time.

After getting off our morning flight and eating a hearty meal at La Fabrique, we stopped by St. Louis Square to soak up some sun. The square is surrounded by colorful Victorian homes, and has a large fountain at its center where a man was dipping his feet(!)

Then we went for coffee and did some reading and drawing outside. We sat by this bilevel French bistro Les Deux Gamins—such a charming exterior.

The next day we went to the botanical gardens, which was so blissfully quiet and serene! We saw so many different trees, which I tried to catalog (right).

I tried to capture the plant life chaos from inside the conservatory, with mixed results (left). The next day we went to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where they had really wonderful exhibits of Nicolas Party and Shary Boyle. I drew part of her “White Elephant” (right).

Much food was consumed! Bagels of course—we tried both Fairmount and St. Viateur, and St. Viateur won out so we went back again on our last day. Being New Yorkers we are bagel snobs, but I really enjoyed how light and snacky Montreal bagels are.

It was raining for half of our stay, so we spent a lot of time in cafes. We also ate a lot of cozy Japanese food—all the noodle soups!

Our go to cafe was Cafe Olimpico, right by our Airbnb in Mile End. Their coffee is divine! We are fans of espresso drinks over drip coffees, so we enjoyed their long espressos and cortados very much. The cafe was a popular spot for patrons to chat or do work, so I enjoyed people watching and stealthily drawing them too.

I am a window seat gal—I love to lean on the plane walls for napping, and stare out the window otherwise. Catching a colorful sunset above ground was a perfect way to wrap up this vacation.

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Thanks for following along! This was the first time I felt like I was in the flow of documenting my travels, and that was in large part because we didn’t jam pack our itinerary with things to do. Do let me know if you have any questions on travel sketchbooking, or if you’d like to see more sketchbook snippets in future posts. Otherwise I am off to celebrate my birthday today! 🍰