Exquisite & Delicate - The Journals of Derika Volpi

This coming Saturday, 17 September, I am very excited to be hosting a visual journaling workshop at the Play Café which will be taught by my wonderful friend and artist, Derika Volpi.  She holds a BA (Fine Arts) degree in Information Design, and is passionate about hand lettering, typography, layout, sketching and photography.  Have a look at her instagram profile (@derikavol) and you'll see what I mean!

Derika's visual journals as well as her photography highlights all the wonderful detail that most of us tend to overlook when we see beautiful big landscapes or when we travel to new and unknown places. We are so often overwhelmed and taken by everything that is "bigger and better" that we lose so much of the exceptionally beautiful detail that surrounds us.  This is a theme that keeps emerging in much of her work.

She prefers to work in small and portable formats mostly. As a busy home-schooling mother of 2, many of her journal pages are done in her tiny A6 Moleskine Diary - which is a practice that she has inspired me to follow too.  She believes in a minimalist approach to art materials.  Derika's pages are often a combination of 3 elements only - collage, sketches and hand lettering.




She adores paper and prefers to use old labels, postage stamps, pages from old journals, vintage book papers, even the patterned insides of used envelopes as well as tiny seeds and leaves discovered during nature trips - which she loves taking with her family.

During the workshop, she will be guiding us through the creation of tiny journals made with recycled papers, and also introduce us to her unique style elements as we create our own visual journal pages.

Message me if you'd like to attend - and I'll forward you the details.

Here's a sneek peak into some of her wonderful journals:

Sketchbook Travel to the Gingerbread Houses of Dictionary Land

It has been two weeks since my last post.  My nocturnal studio sessions came to an abrupt end on 28 March when I sustained a concussion, broke my right clavicle and - confirmed by my orthopaedic surgeon only yesterday - 4 ribs were fractured in a horse riding accident. Who knew that by the time I write my next blog post, I would be lying on my bed for 6 weeks and using my left hand to edit pictures and write this post. Life sure is full of surprises!  So now I've been able to start something that has been one of my goals for this year - to digitally combine 15 years of travel photography and travel sketches.

5 of us were crammed into the ancient Toyota Land Cruiser of our trusty driver and tour guide Ahmed.  It still played cassette tapes! We spent 14 days exploring the mountains, the canyons, the sea and the desert of Yemen. A fascinating and arid place which writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith named Dictionary Land.  Because the Arabic dialect that is spoken here, is rumoured to be closest to the Classical Arabic that is taught by academic institutions today.  A country that provides you with the most authentic experience of what Old Arabia could have been before the modern age set in.

It is the place where Sam, son of Noah had settled after the Great Flood and the land where the palace ruins of the Queen of Sheba can be explored - according to legend.  And if you ever wondered where the world's old Land Cruisers go?  Well, they find an afterlife in Yemen - the ones that can still be fixed manually at the roadside by its driver, that is.  Extremely essential in this remote part of the world!

As for my travel sketches - there was no time for leisurely sketching.  We were constantly on the move so most sketches were quick impressions while the landscape flashed past our moving vehicle.

Slideshow: Sketchbook Travels to Yemen Music: Hijaz by Magamat (The Legend of Oud)

For more Yemeni/Arabic inspired material: READ: Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Wilfred Thesiger, Freya Stark WATCH: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen LISTEN: The Legend of Oud by Magamat Here is a beautiful Jewish Yemeni folk song by Noa and friends:

Of journalling on the go and doing like the locals do

And so the calendar has turned to 2013 unobtrusively while I was taking in the California scenery.

If you think that your thirst for travel is quenched after weeks in foreign territory and a 2000 mile road trip. Think again. The road merely opens up more possibilities. Next time we should overnight here...maybe stay 2 nights in this and that quaint little seaside village...take more time for a photo safari in that area...how about bringing our friends to do a mountain bike tour of the area...plan our time so that we can make more stops to take in the scenery at viewing areas...and so on and so forth. I believe one should always have a reason to go back.

I am not one who gets up at the crack of dawn armed with a checklist of tourist attractions for the day. I prefer to do as much as I can like the locals do - go to a local coffee shop, sit, watch the people, sketch live, listen, interact, ask questions, read, try to understand. Then come back at night and when everybody's asleep - journal!

For the first time, I made my own journal in preparation for a trip - thanks to Mary Ann Moss' online course, Remains of the Day - please do go over to her blog and have a peek if you want high doses of inspiration.