Category Archives: Travel journal

Travel journal video

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I’ve made a video of all my art journal pages in my recently finished travel journal. This covers all the pages I made while traveling in Europe in 2018 and in 2019. I took with me some small tubes of acrylic paint, some images I printed before hand that i thought I may want to use and a few stencils. I made the decision NOT to print off any photos along the way as I wanted to avoid a scrapbook style of journal. Not that there is anything wrong with that but I have already made a couple of  travel journals like that.

So on these last 2 trips I searched for images along the way, in found magazines, airline magazines, museum and castle brochures, maps etc I made pages about whatever thoughts and emotions I had at the time, mostly (but not exclusively) in response to the places I visited. This was very satisfying and deeply enriched my travel experience. Hope you enjoy my little video!

More Travel Journal Pages

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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.

Travel journal pages from Tuscany

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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 -Netherlands

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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.

Our European holiday begins!

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Finally the day had come! Our much planned and eagerly anticipated trip to Europe was beginning. Here we are looking excited at Brisbane airport. The trip from door to door took 33 hours! Fortunately it was uneventful in a ggod way, and we were delighted to find ourselves in Utrecht at 9am Wednesday morning 10th April.

The day was cold, about 7 degrees. Eirinn greeted us before he left for work. I was so happy to see him again after 16 months. Here we are out on his back deck.

After he left we checked out the closest cafe called KEEK which had very nice coffee and healthy, inexpensive food.

 

It was a wonderful feeling to be back in Holland, sitting in a cafe, watching all the people (mainly young, mainly students) ride past on their bicycles.

The weather was a bit colder than I anticipated, only 2 or 3 degrees most mornings, rising up to 9 or 10 maximum. My Katmandu  jacket turned out to be not very warm in these conditions! Luckily Rowena (Eirinn’s partner) had a coat I could borrow while I was there.

Eirinn and Row’s apartment is in a very desirable part of Utrecht, down the Oudegracht (near the old canal) surrounded by all the food shops they might need and only about 12 minutes walk into the main part of town. I fell in love with Utrecht even more this time (we visited 2 years ago). I particularly love the Dom, which is the tallest church tower in the Netherlands….you can see it here behind us.

After a few days in Utrecht I found time to make a page in my travel journal. I had prepared a few backgrounds beforehand including this one with gesso resist clouds, which I intended to use for a page about the journey over. And here it is, with a photo of us looking wasted after 33 hours travelling. It was a bit of a mission to find somewhere to print photos, I dont think its going to be as easy as I thought. I imagined there would be lots of printing places like the one at home in Brunswick Heads, where I can take a USB stick and get pics printed on normal (not photo) paper. But it seems I will have to use automated machines in Europe which only print 2 sizes and only glossy photo paper. O well, first world problems, as they say.

 

 

Travel Journal continues into Switzerland

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It’s summer holidays here, and I’ve been spending some time working in my travel journal. So far, since my last post about this journal here I’ve finished the pages covering our journey to Saverne and Strasbourg in France and on into Switzerland.

 

Some pamphlets we picked up are stored in a pocket made from a postcard from the Bosch museum.

I employed the Azza technique again here on the right page, cutting up 3 photos to make a gothic window shape I used a bit of walnut ink around the edges of the page to give an aged effect. Love that walnut ink!!

We were lucky enough to catch this wonderful English choir in an old church near Saverne. They were certainly the best choir we heard on the whole trip…the English really know how to do choirs!

 

We drove from Saverne in France to Romanshorn on Lake Constance in Switzerland in one day. On the way we diverted up a mountain to see the Chateau of Haut-Koenigsbourg.I made this background using a new stencil by Michelle Ward that my darling husband gave me fro Christmas. First I painted 2 pages with yellow ochre blending into cobalt blue, then used blue, green and yellow spray inks through the stencil. Then I ripped some fleur de lis scrapbook paper to make a border. I loved the effect of the ripped patterned border so much I used it again on a few more pages. On the left page I used a photo I took to make a pocket to hold a pamphlet from the castle. This is my favourite page so far from this journal, I LOVE everything about it.

A double page devoted to Strasbourg, where we explored the cathedral and took a boat tour. As you can see I used another fleur de lis scrapbook paper here. I visited a few scrapbook stores in my area and bought every medieval/baroque style paper I could find.

 

I painted the next 2 pages with yellow ochre and red oxide, and printed out a map from google maps of our itinerary from Saverne to Romanshorn. There’s a pic of the city of Konstanz in the centre which flips over separately.

Here it is again with the central photo flipped over. Now you can see the old door (from 1322!) and the library of St Gallen, which has many beautiful OLD manuscripts and books.

 

 

 

We drove over and through the Alps to the Italian part of Switzerland and stayed in Bellinzona which was gorgeous. I had forgotten to print out any photos from this part of the trip, so I put together a montage of 3 photos on the left page, the 2 in the background I made pale.  I used a pale green damask patterned paper for the background on the right and tore a border with it on the left. That walnut ink came in handy again around the edges.

Over and through the Alps again to Grindelwald, a beautiful valley surrounded by snow capped peaks. The left page is a map I picked up in Grindelwald  and the right page another Azza style of cut photos. I had yet another fleur de lis patterned paper that I used to make a border and tie the 2 pages together. There is some of Gerrit’s writing (in Dutch) about Grindelwald on the left page.  I have not really written a great deal in this travel journal, just a few lines here and there. Partly because it all happened over a year ago now and partly because I have so many photos I want to use. When I travel again this year I expect to write a lot more, as I intend to be making the journal as I am traveling.

I still have all of our 4 week trip through France to go in this journal! I don’t know whether I’ll get it all done or not..in any case I quite like what I’ve done here so far. Thanks for listening, blessings to you all in blogland.

 

Travel journal

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I’ve become interested in travel journaling in the last few weeks and have been looking at LOTS of travel journals, scrapbooks, smashbooks etc on the net. Next year we will be traveling back to Europe (both my offspring are over there) and of course I want to be journaling while I am there. I’m not sure what sort of journal I will be doing, but I thought I would have a go at making a travel journal retrospectively of our trip to Europe last year. So far I’ve only done the first part of it, which was about the 10 days we spent in Holland before we headed off to Switzerland and France. I used a plain 2 ring binder (A4 size). Here is the cover which I covered with a scrapbook paper and an antique map of Europe.

Here is the inside cover, on which I put one of my favourite photos taken in the Avignon palace, and surrounded it with a border of a scrapbook paper that I thought looked a bit medieval. The opening page with the airplane I made on photoshop.

First inside page shows some photos taken in Utrecht (where my son is living) I made a “filmstrip” of a few photos on photoshop.

 

I printed out quite a lot of photos so I had to find ways to fit them in. The small yellow page in the middle has a photo on each side.

On this next page I scanned a map of Utrecht that we had collected, made it lighter to create the background, then stuck strips of the original map around the edge as a border. I got my husband to write something in Dutch for me also.

The next 2 pages are a bit more “art journal” and less “scrapbook” like because I used a stencil and some spray ink to create a border (supposedly resembling some Delft blue pottery). First I collaged down some black and white pics of some delft buildings and gessoed over them. When I posted the photo of us in a giant clog on facebook the next day there was a funny little conversation about it, so I took a screen shot of this and included it on an extra flap in the centre. This is also a pocket in which I have put a pamphlet from the cathedral. Delft is where my husband went to University many years ago, so it was wonderful for me to see it with him.

We spent a couple of days in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which everyone seems to just call DenBosch. There is an amazing huge cathedral here, very gothic, and we were lucky enough to hear a beautiful choir singing there on the Sunday morning. I also met  Gerrit’s sister and brother (pictured at left). The background of this page is a photo I took in the cathedral which I made pale on photoshop.

There was also a museum dedicated to Hieronymous Bosch who hailed from this town in the 15th century. The flap/pocket in the middle is made from a postcard from this museum.

Here are some more photos from Utrecht, which was our base when we were in Holland. I had a belated Mother’s day lunch there with my two darlings. The page on the right is 3 photos of Utrecht cut in the French scrapbooking style known as Azza, which I discovered on the net. It is supposed to be a kind of tulip shape. The edges of this page are painted with watercolours. I expect I’ll be taking watercolour paints with me next year, but I don’t know whether I’ll be easily able to print out photos while we’re traveling.

This is the last page that I have done, with a couple of photos in Amsterdam.

I made a stamp myself (carved it with ezy carve) of some old Dutch houses (like you see in Amsterdam) and printed it here with a golden coloured ink. I’m rather proud of it. The page on the left is just a scrapbook paper with a photo stuck on it. I had fun one day visiting a scrapbook crafty shop in Lismore to buy some travel themed papers for this journal. I guess this travel journal is kind of a cross between a scrapbook and an art journal. It’s been a lot of work so far, and I’m only about one seventh into our trip (which was over 8 weeks long), I’m still learning as I go along, trying out different ways to present the photos, and to write some memories. It has been nice to relive some of those memories while making this journal. I hope that I continue with it. My other art journal is calling to me though, because it is nearly finished, only a few pages left…..and now Zom is back and art journaling classes have resumed, yahoo!

Blessings to all of you out there in blogland.