Rediscovering Singapore through Urban Sketching

By Sanjukta Sen in Singapore

The things that I missed when I moved from Singapore to the UK for university included the sunny weather and the incredible food. However, this December when I returned home for the winter break, I discovered a new side of Singapore with some help from my mother.

My mother has been an artist for about 20 years now, and I started sketching 10 months ago. When I returned home, I brought two Japanese Moleskine sketchbooks with me – one for my mom and one for myself. The format is ideal to draw panoramas on, and the layout is nice to look back on as one long memory.

We sat at One Fullerton and sketched this.
It took ages for me to get all the details in and even then I’ve omitted many buildings!

Our sketching journey started at One Fullerton, where my mother took me to sketch the classic Singapore skyline, complete with the Marina Bay Sands and the Merlion. I think the sheer size of this drawing meant that towards the end I lost focus, and it turned out a little sloppier than I had hoped for.

Our next stop was the Tiong Ghee temple. We walked five minutes from our house to sketch this temple. I had never appreciated how complicated the structure was, and how different and difficult it was to draw compared to the glass high-rise buildings in our previous sketch-pedition. I got bitten by a hundred mosquitoes, but the experience was worth it.

Tiong Ghee temple – the Chinese temple behind my condominium.

Once again, we set off in fairly gloomy and cloudy weather (which, actually, is the best weather to sketch in Singapore because when it is hot, it is impossible to be outdoors). We took shelter under a shop house and, perched on our little stools, set about drawing this scene. We finished it surprisingly fast, and because the weather had not tired us out, we walked a little further to draw the Sri Marimman temple.

Chinatown

This was the hardest thing I’ve probably drawn in this sketchbook. The temple is made up of hundreds of carved statues that are stacked on top of each other to create this formidable structure. That, and the fact that the sun had come out and was beating down quite mercilessly on us, made for a very challenging drawing. My mother and I laughed every five minutes at how futile it felt trying to draw the statues, and we soon figured out that capturing the “mood” of the temple was a good attempt enough. We went home absolutely exhausted.

Sri Marimann Temple – ridiculously hard, ridiculously fun.

Once again, the weather favored us and we roamed around Arab Street for a while, trying to find a good spot to sketch this famous mosque. There was an old man who kept returning to check our progress on our drawing, and at one point he started calling out to other pedestrians to see our sketches! It was very cute.

Sultan Mosque, Arab Street – a Singaporean architecture landmark.

Our final stop was Emerald Hill, where my mom has sketched many times with her friend. The weather was blisteringly hot. Despite sitting in the shade, the sun beat down on us, and within five minutes both of us were sweating insanely. However, this scene was the most fun I’ve had to draw, as I loved playing with the architecture and exaggerating the perspective to capture the mood. This was the perfect end to a very fun vacation of sketching.

Emerald Hill – a good way to finish off an amazing sketching vacation.

I learnt a lot from both watching my mom’s approach to sketching and exposing myself to such an incredible variety of architecture. Nowhere else in the world is there such a range of buildings to draw – each one was so different and so challenging. Rediscovering Singapore through urban sketching with my mother’s help has made me fall in love with this country more than ever.   

Sanjukta Sen, a compulsive sketcher from Singapore, is currently studying Politics and International Relations at the University of Cambridge in England. You can see more of her work on Instagram.