When my now-husband Finn and I first started travelling together, I brought along my sketchbook and did micro sketches of things we experienced: waterfalls, delicious meals, hilarious cultural misunderstandings. We both love drawing as a way to experience places. A few years ago, I elaborated on that habit to make my own postcards while we travel.

I call them postcards but I don’t really make physical copies of all of them to send home. They’re just postcard-sized plein air drawings – basically art you make while you’re actually outside in a space. Drawing can be a fun excuse to linger and notice details you might miss with a photograph. Challenging myself to do most of the work en plein air pushes me to work quickly. In this case, knowing that eventually it might rain and Finn will get bored gives me an excuse not to overthink the work.

The first series is from a trip we took to France. I had to take a French class in Grenoble for university. My husband came to travel around with me for a little while and drop me off at school. In Paris, we visited the Musée de Montmartre (thank you Heartstopper) and the Père Lachaise Cemetery (to see Jim Morrison’s grave).

I take very lightweight art supplies: my quill, a bottle of waterproof ink, watercolour pencils, a carbon disc, and brushes. Most of these are tools I learned to use when I took a cartooning class from Gerry Rasmussen. If you look closely you’ll see blue pencil underneath my black lines. That’s an artifact of a technique he taught us: usually it’s used so you can scan it in and remove the blue lines. I kind of like leaving it as a hint of the process, though.

While I was in Grenoble, I made this sketch outside a farmers’ market. It was a real lesson in ephemerality: all of the flower and vegetable stalls were packed up before I was done, and of course the people on the street walked faster than I could sketch.

The more recent postcards are from a trip Finn and I took to Colombia in 2025. We visited Bogotá, Medellín, and an awe-inspiring nature reserve called Río Claro. If you ever want to be inspired by the work humans can do to protect a stretch of rainforest, visit Río Claro. It was just pulsing with life, like this limpkin that was perched on a marble outcropping as we rafted down the river.

We saw highways of leafcutter ants, amber fireflies, iridescent blue morpho butterflies, and bromeliads becoming the foliage of gigantic dead trees. In the morning we’d hear toucans singing along the river, and once I got to watch a hummingbird preening outside our cabin for the better part of an hour.

Before we went to Colombia, I’d only seen a myco-heterotroph once. They’re plants that don’t produce their own chlorophyll – they tap into fungal networks and get their sugar from other plants nearby. In Río Claro we saw two! This Voyria truncata was about 5 cm tall, with white stems and pale violet flower petals.