Travel Album Covers

Before the demise of the thick photo albums, I used to draw a personalised album covers to label and brand each photo album. Here’s a selection of my favourites. They were painstaking, but I enjoyed creating them. Nowadays, all our photo albums are digital. There’s no motivation to draw anything anymore. Missing the good old days!

From 1998 onwards, I began to develop a more linear style in both drawing and taking photograph. This was probably inspired by the colourful linear patterns consistently seen in Andean embroidery.

This 2000 Bhutanese series took a lot of effort. I had to imagine myself as the painter on the site, painting the actual columns, beams and parapets, making sure the colour tone, hue and patterns were authentic.

Another easy drawing except for the linear details. Took a while to match and smudge the colours.

The visit to the Kathmandu valley in year 2000 was like a “homecoming” after a 9 year gap. Blending the gold paint with the brown paint took some trial and error. Looking at this today, I am actually quite impressed with how realistic the brick wall looks.

You will notice that my whole family of 8 was captured in this 2002 map. My daughter was still being carried in the arm and my boy was carrying his favourite teddy bear! My aunt, my parents and my mother-in-law joined this trip just a month before the Bali bombing!

This 1996 drawing was supposed to give you a sense of “where you are in this big world”. The place we live in sometimes seem so big and complex. Actually with a bit more of imagination, it is really that small and simple.

This 1996 map was my first attempt in including city layout and and train routes in exactly the way we would see from the “google earth” view.

This must have been one of the easiest drawing, I believe it was done in 30 minutes. Year 2000.

This section of a 1996 map showed Venice’s layout but not to scale. The details included famous landmarks like Piaza San Marco and Ponte Vecchio.

This was one of my favourite cartoon pictorial map, drawn in 1998. The actual map was well laminated. This was one of the rare map in which the colour and ink did not fade nor smudge. The length stretched almost 1 metre long, depicting our South to North Americas journey. Shown here is half of the map.

This 1994 map tells the gruelling but unforgettable overland journey from Singapore all the way to the Karen villages beyond Mae Hon Son in Northwest Thailand. I wondered how I had the patience to draw the waves! Even more bewildering was how my then girlfriend and her two best friends survived the journey on those Thai local buses over 20 years ago!

I liked this 1996 drawing because the atmosphere created was much bigger than the effort. Mount Merapi, Borobudur, Prambanan and the Dieng plateau were simpily shaded on a green piece of paper.

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