Sketchbook Diary: Painting Cambodia

There's a particular kind of light that hits Angkor Wat just before sunrise — pale pink bleeding into a deep, almost molten orange, with the temple towers rising up like dark fingers against it. I knew the moment I saw it that no photograph was going to do it justice, and that I had to get my paints out there and then, sitting by the reflecting pools with the flowers just starting to open around my feet.

That sunrise painting became the anchor of the whole trip — two facing pages in the sketchbook, the sun caught right in the spine of the book, its light spilling across both sides. Painting outdoors like that, in the moment, is a different experience entirely from working from photos back home. The colours change under your brush as the light itself changes; you're racing the sun, and it always wins, but that's part of the joy of it.

Wandering the streets

Not every page from this trip is a grand monument. Some of my favourite sketches came from simply sitting somewhere ordinary — a tangle of power lines slung between shopfronts, a big old tree pushing up through the rooftops, awnings and market stalls crowded together underneath. I love drawing these unplanned, slightly chaotic corners of a place; they tell you far more about how people actually live than the postcard views do. Pen and ink first, loose washes of colour after — quick, instinctive, done before anyone even noticed I was there.

The carvings that stop you in your tracks

Inside Angkor Wat itself, I spent a long while with the Apsara bas-reliefs — the carved celestial dancers that cover so much of the temple walls. Painting them in a soft, sepia palette felt right; they've weathered a thousand years of monsoons and still hold that serene, otherworldly expression. Sitting there with my sketchbook, tracing those headdresses and the delicate curve of a raised arm, I felt like I was having a quiet conversation across centuries with whoever carved them.

Stilt houses and warm welcomes

Away from the temples, we spent time in villages built up on stilts along the water — timber houses on tall wooden legs, fishing boats pulled up on the mud below, nets strung out to dry in the sun. I painted one particular cluster of houses that caught the afternoon light beautifully, all blues and ochres and that dusty gold of the riverbank.

But honestly, what stays with me more than any view is the people. Everywhere we went, Cambodians were extraordinarily warm and generous — genuinely curious about what I was doing, happy to stop and chat, often insisting on bringing tea or fruit over while I painted, even when they had so little themselves. Children would gather to watch the colours go down on the page and giggle at each new shape. Fishermen mending nets waved us over for a look at the boats. There was never a sense of being an intrusion — only welcome.

It's a kindness that's hard to put into a painting, but it's there in every one of these pages if you know to look for it — in the care I took, in the time people gave me to sit and work undisturbed, in the small gestures of hospitality that made a foreign place feel, very quickly, like somewhere I was glad to be.

I've brought all four sketches home now, a little travel-worn at the edges the way a good sketchbook should be, and I'm looking forward to working some of them up into fuller studio pieces over the coming months. Cambodia gave me more colour, more light, and more warmth than I quite knew what to do with — I hope a little of that comes through here.