The journey

I wanted this image to be cute. Whether or not it is cute is another question entirely, but it was a lot of fun to draw. I have been working on this every evening since the first of September and I think I’ve finally got it to a stage where I can say, “Yeah–you know what, I’m pretty darn chuffed with this.”

About a year ago I visited Japan and I’ve used a lot of that trip for inspiration when drawing this picture. Most obviously, the train is loosely modelled off a Tokyo Metro carriage with some bits (such as the windows) taken from a Kyoto commuter train. The scenery is undeniably rural Japanese–so much so that my friends who have seen this image so far have immediately said that the Japanese scenery I used looks really accurate. I found this surprising at first, originally the background was a lot more generic than what you see now, but I’ve changed it based up[on these comments. In contrast to this, the line information board (seen on the left of the image) uses station names from Singapore, where I was born and spent a lot of my life.

While I wanted to go completely line-less for this image, I’m definitely not confident enough in my drawing skills to make that jump yet. That being said, I tried to hide obvious lines by reducing their opaqueness by half. Hopefully this lets them blend in more with the background colours.

I could spend ages writing about it here, but I think I’ll save the best for a journal post. After all, the less text there is here, the less you’ll get distracted from the image!