Like many travelers, I come home from every overseas trip with a packet full of ephemera. Every ticket, business card, map, and brochure reminds me of places I explored, memorable meals I enjoyed, and all the fun times I had with my students and friends.
More often than not, though, these paper souvenirs I so diligently collect and carry home in my bag end up on top of the growing stack of stuff at the back of a cupboard in my studio.
BUT after my trip to Paris and Provence last fall, I decided to actually DO something with all the goodies I had brought home. As I worked on finishing up my sketches from the trip, I added a few collage pages on the empty reverse side or facing page of some of the sketches.
This first one is opposite the sketch I did of Sacre-Coeur, which you can see and read about in this post.
The collage includes a business card, a room key holder, a sugar packet from the sweetest little Parisian cafe where I had hot chocolate, and a postcard that looks like something I would have sketched if I’d had the time. It only took a few minutes to glue everything in place, and, while not a great work of art, it serves my purpose, reminding me of those days in Paris last September.
My visit to Musee d’Orsay was eye-opening, exciting, and inspiring, but I’m afraid my collage (below) doesn’t begin to capture all I felt that day.
Seeing in person the paintings I had studied in art history class almost fifty years ago was something I can’t begin put into words. Studying the colors, textures, and brushstrokes of the originals from just a few feet away left me (almost) speechless. I hope this little collage will help me to remember the vast difference between seeing a painting projected onto a screen in a college classroom vs. seeing its richness and beauty with my own eyes.
I had brought home plenty of material to work with from this trip, so I did a few two-page spreads in my sketchbook, too. The one below features a map of the village where we stayed in Provence on the left-hand page. The background on the facing page is a bakery bag that was once filled with macarons. (Hmm, I wonder what happened to them…)
The pictures were cut from brochures, and I taped in a postcard that has a handwritten note on the back side. (It can be flipped open to read the note.)
For the pages about Roussillon (below), I painted a background with watercolor and let it dry before gluing in cut-out brochure photos plus a few pictures of my own that I printed at home.
Adding handwritten titles, notes, labels, and comments makes the collages feel more personal, plus it makes them fit in better with my sketches, because they have the same sort of lettering, borders, etc.
The red square that says “Our secret hotel” was cut from a brochure featuring the lovely hotel where we stayed. (I removed the name at the request of my tour organizers, so we can keep it to ourselves.) It is taped in place with washi tape and holds cards from all the restaurants we ate at during the workshop.
Finally, I did a page about St. Remy-de-Provence. It includes information about the cloister where we sketched in the morning and also features a map of the historic area where we had lunch and sketched in the afternoon.
In the lower left-hand corner, I glued in a copy of a painting I did with acrylics and Posca pens after I returned home from this trip.
I really enjoyed adding these collage pages to my travel journal. The biggest challenge I faced when doing them was in overcoming my perfectionist tendencies. I had to keep telling myself to just have fun with them and not pressure myself to create something Pinterest-worthy.
Collage offers an easy way to mix things up in a travel journal and paint a more complete picture of your experiences during a trip.
2 Comments
I did this with my Croatia/Greece trip in May of 2023 as I was a beginner water color student my water color works were not as attractive as I wanted so the collage approach made my journal more attractive. I felt like I was cheating but now that I viewed your post I feel more comfortable with this approach. Thank you!
Aloha Karen
It’s your journal, and you can do whatever makes you happy! I think adding some collage pieces makes it all more interesting, and it’s an easy way to add more information about a place. I’ve even started including a photo of my workshop group in my travel journals and labeling it with everyone’s name, so I can remember all the special people I’ve met over the years.