Was your teacher one of those who would give you holiday work? Often it was to keep a journal of your holiday, in traditional 'weekend news' format - a colourful drawing of everyone smiling, facing forward, with painstaking handwriting underneath. Or you would keep a holiday scrapbook, with tickets and postcards pasted in. Even then we had the urge to tell a story of where we've been and what we've seen.
When I got older, the urge was still there and it tended to go like this:
Three of four days of journal keeping, two days that I missed because we were too busy, left blank to fill in later, sporadic notes for the duration. Add to that a bundle of leaflets, tickets, napkins, matchbooks and the like and six rolls of film to develop when we got back. By the time I was in a position to scrapbook the trip, the impetus was lost, and I no longer remembered what those standard coat check tickets had been for.
Eventually I learned that keeping a travel journal enriches my trip, and allows me to enjoy scrapbooking it when I'm ready, without a sense of pressure about it. I love sitting in a cafe on a trip, watching the world go by, recording my thoughts and experiences while I am still in them. I still sometimes take a roll of film to be developed while on the trip and cut those up and stick them in there and then. Of course you can do that with a memory card too.
There are several more immediate ways to make images for your travel journal that I want to share with you today.
This is an old page I made using this technique. It has a lot of gel medium over a collage of plain paper images of details of what makes home feel like home to me.
If you are staying with friends, you may be able to use their printer to print digital prints on regular paper. Most computers nowadays have a card reader, or you can buy a little one that works through the usb. The images are clear enough, yet somewhat dreamy and merge in nicely with a prepainted page and is nice and flat for layers you add later. You can use some of your images to make your thank-you card!
Although I haven't stuck this kitty onto this page, the Pogo prints on sticker paper, so it is really easy to use on the go.
Now, I don't like promoting products, but I do find it helpful to know what other creative types find useful. In that spirit, I'm going to share two of my favourite toys. The first is my Pogo printer. It's by Polaroid and prints on 2x3 inch sticker paper. It's chargeable, although it doesn't hold a charge for that long. You can print from many laptops and phones via blue tooth and many cameras via a usb cable. There are more pogo images in this journal post.
A bird house that hangs in my window at home. I haven't had the chance to take the instant camera on holiday yet.
This is even more instant, although hard to get used to if you normally shoot digital, as the results are less predictable and you don't know if you've got the shot until the image develops. There are a variety of cameras around that use Fuji Instax Mini film. You can get much sharper images than this, but this is a favourite especially for its blurred out, surreal dreaminess. You need to shop around for film, as it can be expensive. The prints are a similar size to the Pogo prints.
A little planning ahead and you can make your travel journal easy to keep and when you look at the pages you will flash back to where you were sitting when you made them.
Thanks for coming by!
Kel xx
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