Japan travel sketchbook tour #1

Hi everyone :)
This summer me and Tomás traveled to Japan. Internet time goes by so fast that posting this in September feels like an overdue post…
But in reality, we landed back in Iceland only two months ago!

Us in Iceland right before leaving to the airport

We stayed in Japan for a month to visit Tokyo, Kyoto, Chiba and Okinawa
I brought my Traveler’s Notebook with me to document it all:

My leather cover with two notebook and a zipper case for stickers and pen

Ok, let’s take a look at the cover :-)

A Traveler’s Notebook stamp from Tokyo and a sticker to write the year down but I haven’t gotten around to write it yet :-p

I had a thousand plans for this notebook, like: drawing a mini comic! So you’ll see lots of drawings in here for that purpose.
But I don’t think I’ll get around to do it anytime soon…
Actually, this was the main reason for not posting this blog sooner, I wanted to make something nice out of it! I think that sharing my drawing diaries might be boring because is my trip and not a well told story of ‘‘a trip’’

I decorated my endpapers with a map from Japan. I love map colors

But recently I have been making friendships…

With people who love journaling like I do! With those of you who join my workshops, who give me job opportunities, buy my stickers to decorate their planners and buy my prints. Now it feels like I’m showing my diary to friends :-)

The only polaroid I used, they are so chunky for journaling in my opinion

Ok, let me show you the first double spread:

I’m using an erasable pen and color pencils from the brand prismacolour

Journaling at the start of a trip is easy

At the beginning of a trip, journaling is easy :-)
You’re hyped with the idea, everything is new! You have lots of hours to kill while waiting for plains, buses and check ins. But as the days pass, you have more and more walking hours, and you’re tired, you start accumulating lots of stickers and food wrappings and it can feel like a catch up game…

I also drew Tomás as a cat, my plan for the comic was to draw us as cats the moment we landed in Tokyo

Whenever I had time to be on my phone scrolling to pass time I would open my journal instead. Train rides (yes, even short ones) waiting for food, sitting on a garden and even at night, in bed at the end of the day. And before leaving the house as well.

I finished some pages way later:

I added all the stickers and drawing of this page only by the end of our trip

I didn’t plan how my pages would go, I was doing this for the second time ever! My first traveling journal was when I went to the Vestmannaeyjar and I remember being to precious about it.

This time around I forced myself to be ok with unfinished and weird pages. Sometimes I would go back 5 days on my trip to finish a page.

Lists of what I bought:

The left page is unfinished but I think it will stay like this forever now

Making lists of things I bough was a good way to keep me accountable!
I bought a Japanese volume of my favourite mangas just to have it at home, as a souvenir. In case you need a reading recommendation:

Hirayasumi

Skip and Loafer

The Meiji Shrine double spread:

What I was wearing that day, my favourite food, a stamp and a fun episode involving a gigantic butterfly that Tomás mistook for a bat lol

Some pictures of the day of this page:

The Meiji Shrine was very close to where we stayed, we had to cross a beautiful garden to get there. If I lived in Japan I’d go for a walk here every morning for sure

To finish today’s post:

I loved all mochis! I tried strawberry and watermelon. Bean paste is delicious! And this peach juice… Friends, if you can, try it! They sell them in some vending machines, is worth the hunt hihi

Here is a reel I made with ‘‘all the pages’’

Thank you for looking at my pages, I’ll post the second part very soon :-)