To really experience a new place, Justin Ng likes to sketch it.
It’s not just for the purpose of remembering what he saw, like a photograph — there’s more to it than that.
“Drawing it allows me to understand the architecture and the place a bit more,” Ng told Vancouver Is Awesome.
“It forces me to take it apart in my head and analyze. But then, more importantly, it’s slow. The slowness allows me to make significance of the trip. I feel like without drawing, it’s like I didn’t go on a trip because everything happens so quickly, there’s nothing that you’re really gripping on to.”
The 23-year-old, who’s currently completing his Masters in Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has just released a new sketchbook based on Vancouver. The book captures the beauty of the city in ink line and watercolours.
Two years in the making, Ng said ‘The Vancouver Sketchbook’ tied together drawings and writings which explore moments in the city’s history that contributed to its contemporary picturesque identity.
For Ng, Vancouver isn’t just another travel destination he wanted to draw. It’s a second home. From a young age Ng jumped between a life in Hong Kong and Vancouver.
“Vancouver is a very special place to me,” he said.
“I’ve only ever lived here for four months maximum at a time. My grandparents live here and on my dad’s side a lot of our relatives are based here. So growing up we would come here every other summer.”
While living in Hong Kong, Ng was inspired by the concrete jungle he was surrounded by, and began sketching buildings that caught his eye when he was in high school, around the age of 16.
Ng said, at the time, he was just exploring what he liked to draw.
“I bought a book called ‘The Art of Urban Sketching’ (by Gabriel Campanario) and that is basically what locked me in to rigorously drawing,” he said.
He believes growing up in the building heavy city is partially the reason why he was inspired to pursue a career in architecture. Ng was lucky enough to complete his undergraduate degree at Waterloo University, in Ontario, which offered a co-op education program that allowed him to gain international work experience and travel extensively.
While he travelled, he drew. His drawings and time-lapse videos of his work — through Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. — can be viewed on his Instagram page, which boasts more than 27,000 followers. He released his first sketchbook, an ‘Urban Sketcher’s Guide to Helsinki,’ in Finland three years ago.
By the summer of 2017, he was back in Vancouver for a work placement at an architecture firm, and in his spare time he started to draw buildings and places he admired in the city.
Ng said he first drew Vancouver with “no intention of publishing a book” but after a while, he realized his collection of drawings could be something more. Publisher Whitecap Books agreed and offered him a contract to write the book.
With close to 100 sketches of Vancouver, Ng said the book offered a little something for both travellers and life-long Vancouverites to learn.
“The drawings themselves all have their own annotations — If you’re just looking for a picture book, you can look at the pictures and there’s no story necessarily, it just tells you something fun or something interesting about each of the places,” he explained.
“Then the whole book weaves all the drawings together into a narrative about the history of Vancouver and it tries to tie it to the pictorial identity of this place.”
The book features iconic buildings and important city figures that helped shape the way the city looks today.
“Unlike a lot of other North American cities, this is a rather pictorial place and that’s not by coincidence and not purely by nature either,” Ng said.
While Douglas Coupland described Vancouver as ‘The City of Glass,’ Ng said it was much more than that.
“It’s a city that’s in constant pursuit of its beauty,” he said.
The book was officially released in November 2019 and is available at bookstores across Vancouver, including Indigo, and online on Amazon.
