James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade were college roommates at UC Berkeley, where they both studied art and quickly became best friends. After two years, they both moved to the Art Center College of Design in LA, where they came up with the idea to travel together cross-country via train, sketching along the way.

In 1982, Kinkade and James Gurney co-authored and published their first book, The Artist’s Guide to Sketching, a how-to sketchbook that is just as much about the adventure of sketching on the road as it is about technique.