Every trip has a moment that sticks. Not the whole vacation, not the flight or the itinerary, but one specific view that just locks into your memory. The Bean reflecting a blue Chicago sky. The green ironwork of a Paris Metro entrance at dusk. The monumental Colosseum dramatically contrasted against a Roman sky.
Hand-Illustrated Stopover City Prints is a new series of wall art prints built around those moments. Each one drawn from a real place and a real trip that meant something to our family.
Why These Places
We travel as a family of four, and over the years certain scenes have stayed with us long after we came home. A stopover in Washington Square Park on a quiet morning before the crowds. Pike Place Market with its red awnings and that unmistakable Public Market sign. Senso-ji Temple's five-story pagoda glowing against a late afternoon sky. These stops aren't always the most famous angles or the postcard views. They're the ones we actually remember standing in front of.
For each print, we stripped out all the people. No crowds, no tourists, no figures walking through. Just the landmark itself, as if you had the entire place to yourself for a few still minutes. We wanted the architecture and the atmosphere to carry the whole image.
Look for the Birds
But the scenes aren't completely empty. If you look closely at each print, you'll find birds tucked into the scene. Not prominently, not obviously, but there if you know to look. A small figure on the pavement in front of The Bean. A silhouette near the crescent moon over Rome. Perched on the scaffolding of the Public Market sign in Seattle.
Each bird represents a member of our family, and each is a migratory species known for the vast distances they travel: the Common Crane, the Arctic Tern, the Barn Swallow, and the Bar-tailed Godwit. Sometimes all four are in the frame together, sometimes just one or two, depending on the trip and the moment the scene captures. We liked the idea of four migratory birds traveling the world together, showing up in unexpected places across the series. It's a quiet thread that connects the prints, a bit of a "where's Waldo" for anyone who knows the story.
Hand-drawn, Printed in Texas
Every print in the Stopovers series is drawn digitally on an iPad using Procreate. Each one starts from a real reference photo we took on the trip, then gets rebuilt as an illustration: simplified, recolored, recomposed. The drawing process for each city takes anywhere from 3 to 8 hours depending on the architectural detail.
Color theory nerds might recognize a complementary, split-complementary, or triadic color palette. We've deliberately used brighter more saturated colors than our more traditional posters and overlapped hues across the set so the prints can hang next to each other and feel like they belong together. The deep teal sky of the Colosseum pairs well alongside the warm yellow of Senso-ji. The purple and green of Washington Square sits comfortably with the blues and reds of Pike Place or Chicago.
Every print is produced in our studio in Fort Worth on 270gsm FSC-certified cardstock using fade-resistant pigment inks. Same process, same quality as all of our wall art.
Each city in the series has its own story. You can read more about the reference photos, the drawing process, and why each view made the cut in the individual city posts linked from the Hand-Illustrated Stopovers collection page.
