Field notes from Borneo

For this trip I have a different kind of field notes: a sketchbook full of sketches from our 4 days trip (more like 3 full days) in Tanjung Puting National Park. I actually was not planning to make an entire sketchbook out of this trip, thinking that I would be lucky to just get one sketch out of the trip, but inspiration just struck when I made my first sketch, and I thought wouldn't it be cool to sketch all of the impressions I had and all of the plants and animals that I saw? Besides, I don't have a really good camera for wildlife photography - my 28 mm camera is perfect for street photography but not for taking pictures of a Barbet bird from afar - so painting is the next thing I could do.

Boat life was slow, since all we did was wake up, eat really great food, pick up our binoculars to observe any bird sighting or primate sighting, and I think this slow rhythm just fit perfectly with sketching watercolor where I needed time to think about what to paint, what story to tell, how to compose the pages. That definitely helped to get the inspiration flowing and gave me the time to focus on sketching when I was not visiting observation sites or hiking.

I couldn't finish every sketch during the trip, of course. In the evening it was difficult to sketch because it was dark. We did have lamps on the boat but most of the time they would attract moths and so we didn't turn them on often. Sometimes we'd just go to the rooftop to stargaze because it was too dark to do anything else. I'd say I completed 1/3 of it on the trip and the rest I had to complete at home when I came back from my trip.

I definitely enjoy sketching on site more but it was nice to work on a longer-term project where I had to fill an entire sketchbook, instead of just sketching one object on a single paper. I felt like going back to being a graphic designer again, in a way - thinking about composing the pages, typography, etc. Of course my sketches aren't perfect in any means, there are typos everywhere, but on the other hand it was nice to do everything by hand, in the age of where most things could be done in a single prompt. (Another topic for later!)

Since I've written down most things in the sketchbook itself, I don't think it will add much to rehash the day to day here, so I'll just attach the entire sketchbook here: