Paris is Always a Good Idea
“You are an adventurer. You go your own way. You’re an observer of the little things that make life so magical. You seek camaraderie with other curious souls to share experiences. You explore with new eyes everywhere you go, and you collect things along the way. You log your impressions in a journal, and then you tell the stories.”
This is my travel manifesto. When gathering art supplies prior to a trip, I select a vintage postcard from my stash and write it on the back side, then tuck it into my journal so that I remember to savor everything while I’m exploring new destinations or returning to favorite places.
Organizing papers and ephemera before leaving on any trip heightens the anticipation of the journey for me. Rummaging through my boxes of ephemera makes me giddy about discovering new places, seeing new vistas, and meeting the locals.
When I’m teaching a workshop, as I was in Paris, I have the added bonus of looking forward to creating with other artists. I looked forward to taking my group to the fabulous flea markets, the lovely little village of Montmartre, and of course, the iconic Eiffel Tower. Paris has so much inspiration to offer.
Our project that week was to create a sensational, one-of-a-kind vintage travel journal to chronicle our visit to Paris. After spending our days taking in the wonder and magic of the City of Light, we spent happy hours constructing our books and adding layers to pages with all the things we’d collected walking through Paris’ arrondissements.
I encouraged the group to collect treasures throughout the week: menus, metro tickets, museum maps, croissant bags, receipts. Anything and everything - “if it can be glued into a book", I declared, "throw it in your bag!”
Puces de Vanves, or Vanves flea market, is my favorite in Paris for finding treasures. There are nearly 400 vendors offering a hodgepodge of items like old photographs, all sorts of antique French ephemera, and the stacks and stacks of vintage books just waiting for us. It did not disappoint. We found lots of old papers, ledgers, postcards, letters, magazines, menus - all sorts of French paper-y goodness to layer into our journals.
We spent another day in Montmartre, beginning with a guided tour of the Musee du Montmartre and the Jardins Renoir. High atop Butte Montmartre and overlooking the vast landscape of Paris, Montmartre was once a village outside the city limits. You can still see the vineyards below the museum and feel the village quality of this special neighborhood.
We gathered later for our workshops each afternoon at a bistro around the corner from our hotel. I demonstrated how to deconstruct our recently rescued vintage books, and then how to put our vintage travel journals back together. Eventually we’d complete our vintage travel journals with the vintage papers and ephemera we collected, and the interior pages taken from our deconstructed books.
Embellishment layers included making marks with watercolors, markers, and pencils, as well as tearing and pasting papers, even stitching bigs of fabric right onto the pages. Words and phrases and ephemera made for even more layers, one on top of the last, building, building, building. Our books were starting to get very juicy!
Another of my favorite museums in Paris is the Musee d’Orsay. As we took in the work of Monet, Renoir, Chagall, Van Gogh, and others, I pointed out color palettes used by the artists and patterns seen within some of the paintings that could be used as inspiration on their journal pages.
We took our journals to the Eiffel Tower, enjoying the sunshine, looking for more patterns within the iron structure to include on our journal pages. Some sketched the entire tower, some used viewfinders to focus on small interesting portions of the wrought iron lattice to include.
The Latin Quarter and St. Germain - I love this part of Paris. From Notre Dame to Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company to the Luxembourg Gardens, we spent the day exploring the Left Bank and basking in its beauty. In our last workshop that afternoon, we pulled it all together in our vintage travel journals - all those beautiful scenes from the week, the conversations, the tastes and smells and sounds of Paris.
These books are more than an art journal, more than a travel diary - they are an archive of our time in Paris. Our week together was one of exploration and discovery, shopping and eating, time spent solo, and experiences shared with other women in the group. The books we made became vessels to hold all of the bits and bobs picked up throughout the week, sketches of places we visited, and the amazing sights we saw.
The beauty of these vintage travel journals is that no experience is required to create them. They require minimal skill. In fact, it’s best to just let your intuition guide you as you add layers to the pages throughout your trip.
If you’re inspired to create your own vintage travel journal and this sort of adventure speaks to you, I invite you to join me for my next workshop in Paris, France. For more information, click here.
