The first application was to cover chip board pages in white gesso and then a layer of hard pastels in various colors was added just before the gesso dried. Acrylic inks applied over stencils created another layer.
Students travelled through Europe visiting a myriad of countries including Prague, Germany, Scotland, England and Iceland. One page was dedicated to creating an acrylic painting. The results were stunning!
An Icelandic landscape and a Picasso inspired painting.
With travel and exploring new places there are ample opportunities to collect photographs, maps, museum brochures, postcards, and a whole host of ephemera. Pages are the perfect place to use these found papers for collage. Combined with acrylic paint, one-of-kind papers made from National Geographic pages using Citrasolv, and stencils, each page becomes a work of art. The best part is… subway ticket stubs, a bakery paper holding the croissant purchased while waiting in line to see the Eiffel Tower, a leaf picked up while walking through a park in Austria, or a paper placemat from an Indian restaurant in Maastricht…they are FREE ephemera and make for the most interesting collaged pages!
Photo image transfer gives each page a personal stamp. As pages take shape with layers of mixed media techniques something special happens…the opportunity to savor the places we have been. Our memories come alive through the process of art making. Visiting foreign lands are life changing experiences and the visual feast needs to become more than just a memory, it needs to be shared as an artifact. Creating travel pages is just the place for this to happen.
Whether it is Medieval art or postcards from a museum, it is all fair game for creating travel pages.
Fused shopping bag makes for a great journal page. With an iron on a medium setting, place 3 to 4 bags together with the “star bag” on top. Lay parchment paper on top of the pile of bags, and parchment underneath the bundle. Iron away, slowly, to fuse them together. Trim to the right size, and hole punch the edge… wa-la… a page of texture and a reminder of shopping at Harrods!
Photo image transfer with acrylic paint and some vintage letter stamps, a family heirloom one of the students brought to class for all of us to use.
Letters made with clear tar gel and acrylic paint.
Stencils and drips make for interesting backgrounds.
A little Monet inspired painting
Teaching Travel Pages was a wonderful experience for me, and the pages created by each student were full of interesting subjects, techniques, color combinations, and layers of collage. Every student had an approach that reflected their personal travel experience. Each page was unique and demonstrated a flair for using ephemera from their adventures to make artful pages. Maybe it is time for you to pull out those maps, brochures, postcards, photographs, ticket stubs, crumpled napkins, and found papers to create an artifact of your travel escapades. It is easy to put a travel journal together using some of the techniques I have described, it just takes time, a precious commodity…but it is worth the effort!
Take a peek inside my travel journal pages. This journal was created with ephemera, found papers, and purchased postcards from my trip to Europe. The countries visited included The Netherlands, Paris, Spain and Italy. Fortunately we have a family member who was a pilot for NATO and had a lovely flat in Maastricht, Holland where we had our home base. From there we travelled to neighboring countries, mostly by air, and a quick road trip to Paris. It was the trip of a lifetime. 
The first time I saw the Mona Lisa was at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It was 1967 and I was in 2nd grade. Jackie Kennedy was instrumental in bringing the masterpiece to the nation’s capital and fortunately my mother took us to see it. Even at a young age I found the painting intriguing. Seeing it again at The Louvre was meaningful and reminded me of how influential art can be at any age. I loved standing in front of this fine lady fifty years later!
I am using a chipboard kit by Recollections for Travel Pages. First I gessoed every page and added a light color of oil pastels. This helped tone down the white and I used a variety of colors, scraping the pastels over the almost dry gessoed pages. There is a layer of liquid acrylic paint that coordinates with the ephemera. LADUREE is a fabulous macaroon shop and restaurant in Paris, the page is made from the bag which held my delicious macaroon purchase. It was amazing to find a coffee shop in Paris that carried Guatemalan coffee, my husbands homeland, so I had to include part of the bag from the coffee we drank. These paper treasures are perfect for collage and spark memories of time spent travelling.
This page is an altered mailing envelope, painted, stamped with Da Vinci text, Florence stickers and specially made collage papers. The horizontal accents were created by dissolving the ink of pages in a National Geographic magazine with Citrasolv. The papers are perfect for adding interest and design.
While walking on the streets of Paris, my stepson’s friend asked me, “Do you collect anything in particular?” Indeed I do…was my quick reply. Paper, all kinds from all sorts of places…cafes, museums, hotels, maps, ticket stubs, even rubbings made on vellum paper while walking around the Cathedral in Sevilla near the spot where Christopher Columbus is buried. And who could imagine the paper pocket which held a warm croissant from a tiny Parisian bakery would be so colorful and intricately made? This is the composition of stash which has lovingly been put together to create pages of art, and a bundle of treasured memories.
