Meet Andi. Now, there are a fair amount of female travel bloggers making the rounds on Instagram, there are just a small handful that are providing truly enriching content instead of simply promoting bikini brands.
Andi draws beautiful scenes that lie in front of her, and then takes an image of her illustration, with the real location in the background. Here, she tackles the vibrantly green rice fields in Bali.
Here, the greenery is less of a focus, and instead the architectural beauty of Morocco’s Kasbah’s lies front and center. Remembering and photographing your destinations are one thing, but doing a portrait must really let the image stick in your mind.
She’s an every woman, but a supremely talented one. Many other travelers comment on her account that they actually saw her drawing the scene, in the moment! Now that’s an Insta celeb we can get behind.
It’s hard to recreate the magic of an ancient city, and the mood that it creates when you stand before it. Instead of trying to replicate that for the masses of social media, Andi interprets her findings in her own way.
Her sketches remind us to put down our phone, and pick up the pen and paper, letting our creative juices flow in the most stunning places that may release them.
It inspires us to reach out to seemingly far-fetched places and explore them for ourselves. This is the signifier of a real artist – she provokes our imagination, but makes us want to experience it as she did.
In many of her posts from the middle east, Andi reminds us to feel love and support for people and regions that experience racism and Islamophobia, dismantling stereotypes that the news and mainstream media try to feed us.
We love that she is using her artistry to make a statement, and hope that she includes some of her peace-spreading mantras in a book of illustrations that we would love to publish.
Until her authorial debut, we can enjoy her diverse sketches from all over, paying homage to centuries old cultures. It’s hard to find an Instagram influencer that’s also a history buff, but Andi’s passions are clear and makes us want to explore past civilizations as well.
She often draws iconic scenes from cities, such as the colorful buildings of Copenhagen, Denmark. We adore her artifact images, but seeing a pop of color in her work really makes us swoon and brings out her personality.
What’s even more impressive is the fact that she does trips with her fans where she teaches photography and editing workshops. Judging by her most recent pictures, we would pay a hefty fee to be able to recreate that ethereal, majestic ambiance.
At the end of the day, Andi might be just another travel blogger, but she reminds us to “travel where the WiFi is weak and the sunsets come in all colours,” and we couldn’t agree more.
She brings a new kind of color to our feed, and one that isn’t based on comparing your lives to others, even though her travels do sometimes give us #FOMO.
Instead, this kind is based on one that nudges you to go on your own adventures, paying tribute to history and the great adventurers that came before you while writing your own.
