Friday, December 2, 2016

The Zelhem Travel Journal - part one of two

Last October I went to stay in my sister's house for a little vacation while she and her husband vacationed elsewhere. I do this every year and it's become a very wonderful way to get away to a beautiful place for free. This time there was even the bonus of her cute little dog Jinte whom I took on many a walk. If you want to see the pictures I took during that week you can see those here, here and here.

Of course I also made a travel journal while I was there. I chose a very small compact format this time, an A6 Leuchtturm1917 sketchbook. The book measures about 4x6 inches (10x15 cm) and has beautiful very white sturdy paper in it. It seems that I am really starting to like small sizes when I'm away from home, it's just so practical.

The journal with the elastic strap around it.

The journal without the elastic strap holding it in check. ;-) It's stuffed!

In this post and the next I will show you the insides of this travel journal. Now I'm not going to show you every single spread, because a lot of the spreads look like this:


Which is of course totally cute, but all the photographs were already shown on the blog in the above mentioned posts.

So I'm going to stick with the more artsy pages that I did. I tried to do some sketching this vacation and I also added some ephemera here and there. I didn't really do any writing, but I did do a little lettering overview of every day in watercolour, just for memory keeping's sake.

Let's take a peek shall we?

Always start your journal with a painting pallet and big spelling mistake!

My luggage and some owls that I copied from sister's napkins.

More napkin birds. I found these so cute!

The first day overview.

One of the very few sketches I did en plein air.

Fair trade chocolate and I needed to buy a new pen, because it ran out the first night.

An attempt to sketch Jinte in pencil.

One of Jintes toys, very very squeaky.

A wrap up of day two.

I loved the shadows that these plants formed on the walls of a viaduct nearby.

Landscapes are hard.

An overview of day three.

So I drink a lot of tea.

An abandoned factory I came across on one of my walks.

A campsite had two retired fighter jets near their entrance. It was really weird.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this first part of my travel journal. I will be back next time with the rest.

For now I wish you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!