Sketching Japan: Still life in a Shodoshima souvenir shop.

The rain starts not long after I arrive on Shodoshima.

I’ve come to this small island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea to walk a 160km pilgrimage called the 88-Temple Circuit. But before I begin, I’ve given myself a day to settle in and, you know, figure out what exactly it is I’ll be doing.

As it is, I’m okay with the rain – for today. “Let it all out,” I tell the sky, in the same way you might say when consoling a heartbroken friend. “Just as long you don’t fall tomorrow.”

The only problem is that my plans to do a first sketch of Shodoshima’s rugged landscape are now thwarted, and I find myself running for cover into a souvenir shop by the ferry terminal. The shop just happens to have a few tables and a long counter with bar stools. I grab one, order a coffee, and look around for some back-up inspiration.

And then it occurs to me that sometimes the best thing to sketch is what’s right in front of you.

And what’s in front of me here in a Shodoshima souvenir shop is a wonderfully eclectic mix of objects: a wooden container of disposable chopsticks, a fish tank, three violets growing in a glass ashtray, and an olive branch placed in a vase.

A perfect still life to sketch on this rainy Thursday afternoon.

But it’s only while I’m laying the scene out in pencil and beginning to go over it in pen that the sketch suddenly takes on a new layer of meaning: This time last year, I was walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across northwest Spain – and among the 13kgs of mostly unnecessary stuff I carried with me was a book called One Sketch a Day: A Visual Journal.

There was a lot of rain on the Camino, too – not to mention a freak snowstorm one particularly frigid morning – so a lot of the sketches from that trip were done indoors. “You draw many bars,” one Spanish barista astutely observed, but only because there were so many such establishments along the way, where one could get a café con leche and wring the rain out of your clothes.

Before arriving on Shodoshima, I’d been wondering if there would be any connections between this pilgrimage and the one I did last year – beyond the obvious, of course.

As I sit and sip my Japanese drip coffee, yet again taking cover from the rain, it seems I’ve found my answer.