Doodle Travel Journal

So, what have I been up to this week?  Well I have a sense of achievement because I finally completed my Travel Journal from our holiday last month.  This was very much an organic process - I started it without any real preconceived idea of what the finished thing would be like, and as I've worked on it, I've had new ideas which have been added and incorporated.  It's been a real labour of love, and I think it's probably unlikely that I'll do it for every holiday, but I've gained a great deal of satisfaction from it.  It'll be great to look back on in the future.  I love spontaneous doodles, and the one rule I set myself when creating this was that I was not allowed to plan the composition in any way, or to use pencil and rubber first.  I had to use ink straight onto paper - this was a little scary.  Of course the finished drawings are as a result much more rough and ready than they would otherwise be, you can see the errors, and there are things I would have done differently if I could have started again, but it has a lot more life and character than something which was completely planned would have done, and that was important to me - it was meant to be less a work of art, and more a personal document.  I found I particularly enjoyed using the white pen on black paper, and I generally restricted myself to black and white - for some reason I'm always happier working in monotone - not sure entirely why that is, but I always put it down to when I was doing my Art A-level, and I was required to do a finished drawing (still-life) every week for 2 years.

Having completed this project, I'm now wondering whether to do the same thing for our wedding album.  We don't actually have an album, just a pile of photos in a box somewhere, because I was always intending to make my own, and never actually got round to it.  But I rather like the idea of taking such a personal approach to creating a wedding album.  That really would be a labour of love (sorry, corny I know!)