Mike and I are taking a dream trip together this summer and I'm envisioning lots of time for walking, wandering and savoring. I want to take along a funky art journal to record my thoughts and to encourage me to find a good park or boulangerie in which to relax and paint or write.
It turns out I didn't have to buy a thing for my signatures. Whenever I paint on paper either for a painting or my larger art journals, I grab a big sheet of Fabriano and begin cutting it down to fit the project size I need. Usually, this means that I'll have some small strip leftover and this was the case when I made my most recet larger art journal. I had a whole bunch of strips that were 6" high and 30" long (though some were 6" by 9" and even smaller like 4"x6"). I had been holding onto these thinking that I'd make them into small postcard size sheets for on-the-go paintings but mostly they just sat there since I've been painting on large canvases whenever I've made the time to paint. When this project came to mind, I realized these bits and pieces would be perfect trimmed a bit here and there and folded in half.
Here they are just folded with nothing else attached to them or embellished at all. I folded some in the middle in varying places so there will be added interest. You'll see what I mean as this project unfolds.
I grabbed my washi tape container knowing I wanted to incorporate these in somehow.
I grabbed some ledger paper, vintage wallpaper scraps, and scrapbook paper too.
See the varying sizes of the watercolor paper... You can see some of the small strip off to the top right too.
More paper.... stash-searching. Grabbing some colors that interested me. The color palette that evolved was that of turquoise, orange, and magneta (with a little green thrown in, but not much).
I just did a Google search to find a good representation of the colors and found this (it's not exact but it's close):
You can see the pin
here.
Some tranparencies are going to be in the mix too.
More stash-searching.
Here's one spread below that contains a map of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris (printed from Google maps) attached to scrapbook paper with some tape and glue. This is one of the pages that doesn't contain any watercolor paper as I want a good mix for places to attach menus, business cards, photos, or writing.
I spent a few hours with this project on Sunday (yes, it was blissful!!) and have more to share.
I was reading Pam Garrison's blog and followed a link she had to her friend Mary Ann's blog who just took a trip to Umbria (we'll be in Umbria for 3 nights too, but in a different city). She did an amazing watercolor travel journal and also has classes on making funky books just like this!! WOW! Thank you, universe, for the inspiration and the sign that I'm going in the right direction. She also has online art bookmaking classes that I just signed up for, in which the projects are similar to this... fun and funky and experimental. Her style is different than mine, in that she favors different colors schemes and patterns, but I love that she is easy-going, down-to-earth and a learn-as-you-go kinda gal! Reading her recent blog posts and seeing her watercolor sketches makes me want to read her archives with a cup of tea. <sigh> I hope she created a class of her most recent work because I would TOTALLY sign up for that.
Thank you, Mom, for the Mother's Day gift. I used it to buy one of Mary Ann's online classes and I'm so inspired that I can't wait to finish up writing here, do my workout, and get down to my studio to PLAY! It was hard to go to sleep at night because of all the ideas swimming around in my head. Days like this are so JUICY and good!