Draw Your Adventures: Making Art to Celebrate Everyday Experiences and Travels Near and Far

by Samantha Dion Baker

Capture the details of your unique and remarkable experiences with this illustrated guide to drawing your travels and adventures, whether close to home or around the world.

In Draw Your Adventures, artist and illustrator Samantha Dion Baker invites you to savor moments and capture memories using your eyes, your creativity, and a few art-making tools. With as little as a sketchbook and some pens, begin a new art practice or enliven an existing one with inspiration from the prompts, challenges, examples, and scavenger hunts that populate these pages.

Your adventures are worth recording, whether they take you as close as your own kitchen or across the globe. Baker encourages you to see the world through an explorer's lens and provides ideas to guide you through adventures you can have during the everyday, on staycations, and over grand trips.

Paint your own postcards to send when abroad. Add pockets to your sketchbook for storing mementos.Create abstract pieces featuring the colors of the clothes you dug up in a closet cleanout.Make a series of paintings of family and friends' front doors.Document what you see around you on plane, train, boat, and road trips.
Draw Your Adventures is the perfect size to carry with you on your excursions. Stunning visual examples from Baker's own work accompany the prompts, making this the perfect book to help inspire your own artmaking practice.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Crafts, Travel

160 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2025

About the author

Samantha Dion Baker is originally from Philadelphia, where she grew up in a family of
artists. She graduated from The Cooper Union in New York City and spent over twenty years ' working as a graphic designer. Now a full-time author, illustrator, and artist, her favorite thing to do is wander the city streets and travel with her family, drawing all of the things she does, eats, and sees in the pages of her sketch journal. She is the author of Draw Your Day, Draw Your Day Sketchbook, Draw Your World, and forthcoming Draw Your Day For Kids! She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two sons.

Reviews

[Christina Vourcos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another Inspiring Book!

View your life as constant adventures. You’ll find ideas there. This is what Samantha shares with us to guide us to see inspiration around us to continue to grow our artistic skills in a sketchbook, or any format.

So many ideas are included in this book and these pages can also spark more ideas to do. I’m continually thankful that I found all of Samantha’s art books because they have motivated me to explore my interests in making art more regularly. It truly helps me in so many ways as a creative.

I read this book in its entirety so quickly on the release day because I wanted to explore each page as soon as possible. But I’ve made notes throughout of where I will return to make art in my square sketchbook and my 9x12 watercolor paper pad. I’ve created more art than ever before reading Samantha’s books.

I can’t wait to see what is ahead for Samantha. I’m thankful for her inspiration, motivation, and guidance from her books, her Substack, her social media, and beyond.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an artist, I'm always looking for new inspirations, and this book is so much fun! Lots of helpful prompts and a great easy way to get started in diary-like sketching.

[Spinneretta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third book Samantha Dion Baker has written in her Draw Your World Series, and is arguably the best one of the bunch.

Presented in a small, and quite portable format (I just wish the second book was the same size), it is filled with ideas for taking your visual diary to the next level.

Although it does start with the inevitable list of supplies (something most art books seem to deem necessary) it keeps that brief, simply because the other two books the author has written cover it quite well.

It is peppered throughout with prompts, presented in Scavenger Hunt Lists, each one appropriate for the themed section in which it hides. The sections approach the idea of creating art in various places or under various circumstances— vacations, appointments, around the home, or out and about; each within the context of things you might do in your normal day to day life.

From the perspective of what she does herself, the author uses her own work as an example to illustrate the what and how of recording your everyday life in an illustrated journal.

This book is essentially a guidebook, with suggestions and ideas designed to allow you to feel inspired, and with some prompts to help break any art blocks you might experience or any fear of the blank page in front of you that you may feel.

It’s an excellent book to help the reader get started in, or restarted in, the habit of keeping a sketchbook/visual diary, but it is not a book of art techniques or a how to draw manual. If you want the latter, you can actually read the author’s “Draw Your World” book, which does have some basic art instruction in it. Otherwise, the book is for the artist ready to get out and record the world around them. It is a fantastic guide, and very inspiring; it would make a very nice present for the artist in your life or for anyone who is thinking about taking up a sketch journal habit.

[Tammy · Rating 2 out of 5]

while the introductory sections were inspiring, i felt more and more the further i got that the author was just trying to fill up space with text. i wasn't expecting beautiful writing, but much of the text feels mundane, pointlessly rambling, uninspiring. i feel like the text could've given more specific advice or stories- like how often does the author choose to sketch from life vs. from a photograph, and what do her sketchbooks actually look like? rather than generic exposition (e.g. "setting aside time to catch up on your art projects alone is enough of a reason to schedule an at-home vacation." "going to a restaurant is an adventure that you can have close at home or across the world. appreciating a restaurant that you have never tried before in your hometown or eating something new at a favorite place is ideal subject matter for drawing a culinary adventure.") that a better editor would've sliced through.

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really appreciate Baker's approach to just start drawing instead of learning certain skills before hand. Love her style and her incorporation of journaling within her sketches. Her penmanship is so pretty! Very inspiring to sketch daily, whether you're on a trip or just going through a basic day. She encourages to look for adventure everywhere, which will be hard to do on a mundane day, but inspiring none the less!

I won my copy in a Goodreads Giveaway. :)

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book so much! I rarely leave home without my sketchbook, and see practically everything -- from the mundane to the fabulous -- as an opportunity to practice, practice, practice drawing and painting. Thanks, Samantha, for the encouragement and confidence to develop my skills as a visual storyteller.

[K. Woodman-Maynard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so inspiring, I immediately picked up my sketchbook and went out drawing. I love the emphasis on adventures at home too--not just in far away places! And the ink and watercolors throughout are just beautiful.

[Kaylen Dinsmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will be an excellent resource for mixing up my artwork prompts when I am stuck in a rut. What a treasure trove of ideas. The overall tone of the book is one of joy, as it offers practical tips for discovering and embracing adventure in everyday life.

[Trudy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most recent in a three part series of amazing guidance books for journaling. A highly skilled and well written artist shares her methods for keeping a beautiful visual diary of her life. Easy to follow. Lots of great ideas for inspiration and direction.

[Lila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe this was a matter of expectations, but I expected more art in the book, but there were a lot of prompts. I think it is nice to show more illustrations with the prompts, but if you need lists of inspiration to draw, this might be a helpful book.

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another enjoyable and inspirational book in the series on making art and sketching our lives as they happen. I liked the ideas for capturing moments of the everyday with the same thoughtfulness as during big international trips or vacations.

[Nathalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geweldig om inspiratie op te doen, bevat heel veel ideeen om zelf uit te proberen.

[Cat Roule · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful book. If only my illustrations would look on paper as they do in my mind.
Thanks to Goodreads Giveaways, author, and the publisher for this gifted copy.

[✨EJ✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a delightful book.

[Jen S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an inspiring book! I started filling my sketchbook before I finished reading the book!