Book Review: Lapin au Japon: Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto-Nara

I love travelogue sketchbooks. Getting them is a must for me.

I spotted this book on Amazon France by pure chance. What luck. Or did I first see it on Lapin's blog? Can't remember.

Lapin au Japon: Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto-Nara collects the travel sketches that French Illustrator Lapin drew while traveling in Japan from 9 Apr to 3 May 2010. This book was published in 2014.

Lapin is a prolific sketcher. He has made a lot of sketches while spending close to a month in Japan, visiting several places as mentioned in the book title.

This book has an interesting presentation. The binding used is the traditional Chinese book binding. Holes are punched near the edge, and thick strings are used to bind the pages and covers together. It certainly looks and feels appropriate for a travelogue sketchbook like this, especially for Japan. The binding is quite cool, I can't find the two ends of the strings.

This book is also much larger in format compared to other travelogue sketchbooks from Lapin that I have. It's almost A4 size. There are 196 pages. So it's thick. It's expensive, but worth the money.

Lapin likes to draw on accounting books, with all those columns and rows of lines, and as usual, all the sketches in this book are drawn on them. The watercolour sketches are beautiful, capturing the joy of traveling and sketching places very well. There are sketches of the people there, architecture, places of interests, and all the little things, like food, toilet bowl even, cars, temples, etc. The lines are fluid and the colours are very Lapin, muted with mainly middle tone values.

It's a lovely sketchbook. The only minor issue is all the handwritten text are in French.

Highly recommended to all sketchbook and travelogue lovers.

Lapin au Japon : Tokyo-Osaka--Kyoto-Nara is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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