#EarthDay is upon us and it’s time for a new illustration and hand-lettering travel quote to highlight my personal feelings as an illustrator, as we celebrate this very special day!
A couple of months ago, I found the perfect quote by love poet and Sufi grand mentor, Rumi, to highlight this year’s April 22 festivities! I feel this quote draws a beautiful picture that illustrates the direction and vision of my food and travel illustration blog!
Rumi, who I feel is one of the world’s spiritual healers and guardian angels, says: “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”
How beautiful is this quote? Like all Rumi poems and stanzas it offers us several layers of meaning and spiritual depth to ponder!
Two meanings I felt were strongly present in this quote have something to do with: Eco-travel, and travel as a way to melt down prejudices, spread kindness, as well as dismantle hatred in the world.
Travelling responsibly (i.e eco-travel, eco-tourism, sustainable tourism, and responsible tourism) is, in my opinion, tightly connected to broadening one’s horizons in ways that make us fall in love with cultures and peoples that are foreign to us.
In addition to thinking of ways to leave a minimal carbon footprint while we travel, I think it is important to keep an open mind and a self-awareness that allows us to inspect our inner prejudices and feelings of superiority (or inferiority) towards the new places or cultures we are travelling to.
I have been on a couple of tours were a number of travellers in my group spent the whole trip criticising and making fun of the traditions and ways of the host country! I’ve also been deeply disturbed by the lack of sensitivity by some travellers towards the customs and traditions of the countries we were travelling to.
These experiences taught me that not all those who travel really do travel, in the spiritual and humanitarian sense of the word. I have talked in more depth about this idea in my previous hand-lettering travel quote about the life-enhancing merits of wanderlust, part of my Illustrated Travel Stories blog series.
OLD ILLUSTRATIONS
Before arriving to the final illustration that you can see at the beginning of this post, I created these two artworks featuring two different colour palettes and a different composition. I’ve mentioned somewhere before on this blog that my illustrated posts are a work-in-progress type of thing; every few months or couple of years I re-visit my old artwork and if I feel like it, I re-create the illustrations or at least give them a slight facelift.
I believe for these two illustrations I used real pen-and-ink line work with digital brushes on Photoshop. However, for the new illustration above, I re-did the faces using digital brushes on this really cool programme called Affinity Photo. This software is actually a rival of Adobe Photoshop’s in so many ways. It still doesn’t have a “timeline” (helpful for creating GIFs and short videos), but it has some really cool features and it is lightweight, as opposed to Photoshop that tends to lag real bad when large brushes or large canvases are involved. Affinity Photo is also a one-time purchase, unlike Adobe Photoshop’s subscription model. So, you basically own the programme and you get updates whenever the mother company, Serif, releases them.
With today’s hand-lettering illustration I wish you all a happy Earth Day!
Travel illustration + Hand-lettering travel quote by illustrator and artist Yaansoon
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