When I looked for ways to finance my travel around the world, I tried to find how to give to my family, friends, colleagues and/or readers a solution to help me.

I found a solution while discussing with Antoine : I have to get them to microsponsor my project. Instead of looking for hypothetical “regular” sponsors, I’d like to go to people I know and who care about me, and include them into my adventure. They don’t have big money like a big sponsor, but they are a lot and they want to help me… So why couldn’t they participate?

What I’m proposing to my microsponsors is to travel with me. After financing one day of my trip (with a 15€ personnal donation), microsponsors will tell me things to do depending on where I am : special food to eat, a place to visit, a video message to record… and I’ll try to do my best to address these wishes. And there’s more! I’ll send to my microsponsors a postcard from where I am: the postcard can be a sketch, an instant photograph, some little souvenirs… it’ll be a personalised artwork, from me to the microsponsor. Before being sent, the postcards will be photographed and published on this blog, with a Creative Commons license. Then, the recipents will be invited to send me a picture of them with the postcard and post it on a Flickr or Facebook group…

And today, it’s the big launch. Well, in french only for now, but I’ll translate in about two weeks. If you know a bit of French, you should be able to register without a problem. The system is quite basic, I’m doing everything from a base developed by Samuel Martin and Stéphane Deschamps. After the registration, I’m doing the payment validations, the mails, etc. You might expect to wait a couple of days for a confirmation email…

Oh, and I discovered PayPal fees… for a 15€ donation, PayPal takes 75c… This could be quite heavy if I get lots of donation. Don’t hesitate to give more to compensate! (ok, that was shameless.)

What day will you choose?

To help you decide, please consult my plans, I put some dates to help you target a country and a date… but nothing’s written in stone. I’ll tell you if I change my plans :)

Go to the Microsponsoring »

The microsponsoring platform has been designed by Samuel Martin and Stéphane Deschamps. May they be thanked again and again, and may they know happiness and felicity in the coming eons even after the return and rise of the Mighty Cthulhu, which could come soon. If you’re still reading this, go microsponsor me already!

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There’s something I haven’t talked about even if it’s going to have its importance in my trip. When we think about a travel, we think about travel journals. We think about Chatwin or Hemingway, or Delacroix the painter and his Carnets marocains, or Gauguin. Travel journaling is intimely linked with traveling : it’s the way to set the events on the record… on a journal notebook of course.

Why am I telling this? I haven’t the faintest idea, I wanted to write about sketchbooks and about my travel, and it collided, but it’s too interesting to be erased now. (no, it’s not interesting, but I don’t want to find another intro so this one’ll do!)

The sketchbooks I wanted to tell about are those I realised during my studies. My school was the ECV Aquitaine, and my big sister gave me a sketchbook, I don’t remember for what occasion it was. The sketchbook was a Moleskine,you know, one of these little black books with mole-skin (not really) cover on the outside, a creamy paper inside and an oh-so-romantic-but-a-bit-exagerated history wrapped all around… The gift fell just right, because I began to do things in that sketchbook, and the more I did things, the more I needed it.

You see, when you have an activity that’s creative but surrounded with walls, when you work or study and the Brief is king, it’s good to have a way to evade creatively… It’s about exploring new things, discovering new way of doing it and get out of the box. Or is it about basic creative hygiene? To tell you the truth, I don’t know.

Anyway, I quickly understood the importance all of this had for me, so I decided to share the thing on the interwebs. It was in 2004, I started a kind of photoblog without photos, but with scans of my sketchbook pages, with also a mirror on Flickr. I maintained this project for two years, and filled four Small Moleskine Sketchbooks : Aloÿs, Björn, Cristöbal, Daphnëe (with or without ¨ of coürse.)

The blog, now shut down, was primordial in my practice : the sketchbook pages I created were destined to be online. I knew, when I created, that I’d have readers, and it pushed me to finalize my pages, to try new things…

And the readers were there… I didn’t keep the stats, but some blogs wrote about me. Moleskinerie first, then BoingBoing totally by surprise (being boingboinged is an experience not unlike discovering your little brother on the front page of a national newspaper — not that I would know anything about that though). And I was also linked on Drawn! and on some other blogs.

I have to mention that the best things happened thanks to the Moleskine users community that grew around the same time as my project. I discovered Moleskinerie.com around the time I started my project, and I quickly became friends with Armand, blogger in chief. It’s via Moleskinerie that I met Patrick, who maintained MoleskineArt, and thanks to whom I could participate to my first exhibition, Proj:Exhibition, in Hong Kong, where some of my sketchbook pages were showed along with other artists sketchbooks. My first exhibition in my whole life! International fame, almost!

Then in 2006 I also participated to the Detour Exhibition in London, organized by Moleskine. My sketchbook “Cristobal” was with other Moleskines from known artists. Global fame, let me tell you!

That is also around this time, with the end of my studies taking all my time, that I felt less need and impulsion to continue. So I finished the sketchbook “Daphnée” without publishing the last pages. These were not shown to a lot of people… and it’ll stay like that :)

After three years of hiatus, wouldn’t it be nice to start again?Why would I tell you all about that anyway?

Of course I’ll bring some sketchbooks along in my travel. But well, I’ll write about it another day, there’s so much to tell about that…

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If there’s one remark I always get from my friends, it’s that one about my cameras. Because, you know, I have the reputation to be the kind of guy who collects lots of cameras…

And yes, it’s true. That’s my big brother’s and my big sister’s fault. They had a camera first so I wanted to have one too. My .big sis’ studied photography in Paris and is now a photo-reporter. During My own studies, while I learned about making stuff up on a computer (it’s called 3D modeling), I bought my own camera. And I discovered the dark secrets of Black And White photography. 

Then, two years ago, my big brother brought me to a photography fair with lots of antique cameras shops. That’s when I began my foray into… well… old cameras and stuff. I first bought myself a Canon Demi without knowing anything about it except it was handsome as heck. I had lots of fun with this half format camera, in the streets of Paris, catching random instants that were meant to be catched. Of the hundreds of pictures I took, I found some of them quite satisfying. 

Sadly, I’ve had problems with the light meter, and now half the pictures are overexposed, but it’s not as bad as the other half, that are underexposed. So I don’t use it anymore. Then, well, I scourged eBay and other such ghastly places, sold pieces of my soul to the Devil, and bought more cameras.

One of them, quite expensive, takes panoramic pictures, the aptly-named Horizon. Imported from Russia. I love it a lot, but I’ve had some troubles with it as well. 

Another compact camera, the Canonet QL-17 GIII, with a rangefinder (if it means something to you). Small, lightweight, and I had it with me in my recent travels… it was quite useful. 

This picture was taken in Paris… Aside from the Canonet and the Demi, I had another camera with me on my recent trip. A Medium Format Camera. A Twin-Lens Reflex. The Yashica Mat 124 G. Instead of using 35mm in metal cannisters, it uses mighty 120 film, in rolls. The pictures are square, bigger, better and lemme tell ya folks, that’s real luxury. 

I also got a Bronica SQ-B bigger and bulkier medium format camera, a disposable one with a very wide angle but made of plastic, a Holga (with polaroid back), a Lomo Lubitel 166b, a Kodak Duaflex and a Menokta. The two last ones are like jokes but with shapes of cameras. So, yeah, my friends were spot on about my camera collection. The question they ask me is therefore very interesting.

And my answer might interest you also. I’ll bring my Yashica Mat 124G and my QL17 GIII. Yashy and Canonety. These are two complementary cameras, I don’t use them to make the same pictures. I take instant pictures with the Canonet, but I take my time with the Yashica. The picture from Venice you see up there, it took me 10 minutes to take it. The right framing, the right exposure time, the setting…

I’ll also bring a digital camera. Maybe. Someday, I’ll tell you about digital and film photography and how I see the big “digi vs. film” debate. 

Canonet I choose ya. 

And Yashica I choose ya too. And here’s what I look like when I take a picture of myself with my Yashica…

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For this website, I needed a page about, well, me, and what I enjoy doing. After all, it’s a common exercice on the Internet…

My name is Joachim, I was born in Bordeaux, France on a 3rd of September. I work in Paris, France as a web & motion designer after studying visual communication, with a specialization in animation & multimedia at the ECV in Bordeaux. I learned graphic design, typography, illustration, motion design, 3D, webdesign, lots of things.

I’m currently working for one of the biggest online retailer in France, I create video trailers for the upcoming sales.

During my studies, I created and maintained the first Moleskine-based sketchblog of the personal sketchbooks I kept at that time. That blog, now dead, was featured on such sites as Moleskinerie, Boing Boing or Drawn!, the archives are still online on my Flickr. My sketchbooks
were then exhibited in Hong Kong (MoleskineArt.com proj:Exhibition, 2004) and in London on the Moleskine Detour exhibition following the lauch of the Moleskine City Notebook in 2006.

For two years I’ve also been enjoying photography, as an educated amateur. I’m really into film photography, old cameras, films, everything’s just great about it… I regularly post pictures on my Flickr gallery.

I’ve been active on the web for some years now. I opened my first blog in 2002 : Le Blaugue, par Joachim (aka Le Blaugue à Beleg), and it lasted until last February, when I decided to put it to sleep for the moment. I’m active on Flickr : joachim and Facebook, I have a Tumblr : joachimesque and a Myspace. I’m also on CouchSurfing…

So, you can see I’m creative, curious and open-minded. I might add that I prefer to walk on the middle of the street (when there’s no cars), I like to draw and tell lots of things, and I want to go everywhere. My next big secret project will be… making books! But don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret!

What’s nice with sketchbooks, photos and the Internet, is that I can bring it along in my trip! I’ll have some blank books, two or three cameras (and lots of films), and voilà! My trim around the world has already a more creative aspect, an artistic process… which I’ll be able to document along the way with the Internet. And what’s more, my microsponsors program is part of that process, as I’ll be doing a postcard for each day that will have been financed by someone…

Oh well, I still have some time to write in detail about my sketchbooks and photography.

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