Good Mail Day! (And Love Locks)

It's a great day when the mailman brings no bills, just good mail! Here's a sample of the good mail I received Wednesday. A fat envelope containing a pen and a fun thank you card from Laurie Doctor, and a fanciful envelope with a handmade card and note from Donna Hacker.

Donna's card had a photo she took from her recent trip to Italy. The photo depicts 'love locks'. She said all over Europe (and according to Wikipedia in the link above, elsewhere too) people are attaching locks to public fixtures, especially in romantic spots. Others come along and attach a lock to the same object or to the attached lock. The stack of locks grows with each addition. This locked 'bouquet' of locks happened to be in Verona. I was so intrigued by this practice that I Googled "love locks photo" and found many interesting examples. This may be a new form of graffiti.

Laurie's card has "Thank You" in chartreuse green printed on the front in her funky script style. So much fun to receive! The pen is going to be fun to experiment with too.

I spend a lot of time lettering envelopes for beautiful weddings. My mailbox tells me I need to send a few more gussied up envelopes to my friends. It's always so much fun to receive pretty mail.

Recent Calligraphy Projects

There are many young men giving calligraphic anniversary gifts!

This first one is ee cummings poem, i carry your heart. Because there are no caps and the spacing is unusual, it has a very different look.

I added colorful flourishes to bring the requested wedding colors into the black on white wedding vows done in calligraphy.

Because this is very personal, I am only showing a portion of the anniversary letter. There was a lot of text, and I was limited to size, so it's tightly spaced. Got the call Monday morning and had it out the door and in the mail Monday before the PO closed. Whew!

Ain't LOVE grand!!?!!

More work from Laurie Doctor's June Journaling Workshop in Louisville

With permission, I share some more photos from Laurie Doctor's recent journal/sketchbook workshop at Preston Arts Center in Louisville. See my last post for a few pix from my first day.

Here is Connie Newbank's collage - our final project was to make a collage of 6-9 equal parts from various pages we'd done over the weekend.

Here is Barb Beattie's collage.

Here is a photo of the lovely fruits and veggies that Laurie procured for our contour drawing exercises.

Here are Barb's contour drawn asparagus spears.

Here are Deb Warnat's contour drawn apples.

Here's another of Deb's pages.

Here is Deb's collage page.

Here is my collage.

Not really done in the workshop, but done ahead for the workshop, I decided to save in my journals the many four leafed clovers I find. I have some pages with the clovers taped over, but these were affixed with matte medium.

Here is what we were all there for - Laurie's exciting work. I for one hope to achieve something like her integral whole from various five minute sessions. Laurie's pages may be worked on for only five minutes at a time, or completed in one sitting, but they always seem to have such life. The contrasting letter styles and colors and weights all come together beautifully.

Here is Marilynn Swan's collage. 'Little jewels' are what we called the bright spots of color.

Here is Marilyn Fischer's collage.

Another of Marilyn's pages.

Patty Bertsch's tiny black and white collage.

I hope to upload a few more images if I receive more permissions/photos. If I've misidentified any of these, please let me know and I'll correct it.

NOTE: Laurie had work published in The Annual Juried Issue of Letter Arts Review, 25:2. Congratulations, laurie!

Laurie Doctor Journaling Workshop

In today's session of Laurie Doctor's journaling workshop at Preston Arts Center in Louisville, we struggled with blind contour writing and blind contour vegetable drawing. Mine was asparagus. Others had garlic, a leek, an apple half, a sweet red pepper half, and many more asparagus spears. It was HARD! Those tiny budlets on the tip of the spear were difficult to draw in contour. Then we were told to put connected lettering on the pages with the drawing. Mine asked the burning question, "What is the best way to prepare asparagus?"
Laurie knew the answer, so I included her recipe on the bottom of the page.

Later we added watercolor to the images we had drawn. As you can see, I didn't quite complete my color enhancements. We also added rectangular insets with detail images drawn into them. It was interesting to see everyone's work.

Here is blind contour writing. Rules: we had to keep our pencils on the paper, the letters had to be connected, and we couldn't look at where we were drawing.

Here is some of that lettering placed on the edge of a page. I was told to keep letting my letters get larger as I went along the edge of the page, and with that came some misspellings.

Laurie has been doing 'a line a day' for quite a while now. She says if we divide the pages into many smaller sections, we can easily complete a line a day. For instance, the edge-lettered page could easily have several other rectangles in various sizes to be filled in with a variety of lettering.

I'll try to update tomorrow with results of tomorrow's session.

Koch & Co. Gallery Grand Opening

Koch & Co. Gallery's grand opening is Thursday, June 2 at 7PM.

I am one of the artists being represented, but I see lots of items I'd like to buy as well. Good stuff! Come if you can!