art journaling inside a travel book?

yep. i debated before my california trip whether to bring my usual little moleskine travel sketchbook OR make a travel scrapbook type of thing OR both? in the end i decided on the travel book format. but then i realized that if i added some higher quality watercolor or sketchbook paper to the travel book, it could function as both. so that's what i did. i didn't draw or doodle every day, but it was nice to have the paper and supplies available when i was in the mood. the "california" page is actually a bit of a cheat, since i did that the night before i left, which meant i could raid my pipsticks sticker stash and add some little palm trees and things.

as it turns out, most of my travel art took the form of lettering this time... sometimes with doodles. but of course there was a mandala monday while i was in california, so it had to be observed. 

a few people have asked me about what pens i like, and what order i use them. 90% of the time i do lettering with the brush tip of my tombow dualbrush pens OR by scribbling the tombows (or tapping some colorburst) onto a piece of acetate and then picking up the color with a waterbrush, which gives a fun watercolor effect. i did the scribbling with tombows method on this "aloha" page. although technically, i painted the large hibiscus first, and then the pink "aloha". yes, the letters are staggered that way because it turned out my flower was a bit large, lol. when those were dry, i added the other flowers, the grey shadow on the letters, and all the leaves. when the entire page was bone dry, i added all of the black lines ...with a pitt artist pen, in the XS (.1mm) nib. this is my typical order for doing lettering or doodles with watercolor. at the very very end i might add a few highlights with a white posca paint pen, which i did here.

the method on "palm springs" was basically the same as "aloha" though instead of doing all the letters in one color i did a bit of rainbow blending. i left off the grey shadow, for a change of pace, and added a sub-head using the writing tip of the tombows. again, the words overlap because i didn't plan my spacing very well beforehand. but one of the best things you can possibly do in art (in my opinion) is MAKE LOTS OF MISTAKES! because this gives you the opportunity to figure out how to correct them. so i overlapped the two words a bit, and added the palm trees to weight that side of the page. hearts are always fun, imo, but in this case there miiiiiight've been a smudge or two i wanted to cover up... :)

i've never drawn cartoon germs before, and frankly i'm kind of hoping not to need them again anytime soon. but, as it turns out, what i thought was cat allergies playing up the day before we left for palm springs, was actually me getting a nose-and-throat bug. i spent thursday night and all of friday in the condo we had rented, being super-duper glad we had two bedrooms and bathrooms, in hopes i would not share my germs with my friend barb. which, luckily, i did not.

no lettering on this one... just some funky tombow watercolor flowers, with doodles on top. painted in the sunny courtyard of barb's house in carlsbad. which is a really nice place to do pretty much ANYTHING, actually!

i hope your day will include a little bit of creativity, and a whole lot of sunshine! ♥