Setting up a travel journal
From inspiration to setup to personal process
As I gear up for a trip to the Pacific Northwest to soak up the last bit of summer, I want to share with you my approach to travel journaling.
Through my years of drawing and documenting my travels, I’ve cycled through the phases of bringing too many materials and not enough materials. I’ve gotten frustrated by how overwhelming it feels to document a busy place, and I’ve felt the peace that comes with being fully attentive to the scenery around me.
My journals have shifted from sketching from life whenever I had downtime to creating layouts of observations and memories I most want to remember.
For those of you completely new to travel journaling, I recommend you read Petya Grady's first-time travel journal experiment! It was my pleasure to help consult on supplies to get Petya started on her recent trip, and I think her account will inspire you to give the practice a try.
And if you'd rather try creating a travel journal from home using a past trip, I'm developing a workshop for that—join the waitlist if you're interested!
Whether you're an avid visual journaler or are just starting out, here are three steps I recommend for setting up your next travel journal.
1. Collect inspiration
There are so many different ways to document your travels. You could have zero words and all drawings, or all words and no drawings. You can collage ephemera on every page, or skip it altogether. You can use one pen for the whole thing, or go maximalist and use all your mixed media.
Though I’ve often skipped this step in the past, I would now recommend gathering inspiration as the first step to planning your travel journal. This way you can see the wide array of possibilities with journaling and consult your saved inspiration for layout and topic ideas. You can do this step via screenshots and photo album, physical moodboard, or Pinterest board.
Here are inspirations for my next travel journal:
Oliver Jeffers’ “One City, Five Hours” project for United Airlines. I love how he has created a map on each spread, accentuating the route with color, and keeping his visual language alive.
Nina Cosford’s travel sketchbooks. Nina is one of my earliest sketchbook inspirations and her variety in color and type never fail to inspire me.
Joana Avilez’s Venice Biennale sketches. These lovely whimsical pages are proof that you can work with one fineliner pen and make absolute magic.
Kika MacFarlane’s travel sketchbook. I love how Kika simplifies and abstracts a landscape, something I’m pushing toward in my own work.
Abbey Sy’s London travel journal. Abbey is so talented at travel journaling—she even wrote a book about it! I’m always inspired by how she mixes ephemera with her own lettering.
2. Choose your materials
If you are anything like me, you have hordes of sketchbooks and art materials to choose from! Whittling all your options down to a sweet spot of 1-2 notebooks and a limited set of supplies can be really tough. Paints, colored pencils, brush pens, inks—how are you gonna choose?!
Though nailing the perfect setup takes a lot of trial and error, the two guiding questions I recommend asking yourself are Does it feel easy? and Do I like how it looks?
Here’s how these guiding questions work to whittle down my materials:
I like to paint with gouache but I have really struggled with incorporating it in my travel journals. It does not feel easy as it requires a lot of dry time and potential water spillage. I often do not like how it looks because the colors are muddied, mixing from my limited paint set.
I love the look of Neocolor pastels, but their chunkiness doesn’t make them the easiest of materials.
Brush pens are very easy to use, but I like to use them sparingly since I don’t love how they look.
Colored pencils are the best of both worlds in my book—both easy and I love how they look!
From there, it’s time to pick the actual supplies I’m going to bring on my trip. Below is my recipe for choosing a limited amount of art materials: