I wanted to jot down some techo kaigi style thoughts on what worked out of the notebook setup I took on my last trip.  I don’t travel nearly as much as I used to and my needs have changed a lot from when I travelled on my own to academic conferences and would sometimes have a notebook and sit and write or draw in a restaurant by myself.  Restaurants and cafess are less relaxing when your kid wolfs down his food and then is very eager to leave, alas! I now carry two tiny notebooks with me so we can both draw at the same time while we’re waiting for our meals, but he’s less interested afterwards usually.

So group one of supplies is almost identical to my usual work planner setup, only I subbed in a personal notebook for my work todo list notebook:

Traveler’s notebook (dot grid, weekly planner, and blank), a grid pencil board, two fountain pens, a grey double-ended brush pen, a multi-colour pencil, a regular mechanical pencil, a black fineliner, an eraser, and a tiny roll of thin washi tape, all sitting on top of a large flat pencil case.

You can’t see it but there’s also a zipper pouch with stickers in it attached to the back of the planner.

The notebooks:

• Dot Grid notebook (the one with Leafy blue/yellow sticker).
  • I use this for journal entries and writing notes, although this particular one also has a bunch of drawings from before I started carrying a dedicated blank notebook.
• Weekly planner (blue and I put foil transfer stars on it)
  • This is my usual weekly planner that I carry to work when I’m not on vacation.  Its main use is to track headache/migraine related health stuff.  I used to do this in a monthly planner that lives with my journal at home, but I’m experimenting with doing a slightly finer grained morning/afternoon/evening tracking and it’s easier to do that if I have more space per day and if I have the planner with me at work.  I also use it for jotting down todo items for when I get home, occasional other notes from things that amused me at work that I might journal about later, the usual planner stuff, and some work-related tracking.
• Blank sketchbook (not very visible in the photo but it’s hooked together behind the weekly planner using a Traveler’s Notebook zipper pouch such that one notebook sits “inside” using the plastic like a cover, and the other is “outside” with the cover slipped into one side of the plastic non-zippered pocket side)
  • This one’s just for drawing.  I’ve been doing some daily drawing challenges so that’s most of what’s in here.  This one’s not actually from Traveler’s Company but rather some Canadian company who have cheaper refills.  I don’t like the covers as much but the paper inside is decent for fountain pens and drawing, though not quite enough for more than a teensy bit of watercolour.  Since it seems like a lot of the stationary stores here struggle to keep the actual TN inserts in stock, I’m glad to have another option.

The writing utensils (from left to right)

• Two Pilot Metropolitan fountain pens – for writing.  At work that’s mostly todo lists and notes about things I want to discuss with someone.  For travel that’s mostly actual journal entries.  I’ve tried a few pens in this setup and the Metropolitian is my favourite because of the colours, reliable nibs, and smaller capacity so I don’t have to spend 6 months with one ink colour (I write a lot less here than in my regular journal).
• Pentel Multi-8 pencil crayon – For colouring my sketches and making a break to show when a new journal/work entry starts.  It’s a bit finicky to use so my original plan to have it as a fun option in my purse for my kid to use didn’t work out, but I like having a bit of colour on hand that’s easier to use than the very tiny 1″ long teensy pencil crayons that have become my purse staple.
• Grey “mildliner” brush pen – mostly used for to-do list checkboxes, but also sometimes drawings
• Normal mechanical pencil – used for drawing and the planner tracking
• Sakura micron fineliner – inking my drawings

Also the pencil case is a “large flat” one from Lihit Labs that conveniently fits TN notebooks.  I still don’t have a regular TN cover because I prefer things to be zippered so they don’t get damaged in my bag, and this fits my needs.

This worked well — I didn’t feel bad about leaving my usual larger journalling setup at home!

And then because I’ve gotten kind of obsessive about painting, I threw in a little painting set:

Painting Set: A set of cheap watercolour pencils, a pouch with two water brushes and a pencil sharpener, the open blank traveler’s notebook showing all the colours, and a small square watercolour notebook.

That’s the blank TN style notebook in all its glory showing the swatch page for my watercolour pencils.  This is the same one that’s attached to my planner, not a separate one.  The pencils were a kid entertainment buy for a previous trip that didn’t work out super well because neither me nor kid had much time to use them and also my in-laws had insufficient horizontal surfaces available for us to use for art that would take a while to dry and thus would render a table useless for anything else for a bit after.  (I’m so glad kiddo and I have a craft room with a table for our paintings in this new house!  It’s been really great!)

The little green notebook was an el-cheapo online buy for me to try some cotton paper before paying art store prices.  It didn’t explain on the listing, but I suspect it was cheap because the cover has a bit of glue on it that wouldn’t have passed quality control.  But the paper inside is nice!  I already showed some of my other travel paintings in my august post, but here’s one more pair with a fish at the aquarium.  Reference photo:

A bright orange fish with a complicated line pattern on it, seen at the Toronto Aquarium.

Painting:

A painting of the same bright orange fish with interesting markings.

It’s not super obvious in this painting (go look at the one with the sea turtle), but I found I could get different textures out of the watercolour pencils if sometimes I just drew, sometimes I drew and then wetted the drawing, and sometimes I basically coloured onto the paintbrush and used it more like regular paint.  Fun!   You can see the draw-on-the-brush technique where I overpainted the eye because I didn’t like the way it looked drawn-and-wetted.

I’m pretty happy with the Traveler’s Notebook setup for work so it’s not a surprise that it worked well for travel: the whole thing fits into my usual travel purse when I wanted it nearby on the train, though it mostly stayed in the hotel when we were out all day being tourists and I was trying to carry as little as possible.  The painting set I was less sure about, but we were so sore after walking all day that it was really nice to sit and paint while my kid vegged out to videos and my husband got stuck doing work calls.  And I’m starting to get fond of those watercolour pencils for my daily sketches now that I’ve gotten better at using them.  I think I still prefer actual paint when I have time to mix and space for a palette and water and stuff, but for “doing art on a hotel bed because there’s only one table in this room and J is using it” it was absolutely great to have something with way less potential for spills and mess.