The Midwinter Journal 2012/2013 aka The Quinn Book - part one

Not long before the holidays the wonderful Quinn McDonald and I decided on a journal trade. I really wanted to try the bound Strathmore Mixed Media Journals (which are hard to come by here) and she offered to send me one free of charge. Of course I had to reimburse somehow for such generosity and so I offered her one of my favorite Seawhite of Brighton sketchbooks in return. And wouldn't you know it, her journal arrived just after Christmas, like a little belated Christmas gift.

The thing is that my days off before Christmas had been rather lazy and unproductive and that's exactly how I wanted them, but I knew that I didn't want to spend my entire vacation that way. So I decided to  take a sort of personal art and writing retreat. I'll talk about the writing in a later post, but it's safe to say that the Strathmore journal seemed just perfect to record my artsy endeavours for the nine days I had off after Christmas. So I practically immediately started working in it and am happy to say it was put to good use.

In this post and the next one I will show you some of the spreads from that book which I really wanted to call The Midwinter Journal, but which in my mind somehow has simply become The Quinn Book. ;-)

I'm not showing you all the spreads, because some of them just have large prints of my photographs on them and since those were printed on shiny paper I couldn't photograph them well (too much reflection) and anyway, you've seen most of them in my Monday post already. 

Here we go!

The card on the left was made by Quinn. A little background info on how I received the journal.

Some doodles done with Derwent graphitint pencils.

The wrappings of the half pans of watercolor in my new watercolor box.

ARTIST will be my word of the year 2013! The tree I sketched en plein air while on one of my walks.

A mandala flower in drawing pen (Pitt), coloured in with felt tip pens (Stabilo 68).

Watercolour doodles (My watercolors are Winsor and Newton by the way).

Watercolour wall with some 'framed'  photographs I took on my walks.

And again. It was fun coming up with different frames.

I actually developed a new to me style of journaling! I used stencils and supplies in a whole new way and loved it.

The Strathmore journal is absolutely wonderful, although as you can see it does not stay open very well without the help of my fingers. That's okay when working in it (it does flatten okay when you're using it), but it was a pain when wanting to take photographs (hence the tips of my lovely fingers in just about every picture).

The beautiful heavy paper takes every medium quite well, but I must say, that even though the surface was vellum (which I thought should be very smooth, but I might be wrong), a thin drawing pen and even my pentel pocket brush did have the tendency to skip a little as if the surface was too rough for them. It wasn't a problem, but I wouldn't use this paper if I just wanted to sketch with a drawing pen. For mixed media it's ideal though.

I hope you liked this first installment of spreads from the Quinn Book. The other spreads I will show you on Monday. For now I wish you a wonderful and artsy weekend!