The Grand Plan

We got back from our week long trip to Seattle last Sunday morning. Since then it’s been 5 days of catching up on the laundry, catching up on work and trying to get back on the east coast time zone. Today was pure relaxing…with a little productivity.

When I came home I had over 650 pictures on my camera. Granted, not every one of them is layout worthy, but a lot of them are—not to mention I never imagined having so many stories to tell about our Washington adventures. I started thinking hard yesterday about how I wanted to scrap all these photos—keeping in mind that I’m nowhere near caught up on my everyday family albums and I made a grand, command decision. I will be scrapping two albums. One I’ll have printed into a book that will probably be of more interest to friends & family than the other. That one is going to be like a highlight reel of our vacation—the great photos and a sweet and simple overview of the trip and events. The other, however, I’m doing just for me.

I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a digital art journal for a while, but I haven’t been a good diary-keeper since I was a teenager, and as you can tell (on a personal basis, anyhow) that I’m not a overly regular blogger either. Art journals are often very thought- and feeling-focused interpretations into art on a page. I know myself—I’m sure I’d start out with great gusto but then end up with a half-finished book that spanned years (maybe even decades), if it ever even reached completion. But as I was sitting there yesterday, recalling some of the small, yet memorable details of our trip, it hit me that an art journal could be the perfect medium for all these stories. I’ve also been coming to the realization that I don’t remember details of events as much as I would like and I’m suddenly feeling a burning need to get all of these adventures down into words before my memory eats them, like some gray-matter garbage disposal—irretrievably gone forever. So I’ve decided that the second book is going to be a retelling of our trip in a more personal, intimate fashion. Journaling-heavy pages that I will be able to come back to 10 years from now to relive the trip all over again. I imagine no one but a very patient person is going to want to read all of the bits and pieces that will be going into this book—which is why I’m considering the art journal to be just for me.

I realized today that I couldn’t possibly tackle this project without at least a sketchy outline of what I wanted to include. In a way, I’m worried that I’ll forget to tell a great story and it will be lost in my brain abyss forever. So I made a page list today. What did I come up with? 36 stories to tell, each one having their own page. In some cases, 3-4 pages will encompass the events of a single day. Our trip was really eventful (but amazingly not exhausting).

I finished the first page earlier today and will be posting it soon. I’m also hoping that doing this will help me not feel so sad that I had to leave several people that I love dearly behind on the west coast and come home. As we were flying home late, late at night I was feeling the familiar ache of missing them setting in already. And maybe that story will become page 37 in my book…