Keith Miller sounds like a holiday nightmare. When he sees something unmissible, he whips out his paints to put the scene on paper.

He’ll sit for hours drawing, sketching, painting; making the scene even more beautiful by picking what to leave out or include.

“It is a way of slowing down, studying a subject more carefully and more personally,” he whispers to The Guide, as if he were at work trying to be inconspicuous.

The Canadian wanderer has spent the past 40 years travelling the world – among crowds in cafes, at crossroads, in ports, overlooking squares – making in-situ illustrations in his notebooks.

So it’s a good thing he travels alone and travels light. His backpack contains little more than a few watercolours, pencils, pens, ink and sketchbooks.

Over the years he’s filled a total of 56 books with illustrations. Some took only months to fill. Others took a decade to complete. He completed his first collection after a trip to Europe in the 1970s.

“I was going to become an illustrator and for that drawing is very important. So I was very much a draftsman, and I remember at that point I was interested in having a good record of what I had been doing.”

He spent eight months in Europe in between studying drawing and painting at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto.

He fell in love with Spain, Morocco and the Canary Islands. He returned to Canada, finished his studies, then took more trips to the Continent while teaching at art college.

“I had the travel bug, as a lot of young people can have. I really wanted to start travelling and a lot of us in Canada and the US gravitated to Europe.

“So I took a backpack and flew over to Prestwick Airport in Glasgow, then down to London and went further south as weather turned colder.”

The aim of that trip was to make a visual record which, he says, “has continued to be my focus”.

Being in charge is the key. “I can include more detail and exclude more extraneous things when I am drawing than when I am taking a picture. A photo takes in everything.”

He’d actually had his first foray into documentary work in 1967.

He’d been commissioned to make illustrations to go with a weekly column for his local newspaper in Tilsonburg. He cycled across Canada with a friend one summer and sent back the drawings with his copy.

Later, after more trips to Europe, he ranged further afield.

“I was fascinated by Asia and that part of the world. I just really wanted to get over and explore places such as Thailand and Malaysia.

“I think these interests come from the mystique of the East, from novels and movies.”

His favourite place in the world is in Malaysia.

“There is a whole book on a Malaysian island off the east coast – the island community of Pulau Duyong. I’ve been back four or five times in the past 25 years and it has changed a lot.

“It was highly traditional when I first visited, with wooden architecture, wooden boat building, beautiful coconut groves. But I still go there because I got to know the people.”

He’s now spent more time outside Canada than in the country. He’s lived in Japan, Korea and Malaysia.

Mexico has been his home since 1990. He wrote a book about his travels in the South American country and has just put together a book to go with a free exhibition of his notebooks in the DeLonghi Print Room at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

He compares his approach to journalism because there is a strong narrative content, but he never sits down to tell to story.

However, pictures of the Chinese Café, Penang, Plaza Pescaderia in Granada, The Zocalo in Veracruz, Mexico, and the famous square used by the Occupy movement in Madrid, Puerta Del Sol, feel like social documents as well as experiments in artistic style.

“I was in Penang in the mid-1980s and it was not an important tourist destination but beautiful.

“I was interested in going around the older establishments trying to capture some of the characters, the rundown quality of architecture, which is hinted at in that drawing.”

That picture is memorable because, unlike other places in China where crowds swarmed around him, he was left alone.

“The Chinese characters just let me sit there. They didn’t care what I was drawing.”

In Casablanca he was so revered the police used force to move along the crowd watching him work. While in Barcelona, a passerby told the artist of a murder which had taken place down an alley he was painting.

“They feel a degree of appreciation you are taking time and not just snapping a picture.

“Nowadays everybody around the world is on the move, there is so much tourism and everybody has a digital device, so it is quite unusual to see an artist sit down and carefully study a culture.”

  • Keith Miller: Travel Sketchbooks is at Pallant House Gallery, North Pallant House, Chichester, until October 6.Open 10am to 5pm Tues to Sun, 10am to 8pm Thurs, free entry. Call 01243 774557