Summer Travel Journals
Recently, Oliver asked to go to the California Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento. Having been there a hundred times, I decided to change it up a little. I told him to gather a bag with notebook, pencils, and erasers. We will go, but we will also sketch the things we see. Light grumbling ensued. Once we got there and he began to sketch, something in him lit up. We closed down the museum, pencils still skittering across our pages. We went outside and wandered familiar scenes through new eyes for what would be two more hours. We sketched until the darkening landscape urged us back to our car in the parking garage.
Within a week I decided that I would put together a proper sketch journal for each of us. I made us some travel watercolor pans, bought a couple of pack and go chairs, table, and umbrella for the summer sun (clamps on the chairs). This experiment evolved into our Summer itinerary. An answer I’d been seeking for the challenge of ‘what mentally stimulating thing do I do with a 12-year-old boy in the hot Sacramento Valley all summer’.
I didn’t have any bookbinding material so I used extra strong duct tape for the spine. Works for a starter journal.
I laid the tape face up, placed tag board (for the front and back covers) on the edges of the duct tape and then placed another piece of duct tape face down on top of the first one to seal everything together. I covered both sides with scrapbooking paper and added a twig from the tree in the front yard as a button and a piece of leather lace for tying it shut.
For the pages, I made several signatures consisting of about 4 folded pages (8 front and back) for each signature. These were sewn into the spine by hand. I covered the front of mine with an old greeting card that inspires my inner child.
Wala, travel journals. By the end of summer we will have documented all of the places we are going to visit and we should have some nice full journals to look back on. I actually find this rather addictive and have been having deep urges to stop and paint streets and rows of bushes on my errands around town.
To keep painting simple and easy I bought us some Meeden empty watercolor tins from Amazon. I used Daniel Smith for most of the colors except for the addition of two Winsor and Newton Gouache colors for adding highlights and combining to make more opaque paints as needed. I will probably do another small post on what paints I use, how to do this and a snippet about portable soft pastels soon too.
