[A DIY Study Abroad Starting with Just a Pen] Ep.3 The Reason for Traveling

[Pen Artist Ha-jung Lee Series - A DIY Study Abroad Starting with Just a Pen] Ep.3 The Reason for Traveling

Rome mornings are sweet and rich.

Like the locals, I sat at a neighborhood cafe and ordered a maritozzo, a bun heavily stuffed with cream, and an espresso. Since I prefer bread and coffee over a proper meal, this was the absolute perfect morning routine.

As always, I grabbed a corner seat and pulled out my 100g notebook and the 0.05mm pen I had bought in Florence. Finishing off my espresso, I began sketching the scenery of Rome that lay before me.

That's when someone sitting behind me struck up a conversation.

"Wow! Amazing work! Are you a designer?"

He looked like a local Italian. I smiled shyly and showed him the drawings I had done so far. I told him I was currently looking for my own style.

Leaving the cafe after our brief chat, a sudden wave of emotion hit me. A sense of determination—a feeling that I had to make this work—washed away the loneliness that had been consuming me. It was a small but undeniable first taste of recognition and success.

The Reason for Traveling

People seeing me purely as someone holding a pen. This is perhaps the greatest perk of traveling and landing in an unfamiliar city as a stranger.

What kind of career I had in Korea, what titles I held, or how much of an impact I made in my industry.

He didn't seem curious about any of that at all.

All those labels lost their power, like old rust flaking off. It was a pure interaction where I was seen and acknowledged solely for 'what I am creating with my hands in this exact moment.'

Talking about my work with a complete stranger at a neighborhood cafe on the other side of the world—it felt like a scene straight out of a movie. I was so incredibly happy that I wanted to preserve this fleeting moment as a permanent page in my life.

A Rosy Future

If only I could say that this fateful encounter led me to find my perfect style right then and there. Unfortunately, that romantic, confident feeling lasted only a few days. The process of drawing was still enjoyable, but the final results left me unsatisfied.

My lack of formal art education quickly showed its limits. I struggled with perspective, resulting in awkwardly leaning buildings. In my beginner's zeal to draw well, I pressed down hard on every line, failing to control the shading and ending up with pitch-black drawings.

Physical pain quickly followed. Trying to cram Europe's grand and complex architecture into a tiny A5 notebook using a pen thinner than a strand of hair made my whole body ache. My eyes stung, and my back was completely hunched. More than anything, the sheer amount of time it took to finish a single piece bothered me.

'Isn't this way too inefficient?'

Sure enough, my old habits as a UI designer—where I could move buttons on a screen in seconds—resurfaced. I started calculating efficiency out of habit, which often led me to just close the notebook in frustration.

The Struggle

Feeling stuck, I would lie in bed every night and scour Pinterest. I collected pen drawings I admired and started comparing them to my own work to analyze the differences.

I constantly struggled to bridge the gap in my skills, and in between, I made some rather odd attempts. When I visited an art supply store in Madrid, Spain, all my accumulated frustration burst out. Trying to cover up my lack of skill with a variety of colors, I grabbed every type of brush pen I could find.

It resulted in an impulsive receipt of over $100. Ah... thanks to that, I had to survive on cereal for days... but it did relieve some of my frustration, so no regrets.

I think about it. I think about myself, struggling alone in a foreign land in Southern Europe. I want to offer a word of comfort to that past version of me who was fighting a lonely battle.

But I eventually have to admit that this entire process was a necessary trial and error to find my own unique style. Even if it wasn't the only way, it was the right way.

Through facing inefficiency and limitations, I was very slowly, bit by bit, beginning to color myself with the unique shade I had been searching for.

(Fin.)