Creative, accessible and fun ways in to capturing your travels through Rajasthan!
Create a Travel Journal - Rajasthan! (18 November - 2nd December 2023)
Art Journaling is a great way to capture your life and the world about you. On the tour we’ll explore lots of different creative ways in to making a travel journal to help you capture your personal experiences of Rajasthan.
Some of the ideas and techniques we’ll use are those that I like to use in my art journals and visual diaries. You can use them on their own or combine them. Learn more about some of these techniques below.
Breaking it Down
You don’t always have to draw an entire scene, location or place to tell its story.
This technique can be used when we’re exploring one location for a few hours and/or when travelling from place to place over the period of a day. It’s great for capturing our individual experiences of a place and any and all the things that make up those experiences - what we see hear, smell and feel.
By breaking down the journal page in to shapes, perhaps inspired by the lines of a beautiful building, a doorway, a street or landscape, we can then draw details of what we see and hear around us in those shapes.
In the example below, the shapes I used to break down the page were inspired by the architectural features inside the church.
For example, the Palaces and Forts we’ll see are breath-taking – but rather than feeling I need to try and draw the entire façade of say, Udaipur Palace, I can instead look for architectural details, textures and patterns, and fill the shapes on my page with those details. Together, alongside other aspects of the Palace and my time spent there, ie artefacts, textiles, patterned tiles, my journal page will capture my experience of it, without having to draw the entire thing. This technique allows you to add any writing to your page too. (Of course, if you want to sit and study the façade of the Palace as a whole, you can do that too!)
As I mentioned, this ‘Breaking it Down’ technique works well over the period of a day too. Start the day and your page off with a small drawing of something that captures your eye. Then close your journal as we hit the road. At the next stop, add another drawing to the same page, then another drawing at the next stop. In this way, you’ll effectively be breaking down the page as you travel through the day (whether in the minibus or on foot exploring one of the tour’s extraordinary sites). This is how I produced the page below, throughout a journey from Hanoi to Mai Chou in Vietnam, over the space of a day.
Another reason I love this technique is that I can fill a page with line drawings, and then if I haven’t had to time to add any colour (or perhaps I’ve started another page with a different technique and focus – I quite like having more than one page on the go), I can do that whilst travelling on the minibus or later in the day. And one last benefit of this technique, is that you can take photos of details that catch your eye, and draw from those later too, or use them for colour references.
Below is an as yet unfinished drawing I made sitting outside a cafe in Chefchaouen, Morocco for an hour or so. I started to add the colour afterwards.
Rubbings and Collage
Our travel tour will be a feast for the eyes! The textures and colours of India are scrumptious and as we explore Rajasthan, we can take rubbings of an array of textures to add to and use in our journals. Doors, walls, tiles, metalwork, plasterwork (where allowed!), floors, signage, brickwork, natural finds – all of these can be captured with a rubbing using pencils or wax crayons.
You might take a rubbing of some gorgeous tilework in your journal, then add the date and a description and leave it at that. You will remember that moment when you look back at your journal! Or, you might take a range or rubbings on separate pieces of paper and then use those as collage material to make a journal entry, by collaging a scene or landscape from the day.
The page below, using collaged rubbings, was created en route in the mini bus - a representation of the Moroccan landscape I was travelling through. Can you spot the small village nestled in the hillside?
Speed Drawing!
A fun technique to use looking out of the minibus window!
As we travel through Rajasthan we’ll drive through a range of landscapes, cityscapes, towns and villages. Speed drawing whilst looking out of the window is an exciting way to capture the characteristics of landscape as we travel through it. It’s not about accuracy, it’s about getting the essence of what we see on the page. By building and layering up these super-quick drawings, we can create pages that reflect the changing landscapes of our tour.
Maps and Mapping
Creative ways in to capturing a journey, walk, a memory or your entire day!
What better way to capture a travel tour of Rajasthan than to map it! I love including maps of my walks, journeys and favourite places in my journals. Again, maps are a great creative tool for capturing your personal experience of a walk, journey or place.
For our Travel Tour or Rajasthan we can use maps to capture our daily travels, a tour or exploration of a specific place, and/or the entire tour. I tend to use maps as a more reflective tool than an in-the-moment opportunity. I like to gather some reference material that I can draw from, this might be a souvenir leaflet of the Lodhi Gardens or the Taj Mahal, and then from that draw out the route of my walk or journey, and then add simple drawings to illustrate key memories, moments or aspects of the experience. I love to use creative lettering too, to add written elements to my map.
The journal pages below capture one of two weeks in West Bengal with Creative Arts Safaris, with a map of the river and road from Murshidabad to Kolkata, and moments along the way.
Below - My latest travels! The map is drawn and ready to be populated with wonderful moments and memories!
Look out for upcoming travel journaling tips and techniques for
'Create a Travel Journal - Rajasthan'!
For further information about the 'Create a Travel Journal - Rajasthan' tour please click here
Or email Jo Beal: jo@cottoneyejo.co.uk or
Fiona Wright: Fiona@creative-arts-safaris.com
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