This article is written by Francesca Albini

A cruise on the Nile may sound like a calm, relaxing experience, but the truth is, most of the excursions start at 4-5 am, you are often dragged from one monument to another, and in the evening there may be special dinners, dances, music and other entertainments. There are only a few moments where, if you have the energy, you can sit down and sketch, glue, paint, or write.

I find it is actually better when visiting a completely new place to absorb the atmosphere and collect material to then work on my journal once I’m back home. I make mental notes about things like colours, sounds, impressions, temperature. I write key-words  and a few diary entries on a document app on my mobile (I handwrite too, but calligraphy is not what I do best). I also have a folder to collect ephemera, ticket stubs, postcards, brochures, and, why not, the letter paper of the hotel or boat I’m staying in.

I hardly use my big camera these days, I prefer a more compact one, but still with an slr chip. I also bring with me a few plastic cameras and mobile camera apps. I very often find that the lo-fi images record the atmosphere better than the higher quality ones. Lo-fi also means you can capture images quickly, for instance when riding on a coach (less pixels or 35mm film are faster).

Here are three spreads from my Egyptian trip.

The first is more collage-based with bits of ephemera, my cut-out diary entries and some photos, one of which printed on a piece of brown manila envelope.

The second is a sketch of the view from the boat. I laminated the book I’m working on with rice paper died with a tea bag. I used pencil, gouache and bits of coloured tissue paper. The reference for the image were a photo I took and some quick sketches I did on deck at the time.

The last spread shows three photos I took, the one on the left is a candid taken with the good compact kept at waist level, the two on the right were taken with a 35mm plastic camera. I spread brass, ochre and white acrylic around the pictures and completed with rough homemade eraser stamps of birds and palm trees.

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Francesca is a visual artist using pretty much everything she finds around her to record and relive feelings and memories of places and emotions. She collages, paints, draws, photographs. Francesca loves mixing modern technology, such as mobile phone apps, with the simplest of tools such as glitter glue, crayons and other children’s art supplies. Read her blog at http://franjournal.blogspot.com/

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