Wedding illustrator, Lisbon
Rui Charnock is a live wedding illustrator based in Lisbon, so a Lisbon wedding carries no travel fee and no accommodation line. He draws in ink and watercolour during the day itself, at about two finished illustrations for every hour booked — roughly twelve across a six-hour wedding.
This is home. No travel fee, no accommodation line, and I can meet you at the venue beforehand without it being an expedition.
Travel and logistics
| By road from Lisbon | 4 km |
|---|---|
| Drive time | 7 minutes |
| Travel charge | Included within X km |
| Night before | No |
| Minimum booking | 4 hours |
Why the local booking is different
I will have walked your venue before the day. That sounds minor and is not: knowing where the four o'clock light falls decides where I stand for the ceremony, and I would rather work that out in advance than during it.
It also means late finishes cost you nothing extra. I am half an hour from my own front door.
City weddings draw differently
Lisbon weddings tend to have architecture in them — tiled walls, a terrace, the river somewhere behind. That is useful. A drawing with a real place in the background reads as your wedding rather than any wedding.
The other city-specific thing is scale. Lisbon rooms are tall and narrow, so I end up drawing upward more than I do anywhere else: the chandelier, the azulejo panel behind the top table, the stairs everyone gathers on.
The district, not just the city
Everything from Mafra down to Setúbal is inside forty minutes, which covers most of the quintas couples actually book. Setúbal is 47 km and under an hour; Mafra is 32 km and about forty-five minutes.
Marrying in Lisbon? Send the date and the venue and I will tell you if I am free.
Check your date WhatsAppVenues drawn in Lisbon
No venue in this region is named on the site yet. Venue pages go up once there is work from the venue to put on them, which is the whole point of having them — a list of places I would be willing to drive to is not information.
Nearby, and what changes
Sintra is twenty-odd minutes further west and a completely different problem to draw — the light under those trees behaves nothing like the light in the city.
Half the couples who ask about Lisbon are really choosing between the city and the coast at Cascais and Estoril, twenty-five minutes down the Marginal.
South over the bridge, Comporta is ninety minutes and still inside the no-travel-fee radius.
What you actually get
- About two finished illustrations for every hour booked — roughly twelve across a six-hour wedding, plus fifty to seventy guest portraits if portraits are included.Getting ready, the ceremony, the speeches, the first dance.
- Guest portraits handed over on the night, as favours.Two or three minutes a face. People queue for them.
- Finished in studio, delivered within two weeks.Scanned at archival resolution. Prints and the original both come to you.
- From €X. Travel included within X km of Lisbon.Full breakdown on the pricing page. Nothing behind a form.
Check your date
Tell me when and where. If I am free, I will come back with what it costs and roughly how the day would run — usually the same evening.