More Travel Journal Pages

I’ve been continuing to work on more pages for my 2011 Travel Journal. Luckily I had kept quite a lot of pamphlets, maps etc from our trip, and since the journal is a loose leaf one in a ring binder, I can add lots of pages retrospectively. I alsokept a brief diary of all the places we went so it has been easy to write about it. I have enjoyed this process so much,reliving  memories of that trip and designing pages to celebrate each place we visited that I’m thinking of making my next travel journal in a similar loose leaf format so I can keep adding to it after the trip is over. This prolongs the pleasure!

Anyway, without further ado, here are the pages I have done over the last few months.

Vaison la Romaine Les Baux Pont du Gard Collioure Castelnou Carcassonne Dordogne FontevraudThese are all in France, Provence, Carcassonne, the Dordogne, the Loire. I’m still working on the Paris pages.

Getting into Mandalas

Mandala JoyA JOY mandala.
Just finished this watercolour mandala last night. I’m not experienced with watercolours at all but I’m starting to like them a lot. I started this one using watercolour pencils but the bright red/orange is actually paint which I found to be much brighter than the pencils.
I am doing a 4 week Mandala course at the moment with Rosalind Gittings and for this exercise we thought of a positive feeling like Peace, Love, Joy etc and visualised a symbol for it to use in our mandala. So my symbol was a sunflower and the emotion was JOY.

I might go ahead and make some other mandalas for Love and Peace at some point.

Winter Comes on

Winter Comes OnIn our art journaling class last week we had a go at blowing runny paint (mixed with some kind of flow medium as well as water) with a straw. I ended up with a background that reminded me of winter branches. I took the background home and stared at it for a while. Then I was looking through an old diary called “The lover’s diary” and I came across this couple in a painting called “The Garden of Eden” by Riviere. They are in a cold looking bleak background, yet her face is lit with love, they seem to be in their own little world. I imagined them on my winter tree background. Before dinner I had a sunset walk on the beach. The winter is almost here, the evening falls earlier every day, but the sunsets in May are spectacular. Nevertheless, I felt a bit depressed when I was driving home, as I often seem to do after sunset on a winter’s evening. I wonder if it’s a kind of seasonal affected melancholy, perhaps it is an ancient coding in my genes? My husband , who does not get depressed, finds it hard to understand these feelings. But he is always there for me, being solid and kind and supportive. So my gratitude to him drags me out of any feelings of depression, and by the time I was glueing down these images I was cheery again. Doing something creative (as opposed to watching television in the evenings) is a mood lifter as well!

Anyway, all of that is what this page turned out to be about. Many different feelings and ideas came together on the page. Art journaling is a wonderful thing.

What to do with a beautiful background

It’s hard to know what to do when you’ve made a background you really like and are afraid to ruin it. I had these two backgrounds waiting a long time, months, to have something else put on them.  I posted about them here earlier in the year. This is what I have ended up doing on these 2 backgrounds and I like how they’ve turned out.

Both Sides Past Lives

Because this page already had the 2 Botticelli faces I had an idea to make the page about the way that I can usually see both sides of most issues. The angels are speaking in Latin, as all my art journal angels do….they are saying “On the one hand (side) ” and “on the other hand”

 

This page already had some ancient looking pillars and an Egyptian statue, but I didn’t have a clue what it was about. It came together more when I added the flying eagle, which I decided represented the soul flying from life to life. As I say in this post, I’m not totally convinced that I believe in past lives, but I am drawn to certain places and time periods, so I was just fantasizing about where my past lives may have been, if I indeed have had some!

Do you think you have had past lives? Where do you think they may have been?

Using a transparency in my art journal

Aphrodite europe blue Aphrodite Europe orangeA while ago in our art journaling class we were invited to bring a black and white photo of ourselves at any age, which we photocopied onto some transparent plastic. I used a photo of myself aged 24, taken in France when I did my big Europe trip. I cut an oval shaped window and stuck the transparency over it. When you flip it one way the Botticelli Venus shows through my face, and when you turn the page a map of Europe shows through. One page I painted blue (smeared over with Raw Umber) and the next page I painted a kind of pale orange Terracotta colour. The two pages belonged together, since they were linked by my transparent 24 year old face. But I didn’t really have a clue what to do with them after that, so they just stayed like that for quite a few months. The composition was a problem for me with a circular collage in the middle of each page and the oval shape of my face on the facing page. I wanted to make the pages about my trip to Europe in 1979 but I didn’t think a lot of small photos around the edge of the oval would look very good. Eventually I decided to cut the central page into a circular shape. I loved the effect , and this gave me the idea to write in a circle shape around the transparency of my face. I enlarged the nymph fromthe Botticelli painting and she holds a welcoming cloak out from each side of the pages. She seems to be encouraging my young self to travel to Europe. I did collage a couple of photos of me in Europe at that time. I made the second page more about my enduring love affair with Florence, then and now. I included 2 photos of me in the same spot, with Florence in the background, one from 1979 and one from last year. I also used some scraps of an Italian patterned paper I love which Gerrit bought for me in Florence last year. Both pages are quite busy, yet I love the way they have turned out. They are two of my favourite pages from this journal. Let me know what you think! Thanks for visiting.

An Old Photo of my Parents

Olive and DonI don’t have many old photos of my parents that are useable. They are mostly tiny pictures, sepia and often blurry! Disappointing for an art journaler! My parents were quite old when they had me, having already had four children and thinking they’d finished, and then 8 years later, I came along! Anyway, I did have this photo and, thank God for photoshop, I was able to blow it up and tweak it a bit to make it useable. This is an A4 size journal (Strathmore mixed media, it’s the best!) so I increased the size of the photo a lot and it worked out quite well except their feet are blurry. On the top left I had collaged a piece of an old sheet music cover, one of my mother’s favourite songs, and on the right is a copy of her handwritten music manuscript of an old hymn, “Lead me to Calvary”. Fortunately I have one old song book of hers with several examples of her writing in the back and front. Both of these collaged pieces were not the originals, but photocopies, so I ripped the edges and painted them with Nickel Azo gold paint to make them look old. Then I stuck on a cupid and a 1930’s fashion drawing. I collaged around the edges with 2 small paper doilies sprayed with brown ink, and some pieces of coffee coloured scrapbooking paper. Before I collaged anything I had used a flower stencil and some brown dylusions spray on the background. So there you go, that was a bit of a reverse chronological explanation of how I made this page. Oh yes, then I wrote something about my parents who had a successful and happy relationship for 60 years.

I have not used this blog much in the last year or so because this wordpress site seems so slow to upload and often times out. So I’ve been very frustrated with it! I intend to make more of an effort to post more in coming months! Love and light to you all.

I am becoming an autumn tree

Autumn TreeA poem I wrote about the aging process!

Our prompt was to make a page in our art journals in which we were a plant of some kind. So I made this page in which I am becoming an autumn tree, and that inspired me to write this poem. I hardly ever write poems so it was significant for me. I am pleased with the poem. Here it is:

I am becoming an autumn tree

My leaves no longer greenly, perkily lifting

Toward the sun

My limbs sometimes creaky in the wind,

All my seeds have floated away and now bloom

In far off lands

My blossoms have lost the blush of youth

And I foresee the day when my leaves will fall, one by one

Into  the silence of winter.

 

And yet, the sap still pulses in my veins,

the breeze still sings in my branches,

and my leaves, Ah my leaves are a blazing torch,

lighting up my corner of the forest.

I offer my gifts to those who come searching,

Vermilion and crimson, russet and gold,

The autumn illuminates me, I am aglow 

with the wisdom of many seasons,

and my autumn song may yet become

the sweetest of them all.

Travel journal pages from Tuscany

Here are some of the pages I made about Tuscany in my travel journal. I started them when we were in Tuscany but I probably finished them in Cornwall as I could not find anywhere to print photos in Montepulciano.

The first week in Tuscany we  spent in an Air BnB apartment in Lucca, along with my daughter, my niece and my sister. It was gorgeous.

I don’t really want to say too much about these pages, if you click on them you might be able to read some of it if you are interested.  In this one above I created a pocket behind the photograph, where I have stashed some tickets etc.

This one on the left I used no photos, only pictures from pamphlets and flyers. We saw some opera arias one night, it was a highlight.

Ok this one below is about Paris not Tuscany. We had 3 nights there before we headed off to Tuscany. It was very special for me because I had both my beloved offspring there plus my niece and nephew. We had a 3 bedroom Air BnB apartment in the 14th arrondisement.

After Lucca we caught the bus to Florence for 3  nights…..such a romantic city! Once again we had an Air BnB apartment, this one with an amazing view of the Duomo, as you can see in this photo.

Even though it was only May, the Uffizi gallery has such long queues that we decided not to bother. We did see some other art in Florence though, I think it was the Pitti Palace gallery and also San Marco abbey.

After our 3 days in Florence we hired a car and visited a few small Tuscan towns.We had 2 nights in San Gimignano, an ancient hilltop town with lots of high towers.

Our final week in Tuscany was spent in Montepulciano, another hilltop Tuscan town with lots of ancient buildings. We had a car during this week so we made quite a few excursions to neighbouring towns including Cortona, Pienza and Montalcino. There was much drinking of wine and eating of pasta! We had family around as well, my sister had another apartment across town with 3 of her offspring, and we had Katy in our apartment. Lots of fond memories! Gerrit bought me this wrapping paper with the beautiful Florentine pattern, so I used it on a few of my Tuscan pages.I’m glad I made the effort to make this travel journal. It wasn’t always easy to find the time to work in it, but I persisted. By the time I returned home, after 4 months, the journal was full and very fat, almost to the point of the spine breaking, but not quite. It’s wonderful to have it now as a record. I love looking through it and remembering!

Travel journal…Brittany

We leave Brittany tomorrow and I still have one more double page to complete for this section, but I wanted to post the pages I have done before we leave. I glued this map of Brittany in before I left Australia. I added an old postcard and a photo of us on our first day in Rennes (which is where we have our house exchange for 11 days)

I decided to an atmospheric page about the Foret de Paimpont also known as Broceliande. I bought a small booklet and used a couple of images from it. It felt right to turn the page sideways for the writing. Broceliande is supposedly where the King Arthur legends happened and where Merlin lived, according to the french version of the stories. This page looks unimpressive here in small size, but I really like the way it turned out in real life!

We have loved seeing all the ancient castles and old medieval buildings in Brittany. This is a page about that.  I’ve included some images from tourist pamphlets and a few photos we took. There were many more pics of castles and old buildings I could have used, but these honour 2 towns we loved, Dinan and Vitre.

I had to dedicate a page to the french food which is one of the main attractions (along with the old towns and history) for us to being in France. I did a rave about an amazing restaurant we went to here, and went into detail about what I ordered. It will be a nice reminder. The whole journal of course will be a great way to remember the holiday.

Tomorrow we are off to Paris for 3 nights where we will stay in an Air BnB apartment with my son, his girlfriend, my daughter and my niece and nephew. What fun!

Blessings to all in blogland.

 

Travel Journal -Netherlands

I have been working on my travel journal in between sight seeing, whenever I get a chance. So far I have two main problems….surprisingly .it’s really hard to find places to get photos printed. And two, my darling husband wants to be out sightseeing all day everyday just about, so it’s difficult to get long stretches of time needed for art journaling. But as you can see, I have managed it a bit.

The journal I have is A4 landscape size so when I photograph a double page it’s very long and skinny. I tried taking the pages separately as you can see, but really they are meant to be seen together.

 

Keeping an art journal definitely enriches the journey for me. It’s fun collecting pamphlets from the Information offices, and looking for pictures and postcards I might want to include. On the left here I have made a pocket from a photograph and put our tickets to the Utrecht museum inside it. The postcard of the old cathedral painting is just attached on one side so you can flip it back and the writing continues underneath it. Nifty huh?

 

For this Amsterdam spread I used a serviette printed with a 16th century Dutch still life painting on the right hand side and I really like the effect. I am enjoying using a combination of postcards, ephemera and photos that we have taken.

 

The backgrounds I had already prepared are coming in very handy now, many of them already had paint and some scrap paper borders, so all I had to do was stick in a photo or postcard and write something.

However I know there are a lot of totally blank pages coming up late in the journal!

I have also done a few pages based on our time in Brittany (we are still there) but I will post them tomorrow. It’s been a long day. And if I may whinge about the weather for a minute, it’s still very cold, and also rainy today. I’m sure we will have better weather next week in Tuscany. Love to you all in blogland.