Paris 2008 Travel Memoir

Paris Street Scene

Giverncy Stream

Senior Citizens dancing on Seine River tour boat

Bakery in the Town of Versailles

Above are a few watercolor paintings inspired by our Paris 2008 trip. All sketches & watercolor paintings are on flickr as of today, but I still have tons of photos, which I will post as time permits.

Usually I keep my posts pretty short, because I figure people want to see the art pieces, but this time I'm sharing the plan, too. The blog gives me a place to put down what I have rattling around in my head & get it organized. I'd love to hear comments, tips, etc. as this is my 1st travel memoir project. I already have a few ideas for the next trip - like slow down & paint more.

So here's the plan or the scoop as I would say to Moby. Even though we were only in & around Paris for 4 days(added a day due to hubby's work), I wanted to take full advantage creatively of the experience.


Week before we left, I did a week of prep to get the lay of the land as my Dad would say. I wanted to know where we wanted to go, how to get there, when things were open, etc. hit the ground running so to speak. I mean 4 days is not a long time to figure out someplace you have never been. Being this well prepared, allows Art & I the ability to just meander & be spontaneous, which we did quite a bit of that.

This preparation involved sketching some of the sites from photos, thereby getting me familiar with shapes, textures of Paris. To top it off, I made a pledge to myself to sketch & watercolor paint every time I stopped, for a meal, had to wait, & at each sight to find something different to sketch. The 1st day quick sketching with pen & ink worked out OK as I was on my own, but the 2nd day it just didn't work as Art was with me & we just had a great time being together. So I photoed everything I could possibly could want to sketch & Art in front of the sites(he was my artist in the photos). In the evenings, I continued to immerse myself in the french culture, while Art was working - I journaled, organized my stuff collected, flipped through my sketches for the day, watched TV, & planned the next day.


As soon as we got back from the trip, I have worked to create the watercolor paintings inspired by our Paris trip. Just finished those yesterday, I've uploaded all of the Paris Trip watercolor paintings & a few more trip photos on my flickr so check them out.



Next, I'm going to start working on the Paris Art Journal including things I picked up at each place and the journaling I did while I was there.

Finally, I want to put the sketches, watercolor paintings, ,journaling, art journal, & photos all together like a travel memoir. I'm thinking of organizing the travel memoir by day or each place visited. It is going to end up a small book, but I will publish it here & on my flickr as each section is completed. Depending on how big it gets, I hope not too big, I'll publish the finished book here or as a flickr set. I'm such a newbie to blogging that I haven't learned all I need to know to do it all here. In the meantime, I use the blog to direct you to the flickr and flickr to direct to blog. Eventually, I see flickr as mostly photos, we'll see how it goes.

Now I know this is a lot to do, but I am on a quest to really experience as much of life creatively as possible. The actual painting, sketching & creating is the priority, not to mention, I want to improve my writing, but that's a whole other story. Besides now that I have written it down & said it here, I'll have to keep to it, right.

Anyway, our next planned big trip is to China in mid-October so I have to be finished by then. 7-days of Chinese culture & images will leave no room for anything else. I'm looking forward to enjoying & playing with such different Chinese shapes, textures, colors,etc., what fun life is!