Moleskine Art Journal - Goal for 2010

Towards the end of 2009, I began my first experiment with Art Journaling and I fell in love with it. In the olden days, writing used to be my hobby. But now that I am hell-bent on making writing my profession, I decided I needed a new hobby that I could allow myself to be bad at, while being creative and having fun - so art was a natural selection. And since I am addicted to journals, art journal was again just the next step. I did a few pages this year and restarted drawing/painting. So for 2010, I have decided to take it one step further, and consciously devote more time to it. My goal then is to finish a complete art journal. I will be using a Large Watercolour Moleskine. I have already done 3 pages in it this year, but there are still 68 pages for next year, so that's more than one a week, and with my schedule, that's plenty. I chose Watercolour Moleskine, because its thick pages give me more freedom of medium. I can use watercolours, paste paper/cards, sketch pens and felt tip pens. It's pretty flexible. Getting really excited about it now, and looking forward to it.

Single Moleskine Grievance

I love my moleskines. I truly do. But I have one grievance. None of my fabulous fountain pens work well on any of the moleskines. I have 2 regular Parker Fountain Pens 1 Parker Pen (expensive one, but can’t remember the exact model) 1 Waterman Fountain Pen On watercolour moleskine, the ink is absorbed in the texture of the pages. On that one, it’s understandable and I am not very bothered. On sketchbook, the pages are too smooth for the ink to stay properly. On regular – both plain and ruled moleskine, pages are too thin, so while the fountain pens work, you can see the impression on the back of the page, which sucks because I write on both sides of a page. Oh yeah, I also have a quill with an ink bottle, but haven’t tried that on moleskines. I really enjoy writing with fountain pens, especially in my journals or anything that I am likely to keep. It just looks better, and my hand-writing is nicer with fountain pens too, so I really miss not being able to use them a lot, especially since now I have officially converted to 100% moleskines for every type of journal I need. How about you? Have you been able to use fountain pens with your moleskines?

Photo Book

Yesterday I ordered my first photo book as a Christmas present. After a few mishaps with several online places, I ended up ordering it with Jessop’s (still online order), so I can pick it up from the local branch. I have made scrapbooks with photos before, but creating a photo book was a new experience. While, it doesn’t feel satisfying from a creative point of view, it still looks fabulous, and something fun to flip through, and improvement from old-fashioned photo albums. I am already thinking of what other photo books I should order :-)