The Inkspired Life - Architectural Sketching

Hello, happy Monday. Hope you're doing well. It is May 13th. Man, this month is flying by. Um, before you know it, summer is going to be here. I'm not rushing the days, but yeah, time goes quick. Um, tonight I wanted to pop on and do a, a review, or actually it's more not— I guess it's more of an unboxing because I haven't really used this, so I can't review it. So I was in, um a big box bookstore the other day. They have a really, really great section with journals and some art supplies as well, and some pens. And they have some Moleskine stuff. So some— I've heard people say Moleskine, um, I say Moleskine. I'm not sure what the right pronunciation is, but that's okay. So I wanted to, um, kind of open this in front of you guys and show what's inside. And yeah, so let's do it. Um, this is totally unsponsored, off the cuff, etc., etc. This is just my own kind of take on what I'm seeing as I open this up. So, um, it's called the Moleskine Traveler's Journal. Your travel experiences all in one place. I like that it comes in a really nice slipcase. Digging the color of it, it's kind of olive and forest green colors on here. Very, very cool. And then the back of the case, you can see it says, "A structured before and after record of every journey you take, from weekend— weekends away to life-changing trips and everything in between." Um, there you go. Intro page is packed with practical travel advice, 8-year calendar, travel timeline, and glossary for travelers. Cool, we'll take a look and see what that's about. 3 tabbed sections: travel memories and wish list, short trips section, a long trip section. Um, each short and long trip is divided into structured before and after pages for planning, budgeting, and checklists, as well as keepsakes, sketches, and memories. Cool. Apparently 400 pages, acid-free paper. You can see the size. Uh, 2 ribbon bookmarks in the inner pocket and stickers. Ooh, inside. Can't go wrong with stickers inside, right? All right, cool. So let's open this up. Pretty cool. Actually, in the bottom says, a place where globe travelers record before and after of every trip. Um, so I love traveling. I don't really travel a lot, but you know, when I do go to places, I like to bring a journal, some sketchbooks. So I didn't know if this would be another alternative to replace a sketchbook, or maybe to use in addition to a sketchbook. All right, um, really, really nice cover. Has a little embossing there. I like the feel and the texture of it. See, it's pretty good size. Oh, there's a pen or Sharpie next to it. Um, I love elastic bands, they're great for keeping it closed, or you can use it as a bookmark. But I think they said there are bookmarks inside, so actually there are. Let me open this up. I see them kind of tucked in there. See if we can find them, find them. It's the treasure hunt. We're going on a journey to find the bookmarks. Here we are. Cool. So there are two bookmarks in here that you can use, which is really cool. All right, let's just kind of go from the front. We'll open it up. Let me zoom in a little bit. Maybe I don't think it's gonna fit the whole thing on screen, so we'll zoom back out and we'll just kind of do this. We'll just do a little manual Zip, zoom, there we go. Love the inside cover. I don't know what city this is, so maybe someone watching may know what city this is. Um, really cool city grid layout. This is brand new, I have not used it. Table of contents, you can see what's inside. Time zones, Measures, conversions, that's, that's interesting. All kinds of useful information. It looks like we have a time zone kind of page. Measures and conversions, temperatures. So obviously we have phones with apps on them. We have apps that could do all this stuff, or we have Google, right? Safari. Um, but it's really convenient to have it kind of in this manual form, grab and go if you want to do some quick references. I like that. Uh, what if your phone is out of battery, right, or you don't have a signal? This is pretty cool. International sizes, that's cool if I'm gonna buy a tuxedo in Italy for some reason. But I was saying before, I don't really do a lot of traveling now, but I plan to do it. And when I do travel, it would be really cool to keep— start keeping more of a log just besides sketching. And I love travel sketching, travel journaling. This could allow for some other things. We have calendars. We have— all right, so this came out in 2018. Calendar goes up to 2025. So I'm sure that if you change the year here, you can— the dates would apply to other years as well. Um, dialing codes, global temperatures and rainfall. That's interesting, kind of cool. Um, list of international airports, words Words and names. Huh, here we go. Car rental: a place or company where cars are rented out. Just in case you're wondering. So this is kind of cool, this glossary. Let's see what else we have. More glossary words. My Inspiring Journeys: join the dots, color, and use stickers to create a map of your unique mind. So I guess you can plot out where you've been or where you want to go. There are supposed to be stickers in here. Let's see if we can find stickers. So in the back there's a pocket. Aha! In this pocket we have some stickers. Let's see. Oh, there's like two pockets. See? One here and another one. That's cool. So I might use that to throw in some sketch, uh, pieces of sketching paper or some watercolor paper. We got some stickers in here that came with it, some other cool stickers. So that's fun. All right, what else we have? My best journey so far. So you can kind of journal in here. I'm going to skip around, I might miss some things. My most extraordinary travel moments so far. So we have a dot grid. I love dot grids. I love writing in dot grids. I love sketching in dot grids. I love playing connect the dots in dot grids. Can be very therapeutic. Oh, we got a bunch of dot grids in there. I'm going to skip to this section, it's called Short Trips. And you can see here, before the trip, destination, when, how to get there, places, notes. So it's a great kind of planning tool here. So when I'm planning my dream trip to Venice, that is the first place on my bucket list I want to go visit. Could definitely break this out. Place for notes, budgets, what price, checklist page. Then we have a section that says after the trip. So after the trip, it's really just blank pages. Um, it's gonna actually be during the trip too if I want to do some sketches in here. So the paper is fairly thin. So, um, it's probably not going to be good for adding watercolor or ink washes to this paper. Um, but there's some blank pages there, which is cool. So that's all for the short trip. If you go to the long trip section, same thing. You have kind of planning area, note section, some more checklists. Again, some blank areas. So this has more blank pages in the long trip area. So yeah, this could definitely be for, um, sketching. So it would be cool. Let's test it out. I am going to— we're going to test the Sharpie on here. I just want to see what the paper is like. So it doesn't matter here, we'll just do it in this section. It'll be fun. One day I'll come back to this and it'll be surprising. I'll be like, oh, I remember when I did that. Um, let's do a little sketch here, and I really just want to test this and see how the ink is. I'll just say we went to go visit this bridge. We went to go visit the city, it had a cool bridge there. I wanted to do a thumbnail sketch of it. Let's do some hatching just to throw down a little more ink and see how the paper holds up. So I like the way the Sharpie's going down on the paper, pretty cool. And let's just throw a little bit more in here and we'll look at the back side. Alright, so let's say that's our bridge sketch. So let's flip it over. Um, yeah, so it definitely bleeds through. You can see it, you can see it went onto this page as well. So this may not be the best sketching paper. For me because I like to use Sharpie. Let's just try a Pilot pen as well and see what that does. So we'll just sketch next to here. We'll just do a little— maybe we're looking at a old church and here's kind of spire of the church. We have a spire. So that is a Pilot pen. Um, so the Pilot pen didn't— started to bleed through a little bit. So that's good to know. So I don't know if this will be the best sketching journal for me, uh, but for taking notes down, it could work. Definitely. I'm going to throw a little bit of watercolor. Let's see if it does anything on here. So I'm just gonna grab my brush and just dip into some watercolor. Now let's see if we can do a wash on here. Let me just throw a little bit more. I think that's good. So really light wash. Yeah, and you can see that's kind of bleeding through a little bit as well. So that's really good to know. So maybe not the best for doing washes in. I kind of wish this journal had thicker paper for me personally. What else do we have in here? Do do do. Page contents, and we have just some totally blank pages in the back as well. So that is the Moleskine, Moleskine, Moleskine, however you would like to say it, traveler's journal. Um, you know I love sketching, urban sketching, architecture sketching, travel sketching. Journals are my thing. I— Moleskine has some really awesome watercolor journals I love using. Let me see if there's one nearby I can grab quick. Let's see. Oh, you know what? All my little— I believe they are all in the other room, so I don't— well, I have this one here. I'm looking for my small pocket ones, but I have this one. They have an art collection. With paper that is thicker, cold washes, and ink a little bit better. So they have their own sketchbook series, which is actually the same size. Ta-da! But this is— this will be cool. This will be really fun to organize my thoughts, planning, taking notes while I'm away, and just recording my travels. So I like the way it feels. Yeah, so there you go. That's my just kind of off the cuff, off of the cuff thoughts about this traveler's journal. Uh, thank you guys for watching. Have an awesome rest of your day. Remember, keep paying it forward, use your creativity for positivity, and I will be back again sketching this week. Probably not Wednesday night. I don't know. I will post ahead of time if I know. Thank you guys so much. Take care. Peace and live creatively. I'll see you real soon.