Something I have been thinking about for some time is starting a nature/art/travel journal. This little project has been sitting on the back burner for a while, but recently got moved directly to the front when I got the opportunity to travel to Saudi Arabia for work.
I love the combination of compact information and artistic license that this type of journaling affords. I found these examples below during a quick search on Pinterest. There are a million different ways to create these journals but the three examples below most closely align with what I am thinking of creating.
While I do have some experience with the arts and crafts, I have been hesitant to start this specific project. Why? Here’s a fun fact: I am not a very good drawer at drawing. Seriously.
You know those books about combining circles to create body shapes and then animals? This is pretty much how I feel.
You know those people who can draw three wiggly lines on a page and end up with a bird? This is not a skill I have.
In the past I have skirted around this issue by taking a picture of the thing I want to draw and then drawing that picture. This seems to work reasonably well for me. I can then focus on two dimensional shapes and the thing isn’t moving. I will also admit that it takes me a looonnnnggg time to fuss with the drawings to make sure they are accurate. Or at least reasonable.
So…limited ability combined with and abundance of enthusiasm…. This is going to be great.
In starting this journal, I had some stipulations for myself. I wanted it spiral bound so that it seemed more like a book when I was finished and, more practically, this gets the cover out of the way without bending the pages. Plus, if I want to rip out a page and send it to my mom or whatever, there’s not a raw jagged edge in the middle of the book like there would be in a bound book. I wanted a book with pages that were thicker than sketch paper and had more tooth than drawing paper because I didn’t want the images to bleed through and I also wanted to add color at some point. So, watercolor paper is what I picked. It is juuuuust thick enough that, if you don’t linger, your sharpie won’t bleed through.
I also wanted a book with fewer pages than a sketch book. The first sketch books I looked at had 200 pages. This seemed like too much of an emotional commitment for a project that I wasn’t 100% sure about anyway. So off to Texas Art Supply I went, where I found this watercolor book with only 24 pages. Perfect!
All the options.
What I ended up with.
Step one in this project was to create a cover page. This was my mental equivalent to getting the first scratch on a new car. I did it while watching a movie and tried not to think too much about it. I just doodled and erased until I ended up with something that I liked. Once I had the letters outlined, I tried to add some details to make it a little more interesting.
The second step was to set some “rules” for myself. These are the things I want to make sure I incorporate into each page. I decided on the following:
• A date
• A location
• A picture
• Information about the picture. (This can also include questions to answer later about the subject matter.)
Everything else is subject to negotiation!
So the first entry into my brand new journal was about our adventures to Al uqair. On the second day of our trip our hosts very kindly took us into the desert to see this ancient fort of Islamic origins. The fort, which contained a market, a jail, customs offices, and more, has been there so long and was so continuously occupied, that no one is certain when it was established. Linked by some to Gerrha, and located a short distance from the fertile oasis of al hasa, Al uqair has been a well-established trading post for hundreds of years. Before that, thousands of years ago, and just 300 miles north, the Mesopotamian, Sumerian and Babylonian cultures flourished. More recently, in 1922, it was the site where political leaders met to define the borders between northeastern Saudia Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq and, to meet the needs of the Bedouin tribes, to determine a “neutral zone”.
I made this short .gif with an app on my phone so you can see the process I went through on this the first page of my journal. I kept forgetting to stop and take pictures so it goes pretty fast!
