woohoo... another travel book!

midway through my california trip, my friend and co-conspirator barb admired by travel book and said something along the lines that it seemed like a really EASY way to make a travel scrapbook, and someday even she might want to try it. which of course was all the excuse i needed to come home and make a second one, just for her!

the size, shape and format of this book is exactly the same as the book i made for myself; which is to say that the covers are 4.5 x 9.5" and the pages are just a tiny bit smaller. this seems like kind of a weird shape, until you realize that it makes it possible able to just punch one hole and add the brochures and things we all tend to accumulate on vacation. which explains the one-ring. because although i love a nice spiral binding, it means you have to wait until the very very end to attach everything. and meanwhile you have a suitcase full of precious papers and postcards getting literally bent out of shape. i covered sturdy chipboard panels with a fun pastel cactus patterned paper and added the title of the book on a postcard from the trip, which i mounted on a hambly transparency dolled up with a bit of washi tape.

since i was making barb's book AFTER the trip, i had the luxury of being able to print and add photos from the jump. so i chose one shot i liked for each of the labeled pages which represent each day of the trip as well as a few themes like food, accommodations, weather, etc. 

i formatted the photos to be the same size and shape as the labelled pages (4.25 x 8.5") and printed them on inkjet transparency sheets, so that you can see the pages beneath... right through the photos. i love this effect. and it always impresses non-papercrafters, because they can't quiiiiiiiite figure out how you made the pics SEE-THROUGH! :)

of course, barb can add traditional or mini photographs to her pages, or even just punch a hole in 4 x 6" prints from the drugstore and make them be their own pages. i love that this style of book is so casual you don't have to do ANY fussing or fancy footwork! i cannot wait to see what fun things barb adds to make it HERS! ♥

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! ♥

hey! it's a travel book!

it's been a while since i posted a travel book, but then it's been a while since i took a trip that called for one. luckily, i just got back from a couple of weeks hanging out with my friend barb in carlsbad, california; and while i was there we took a road trip to palm springs for part of modernism week. and that's definitely the kind of trip that needs recording! 

somehow i accidentally forgot to take a "before" photo. so we will just have to imagine the bare bones book i started out with. it consisted of two chipboard covers measuring 4.5 x 9.5" that i had wrapped in an oversized atlas index, and added a cloudy sky illustration from an old book as endpapers. 

inside, i started with about 50 cardstock pages, measuring 4.25 x 8.25". i made one page for each day of the trip, labelled with the days of the week; a few printed theme pages for things like "food", "weather", "accommodations" etc; and a bunch of blank pages for journaling or adding photos, stickers, business cards or other fun things from the trip. i also made a bunch of slightly higher quality sketchbook-paper pages, so i could draw or doodle or do some lettering while i was on the road. 

my travelbook kit is a little larger than my regular travel art kit, just because there are a few extras i thought i'd need... also the book is bigger than my little moleskine travel sketchbook. inside this 12 x 9" clear plastic pouch i could easily fit: the book itself (secured with a hair elastic so the pages wouldn't get bent); small scissors (TSA demands the blade be shorter than 6cm if you want to put them in your carry-on); a hole punch, tape runner, tiny stapler and some washi for adding and attaching things; small ruler, pencil, magic pencil, sharpener and eraser; a selection of pens including my 3 favorite sizes of pitt artist pen (XS, S and 1.5), a ballpoint with 4 colors of ink, a couple of gel pens as well as a medium and fine point white posca paint pen; plus a rainbow of tombow dualbrush pens and a waterbrush. oh and wet wipes, which are useful for clean-up, while the outside plastic wrapper is a nice wipe-able surface for scribbling the tombows on, to pick up with the waterbrush and use like watercolors!

typically, i spend 10-15 minutes per night on my travel book during the trip. the most crucial thing to do during this time is write a quick summary of what we did on the appropriate day's page... because although i THINK i'll remember the details... honestly, i never do, lol! the other thing i do each night is punch a hole in the brochures, menus, postcards, business cards or any other ephemera i collected  that day, and slip them into the book, more or less in order. honestly, it's this type of item which makes up better than half of my travel books. and that is why my travel books are generally the size and shape they are: i based the whole design around the size and shape of the typical tourist brochure. not only is this the quickest and easiest way to document what we did, it means that when someone asks me next year the name of the condo we booked via air b-n-b, i will not only KNOW, i'll have the address and telephone number in a place i can quickly find again. you can see from the photo below that i will sometimes also make notes on the fronts or backs of postcards and brochures, if there were particular things i wanted to remember or a funny story attached to a place or... whatever...

honestly, i have made plenty of travel books in which the day pages and ephemera are the ONLY contents and they are fun, useful and (to me, at least) cool looking. however, if i'm feeling more ambitious, i will sometimes add stickers, tape or other decorations to some of the pages. for example, i found those cute puffy cacti at paper source in carlsbad, the day before we left for palm springs. obviously, they were a necessity! when i get home, if i feel like adding photos, i do; if not, i don't worry about it. in this case, i chose to print a dozen or so panorama-shaped photos the same size as my text pages, and i printed them on inkjet transparencies, so it's possible to see the text through the pics as you flip through the book. in the photo below, you can see a rather dramatic sunset towards the back of the book, a pic of me standing in front of the big MW moderism week logo, and in the foreground, a snap of the little monkey amigurumi i crocheted on the airplane and sewed together before we left for palm springs. because road trips need mascots!!! :)

the final step i do after returning from the trip is make the decorative part of the cover. i don't do this beforehand because i know i'll be handling the book a lot, and honestly anything attached to the covers during that phase is bound to suffer. also, i love to use something i acquired on the trip, to make it even more special. in this case, it was an oversized vintage postcard of palm canyon drive in palm springs, in the magical twilight you only get in the desert. of course, i could have attached this directly to the index-wrapped chipboard covers, but you know how i LOVE layers, so i added it to an orange hambly transparency, which swings free of the cover itself. a few pleather stickers for a title and i was DONE. 

seriously... i think this may be the easiest and lowest maintenance style of travel book in the world; you literally come home with the thing 90% done! later this week, i'll show some art journal pages inside the book that i made while on the road. and hopefully  a second, blank book that i'm making for my friend barb as a thank you gift! (so shhhhhhhhhhhhhh don't tell her, k?!) ♥♥♥

paris travel books are ALWAYS a good idea!

unfortunately, i haven't been to paris yet, and thus have had no need to make one for myself. luckily, though, my friend amy got to go last autumn, which i decided was the perfect excuse to get my "ooh la la" on!

at 8 x 10" this book is quite a bit larger than the ones i make to take with me on a trip, and the ones i make for my etsy shop. but since i was constructing this after the fact, i wasn't that worried about size. and in fact, the bigger pages mean that amy can paste in more photos and souvenirs and things!

another consideration when i was determining what size book to make is that i had quite a few larger items i wanted to include. such as this page from an old history book that shows the construction of the eiffel tower, the pronunciation guide from a children's french lesson book i've trimmed and layered over it, and even the commercial patterned paper i used on the front cover.

when i thought about how much i'd need to trim off (and thus waste) it made me cringe a bit. so although it might sound silly, it truly is the #1 thing that made me decide bigger was better.

i think by know everyone know how much i like to mix old and new, elegant and funky. and the more you do that in a travel book, the more it allows for the inclusion of EVERYTHING we collect on trips; including those that we might not think "go with" a more homogeneous design. so yes, there is a map of the louvre my mom brought back a few years ago...

...next to a glittery eiffel tower from a calendar page, interspersed with a hambly transparency. 

another fun calendar find: hello kitty cycling past the arc de triomphe!!! meanwhile, you'll notice that instead of hand-binding the book, or even using a fun sprial binding, i went with two simple book rings. they aren't as fancy looking as the alternatives, but they allow amy to add, subtract and move around the pages, which seemed like a pretty important consideration.

more funkiness: a page from a 1960's french comic book, which i xyroned to some thin patterned cardstock to make it sturdy enough to be a stand-alone page.

a neat illustration from a fairly recent magazine, included just because it fit and i liked it. (most of my design decisions are made using those two very scientific considerations, lol!) 

a copy of, "alouette" from a book called, "world's greatest easy-to-play songs" which i found at a garage sale and absolutely fell in love with.

i put the title on the front cover using two different styles of vinyl thickers. they were not the first ones i tried, by any means, and when they turned out to be my favorites, i was frankly kind of shocked. but i do think they work. 

i wound up with a rather collage-style cover made of new products because i LOVED the eiffel tower paper, but that oddly shaped piece of  was all i had. and you can see right off: it's not big enough, lol! so i added a strip of vintage-inspired ledger paper and taped the whole thing together with a few strips of washi... which i repeated on the back cover to make it look more intentional!

et voila!

this concludes my paris travel book tour for today.

♥♥♥

here in new jersey it is *FIFTY* degrees, so i'm off outside to take a walk! i hope it is sunny where you are, or if not, that you have found something fun and creative to do indoors!

♥

oh me lucky charms!!!

comin' up on saint paddy's day pretty quickly here, so we've got a "multiple choice" challenge for ya this week at shopping our stash. you can make a last minute card for the BIG DAY; ...OR... you can make a project that's predominantly green; ...OR... you can incorporate charms ...OR... i suppose you could combine all of those together, but it doesn't really get you extra points or anything; though i'm sure we'd all be super-impressed, lol! here's what i made:

vintage papers from a few different old atlases; glitter and foam thickers: american crafts; twine: doodlebug; charms: tim holtz; book ring and plain white cardstock pages: staples; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, xyron, sewing machine

i was in the mood to make a travel book, for one thing, there haven't been any in my etsy shop, just enough stuff, in ages.

for another, i've got loads of travel-themed vintage ephemera that i loooooooooove to play with --AHEM-- utilize in artistic projects (that's better!).

plus, i just happened to score a very cool pack of tim holtz travel-themed charms in the clearance section of michael's last week, which seemed like A SIGN, lol.

so i'm officially listing this baby in my shop, as well as this "aloha" book that i made ages ago but somehow never posted. honestly, the plus side on days like this is that i feel utterly unworried by the imminent zombie apocalypse, seeing as how my brains are totally lacking in nutritional goodness, woohoo! :) :) :)

speaking of goodness, and brains, and glamorous good looks, did i mention my amazing design team sisters have also made fabulous projects just to inspire you? it's true! hop on over to SOS where awesomeness awaits! ♥♥♥

make a spectacle of yourself!

yepper, that's what we want you to do for this week's challenge at shopping our stash! so will we all be channeling our inner kardashian? ummmmmmm... no. howsabout we just make projects with eyeglasses on them? yeah, that'll work. to this end, i constructed a somewhat fab pair o'shades, if i do say so myself... and apparently, i do! :)

black and white photo pages from a very old falling-apart book about hawaii i found at the library booksale; palm tree stamp purchased in a pearl city giftshop by my friend barb, c.1995 (!); epoxy palm tree + tiki sticker: (very old) creative imaginations; yellow chipboard thickers: american crafts (via the lovely miss leslie, ta v much!); sunglasses constructed from a scrap of ranger glossy black cardstock using a free clipart image, see below for details; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, xyron, sewing machine; book covers made of paper accents medium weight chipboard; endpapers: frances meyer; bookring and interior cardstock pages: staples; font: splash

ok, so yeah, i'm still stuck in hawaii mode. and let's face it, there are only so many "aloha" birthday cards a girl can use, lol. on the other hand, my etsy shop's stock of travel books is sadly depleted, so i just shifted gears and made one of those with a sort of vintage hawaiian vibe. the cover is 5x7; the interior pages are just over 4x6.5". it's bound by a single book ring to facilitate adding postcards, brochures and other fun "vacation stuff" while on the road.

but my favorite thing is the pair of shades, which i built from the ground up. it was easier than you'd think, too, want to see? the main thing is knowing how to cheat, which i'm pretty good at. yes, i could draw a pair of sunglasses, and in fact the idea of this was inspired by something i drew for ICAD, but i wanted this pair to be symmetrical, and i also wanted to be able to re-use the same shape in future, so i found a free clipart image online, and printed it within the size of a 3x5 photo on some sturdy index stock.

it's well known that i loathe cutting with a craft knife, but this one i found at staples last winter is by far the most comfortable handle i've ever encountered, and for interior cuts you just have to sort of suck it up. to maximize my results i attached a scrap of clear inkjet transparency to the cardstock, so i'd wind up with a stencil as well as a template.

two stencils, actually... one positive and one negative; or i suppose you could call it one stencil and one mask? plus the cardstock template, which is what i used for this project.

i traced the glasses frame on the back of some glossy black cardstock, cut it out, and then backed it with the palm trees i'd stamped on a scrap of bookpaper that looked a bit like a sunset. i adhered the little collage of glasses, palm tree, tiki and "aloha" to the beach photo, which i left large enough to wrap around the front cover of the book. since i like the front and back covers to coordinate, i found a second black and white image that went pretty well.

i trimmed up some pretty hibiscus-patterned cardstock to use as endpapers, and made two week's worth of pages with the days on them, some fun hawaiian word pages, and a bunch of blank extra pages, and attached everything with a sturdy book ring:

i've used leslie's gorgeous crooked stamper sketch challenge #7, though you can see that i've rotated it 90-degrees counter-clockwise; and admittedly, it's still a pretty loose take. but it's an awesome sketch and it really did inspire me, so i bet you'll like it, too:

speaking of stuff i *KNOW* you'll like: all of my darling dt sisters are making a spectacle of themselves at SOS this week, too;  and there's no way you want to miss that! ♥

new york, bound

last week i showed off my favorite photos from our recent new york trip; now would you like to see what i've done with them? (hint: i made a travel book! surprise, lol!)

i didn't think i was going to make a travel book this time. honestly! i mean, i do go to new york fairly often, and i keep the "treasures" i acquire in my ordinary journal AND my new york theme book; so it sort of seems like at some point these things would become a bit redundant. but being as stephanie was here, and we were actually going to spend most of the week in the city, within about 15 minutes of arriving, i had labelled this an official vacation... for which one obviously needs to make a souvenir book. (obviously!) the fact that i hadn't made journaling pages in advance suddenly became an advantage when i realized it meant that i could just collect up all the bits and bobs, then use my bind-it-all to make a "real" book out of everything when i got home. so i did. :)

it also meant i could do some fun, silly things, like make a custom "title page" out of my favorite picture, with lots of different fonts:

i emailed myself some quick notes each night, so i'd remember everything. when i got home i used my vintage typewriter (and stickers and a few photos) to record our itinerary from each day:

so what else is inside? a little bit of everything, really. menus from our favorite restaurants--with some teeny tiny pics attached because, bein' cheap, i like to fill THE WHOLE PAGE of photo paper!

there are postcards and handouts and more photos (these are from the high line):

maps (both commercial and the google kind), plus the fortune from my favorite little temple in chinatown:

tickets and leaflets and museum brochures and even more photos:

i love that the bind-it-all lets you incorporate material of all different sizes... i like that you can see little hints of what's coming up next around the smaller pieces:

i especially like having a mix of wide and narrow, long and short, single items and collages.

i made sure to attach a few fun photos "upside down" to the backs of pages, too; thus when you flip the page you can see both "planes" at the same time.

i deliberately attached some of my photos to transparency scraps so they would "float" in the book. but this see-through page is actually the trimmed down vellum bag in which my purchases from kinokuniya were packed:

yes, i saved the chopstick wrappers from the sushi place. but only because they were especially pretty chopstick wrappers, lol!

finally, another big photo for the back cover, with a little side view of all the pages in the book:

want to know my favorite thing about this project?! i get to KEEP IT! (yay!) ♥