Santiago de Compostela in Watercolor: Forgotten Corners
2023-11-26
This watercolor of Santiago de Compostela captures one of those beautiful corners, the less perfect, half forgotten kind, this is how I see the places I visit.
One of the best things about living in Portugal is being so close to Spain. Galicia especially, right next door, lets us stretch a weekend and explore somewhere new. The city we keep coming back to, without a doubt, is Santiago de Compostela. It’s simply magical.
I guess we can partly thank Paulo Coelho for that. Back when we were teenagers, it felt like every single Brazilian household had heard about his pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago. That stuck with us, and it made Santiago de Compostela a place that marked our imagination forever. So whenever the road takes us anywhere near Santiago, we end up stopping for a while. This drawing of Santiago de Compostela came from one of those days.
We stopped for lunch and a couple of beers, or a “caña” as they call it there, just to enjoy the moment.
I owe an apology to anyone looking for the perfect postcard spots. My focus is drawing the strange corners, the ones people forget or barely notice, but that still carry their own kind of beauty. That’s the spirit of Urban Sketching I practice.
That afternoon, the glass of “caña” on the table, right in front of the Church of San Martiño Pinario, turned into another memory kept. A fragment that will live in my memory forever. That’s what travel illustration is about, capturing these sensations, the atmosphere, the small details of one particular moment.
It’s a way of practicing Urban Sketching and going beyond the perfect façade. It’s not just a monument, it’s the life happening around it. So this watercolor of Santiago de Compostela was born right there, at that wobbly table, the watercolor slightly mixed with the cold “caña”, the way good moments in life deserve.
I used watercolor over a pen sketch, done right there at the café table. Later I added a few shadows and let the ink stains tell part of the story. That’s how I like to work with this watercolor technique, leaving room for the unexpected.
If you also enjoy exploring cities through their less obvious corners, come follow more of my drawings and travel watercolors over on my Instagram.