Art Journal: Travel Journal [Wanderlust]

This week’s class on Wanderlust (a year long course encouraging art journalers), we’ve been shown how one artist, Kate Crane, creates her own journal to fill in as she travels. Here’s my take on the project. Using two sheets of 12×16″ watercolour paper, I created the concertina pages, incorporating pockets into the overlaps. I’ve chosen to create faux leather straps to hold it together, rather than ribbon, and have made these from Grungeboard. Lots of layered DecoArt Media paints and interference paints over some embossing paste create the cover decoration, and the pages are covered in Distress Paints, DecoArt Media Titan Buff and Quinacridone Gold fluid acrylics and gesso applied through a couple of stencils. Now it’s ready for filling with travel goodness 🙂

I chose to make my pages 6″ square, so I tore two 12″x16″ watercolour paper sheets in half, and then scored at 6″ and 12″. Where the pages overlap to make the concertina, I made various pockets. On the fourth 6″x16″ sheet, I tore off the 4″ remainder after scoring as this wouldn’t overlap.

Before sticking the top, left and bottom edges down with high-tack double sided tape, I punched a notch out of the right-hand side to make a folder pocket.

For this top loading pocket, I stuck down the left, right and bottom sides of the overlap and then punched the notch out of the top. You can see the pocket below shadowed top left.

For the last overlap, I stuck down the left side and bottom, and tore off the corner for a tuck-in folder style pocket.

Just to make sure everything dried in place, I clamped all the edges with one or two clips…

The cover is 2mm greyboard covered with acrylic paper which has a canvas weave to it. Before painting, I used Dreamweaver embossing paste through a stencil and allowed it to dry. I built up a rust-style patina using DecoArt Media fluid acrylics: Raw Umber, Quinacridone Gold, Paynes Grey and then interference colours Violet, Magenta and Gold. The embossed lines were rubbed lightly with a sandpaper block to return them to a lighter colour before covering the whole cover with a dirty glaze. I used two coats of DecoArt Media Soft Touch Varnish to seal.

The inside pages are a combination of: Distress Paints (Old Paper/Peacock Feathers/Carved Pumpkin/Fossilised Amber/Twisted Citron and Dusty Concord. DecoArt Media Titan Buff was added to tone down the colours and Quinacridone Gold were added for the zigzags. I used gesso sponged through two stencils for the white layers, and Hickory Smoke Distress Paint through the chicken wire stencil.