In a previous life, Jose Naranja was an aeronautical engineer. Now he’s a professional traveler and “notebooker.” His work documents his travels, combining scrapbooking, illustration, cartography and journaling to create unique manuscripts.
Naranja’s previous career is still visible through the detailed technical drawings included in his works. Photo: Jose Naranja
It all started in 2005, when a young engineer from Madrid picked up a Moleskine sketchbook for the first time. A lover of travel, he used the notebook to document his thoughts and experiences and express himself creatively in a way he couldn’t at his job. He began sharing the results online and grew a devoted following.
Eventually, he sold reproductions of his completed journals as art books, which allowed him to sustain a life of travel and adventure.
His travels mostly take him across Asia. He especially likes Thailand. “Thailand has many layers to be unveiled, and the more I discover, the more fascinating everything becomes,” he wrote after a 2023 visit.
A notebook created on a visit to Thailand. Some pages are more illustrative, while others are composed mainly of ephemera and handwritten text. Photo: Jose Naranja
The travel notebooking genre
Multimedia travel journals as an art form predate Naranja. The late American photographer Peter Beard documented his travels in Kenya through a series of illustrated collage diaries. He combined photojournalism with multimedia collage art to create art books and exhibitions. His work, which documented the degradation of the natural world, even incorporated animal blood. The artistic travel journal, as a medium, can support a broad range of tones.
For anyone interested in travel notebooking, Naranja has shared a great deal about his process and materials. He travels light, focusing on portable supplies like pocket-sized folding watercolor sets and simple, reliable pens. He loves including local stamps in his journal pages; they’re an easy way to add art to a notebook while showing where you’ve been.
A sample four pages from one of his notebooks, which can be viewed in full on his site. Photo: Jose Naranja
Twenty years after that first Moleskine notebook, Naranja is still hard at work. He now hand-binds his own journals. While Thailand continues to exert a magnetic pull on him, he has also explored Colombia, the Netherlands, Georgia, Germany, Ireland, the Cook Islands, and even Everest Base Camp.
