Six Weeks of Art Journaling on the Road

I had taken the time to prepare to continue my art journaling on the road. I packed a travel kit with watercolours, scissors, adhesives, tape, markers, gel medium, among other things. I gessoed six sets of pages, one for each week we were scheduled to be away.

I saved all sorts of ephemera from our travels - brochures, ticket stubs, newspapers, napkins, menus, business cards. The gel medium was perfect for adhering these items to my pages. The first few weeks, my pages looked pretty similar.

July Week 3:

This week was a day in Paris, 2 days in Reims, 2 days in Paris, a day in Reims and then back to Paris for the weekend. Included bits of a Paris map, train ticket, napkin from a restaurant, newspaper, Reims map, Louvre brochure. And doodles with markers and watercolours.

July Week 4:

We were on the road, waking up in Germany Monday morning, spending Monday night in Munich, Tuesday in some Italian town just inside the border, Wedneday in Florence (delightful!) Thursday in the Cinque Terre coastal region of Italy, ending up in Monaco on Friday, for several days.  These pages were more of the same: maps, business cards, menus, newspaper and brochure bits. Doodles and bits of journaling.

August Week 1:

We started the week with a couple more days in Monaco, then hit the road Wednesday for a leisurely drive through France. Nice, Aix en Provence, Lyon, Dijon, Troyes, and back in the Reims area for the weekend. More stuff from our travels. Menu, parking vouchers, cool foil packaging from a Monaco chocolate coin.

August Week 2:

Most of this stuff was odds and ends from a quiet week in Reims, and a quick weekend trip to Belgium - Brussels and Brugge. A cool business card from a not so delicious crepe restaurant, more maps, wrappers from the free chocolates in our Brussels hotel. Journaling. Doodles.

August Week 5:

An entire week in one place is reflected in these more simple pages. We stayed put. Played soccer. Walked. Fed the ducks at the park. Did laundry once. Visited the hospital once. (Nick's hand -- cut that wasn't healing well) and of course the Police Station, in Reims, called the Hotel de Police. We did discover that fabulous bakery with the crispy baguettes and yummy meat pies.

And the last week of journaling on the road, my August Week 4:

This one, start to finish, was completed at home. I didn't even look at these pages that last week, til we got home. I had it in my head to use clouds, and perhaps rain, to document the crap. But I realized that being my birthday week, it wasn't all bleakness and clouds. So I cut out cardboard clouds for the left side, and a cardboard sun and rays for the right side. After a quick wash of yellow watercolour, with the sun in place over top and the clouds on the other side, I spritzed the pages with a few different blues. Journaled the 'bad' stuff in the clouds and the good, on the sunny side. Along with my age. It's just a number, right!?