For the OP's intended use, encrypting just the home directory should be more than adequate, perhaps even overkill. Under most circumstances, encrypting an entire boot disk is unnecessary and even undesirable.

I should mention that Mac OS's built-in Disk Utility allows the creation of fixed or variable sized disk images with AES-128 or AES-256 encryption. These images may be placed anywhere on any disk, and once mounted, are visible as a volume in which any number of files or directories may be stored.