When Rodrigo and I went to SPX/CXC back in September I was really excited to try and keep a travel journal during the trip! I had already been keeping a daily journal during the year, and the idea of having an illustrated travel journal as a memory of our trip was so cool…
Anyway, I finished catching up on my travel journal pages this morning—almost 3 months later. Whoops…?
How do people even DO travel journals? I could never find the time to work on this during the trip—we’d be out all day, and then I’d get back to the hotel so tired I could barely move… 💀
The one thing I managed to keep was this pocket notebook that I would carry with me at all times to write down everything that happened during the trip, which I later used as reference when it was time to write/draw on my journal. This was actually really helpful! Due to the one-page-per-day format of my journal I had to cut a lot of stuff out, but if I ever want to look back at a more detailed (but messier) account of the trip, I can always look back at my pocket notebook. I also used it to track my expenses! Multitasking!
Here’s an example of my travel notes next to the final journal page:
I also ended up switching my tools along the way—when we did SPX I went ALL IN with my watercolors, but then I realized it was too much work so I downsized to just shading with a light blue marker.
This ended up being a lot more work than I expected, but now that I’m caught up I’m really glad that I did it!! Keeping a journal this year has been a lot of fun…but I’ll talk more about it in a future post 😉
(self-advertising time: I just posted all of my SPX/CXC journal pages to our Patreon, if you wanna see more of that!)