Isola

When you’re traveling and find yourself in an especially beautiful place, what is your first instinct? Do you, perhaps, reach for your camera or phone and photographically capture the moment?

Then you might want to take a leaf from the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin’s book.

Draw a picture; it’ll last longer

Ruskin believed that drawing was a great way to heighten your aesthetic appreciation of the world around you.

As a child, he was once so overcome with the beauty of grass that he wanted to eat it! Luckily, he found a way to realize this rather impractical fantasy that didn’t actually involve munching on vegetation. Instead, he spent hours drawing blade after blade of grass, taking in every little detail. For him, this was a way to eat the grass, though he consumed it with his eyes and mind rather than his mouth.

Unlike simply snapping a photo, which only takes a second, drawing slows us down and makes us ask questions about what we’re looking at. Why are some leaves on the tree greener than others? How deep do the tree’s roots go? These questions make us appreciate what we’re looking at even more.

So next time you take a vacation, bring a sketchbook. Instead of reaching for your phone or camera, grab your sketchpad and take a moment to draw what you see. You might discover something you didn’t notice before!

For more on how to make the most of your travels – including what the French poet Baudelaire had to say about ships – read The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton.