Laurie Doctor to Teach Workshop in Louisville

Laurie Doctor sent me information about a workshop she'll be teaching in Louisville in June. If I can swing it, I will be there. Her workshops are always wonderful. She's an excellent leader in these sessions, guiding you to your own decisions while assisting you in reaching the outcome you want to achieve. Her books are artistically inspirational. Here is the flyer. You can click on it to enlarge it.

Laurie - save me a space!

Nationwide Calligraphy Service

Don't you just love the internet, email, PayPal, free long distance, UPS, USPS and FedEx? All of these things make doing business nationwide a piece of cake! I have had clients in Texas, New York, Washington DC and various places in between, all facilitated by the services mentioned above. It truly is a small world now with all of these capabilities at our fingertips. Look at my website. See something you like? Email me or phone, and we can make it happen. Look at my wedding blog. See a style you like? Contact me and I can get you on my calendar. Truly, national service is just a phone call and a shipping service away. It's the way people used to do business via the Yellow Pages. Now they do a Google search. Or they get on any number of online shops and place an order. I do it all the time.

Our world is so much smaller now than it was just a few years ago.

Watercolor Artist Magazine

This is an unabashed plug for Watercolor artist magazine. No affiliation other than I am a subscriber - and sadly, my subscription ends with this issue. I wish there were a fairy godmother for my art subscriptions.

Back to the plug. The current issue (Wow! They are way ahead of themselves!) is June 2011. I am loving so many articles in it. I sat out in the morning sunshine reading it today. There is an article about Chinese artists, Trade Routes that goes on for pages and pages. It's fantastic! I absolutely love the image by Xiao Yang - though I do have a question about the masculine and aged look of the Tibetan woman's hands compared to her youthful face. (Maybe Tibetan women have a facial product secret? Or maybe they are in severe need of some of my favorite Windrift Hill Goat's Milk hand lotion. - Yes, another plug. LOVE the stuff!) The artist Wei Li also has one of my favorite pages. Exquisite birds with a mother feeding her young up in the rafters of an ancient building. Gorgeous! The artists are represented by some fabulous images. Worth buying a copy of the magazine for.

But wait! There's more! The next page brings us Japan! As in Japanese papers used in mixed media watercolors. Wonderful! I want to plump up my stash of Japanese papers. I will want to do several new pieces using the techniques Brenda Swenson used. There's one of hers that I love so much I'd love to buy. Bet that would put me back more than the price of a few magazine subscriptions.

Articles about using dispersions, en plein air painting and more complete the magazine. Is this one so good, or have I just not taken time to read the previous ones? Not sure. I'll definitely revisit the previous issues to look for more inspiration. But then I may become all inspiration, no output. What a dilemma!

Wedding Envelope Sample Packs!

I spent a lot of time this week lettering envelopes and making sample packs for a few places that do referrals for me. Love how they turned out! The cover is an envelope lettered in Spencerian with my price list inside. The back cover is an envelope loaded with my new business cards.

One of the pages in my sample packet. This one is not the best example of this style. It has a contemporary script name and relaxed caps for the address.

This sample is one of two sizes done on the diagonal.

This sample has titles above the names which are larger than the addresses. I like this option. I think it gives the recipients a bit more of a feeling of 'important guests'.

This page was lettered in mixed caps and lower case with pencil as a fun option.

See my website and my wedding blog for more event calligraphy.

Derby Calligraphy Can Be Less Traditional Than That for Weddings

A press release went out today explaining that Derby event calligraphy can be much more fun than typical wedding calligraphy. Derby parties are very big here in Louisville KY on the first Saturday in May - Derby Day. A good Derby party can be even more fun than going to the track itself (well, I like to think so anyway) and seeing the races is often easier on big screen TVs at home than from, let's say, the infield of Churchill Downs. Parties can include stick horse races, Derby pools, Derby pies, great food, hat contests, and almost anything a hostess can imagine. Roses and horses are traditional themes for these fun parties. It's getting a bit late for Derby party invitations to go out, but if they haven't yet, fun and funky lettering to the rescue!

This informal lettering style is one of many fun informal styles I can do that take less time. They can be done with colored pencils or markers which also makes them faster to complete than traditional wedding calligraphy done with a dip pen and ink.

Derby Day this year is on May 7th. Whether Derby party guests are invited by real paper invitations or by phone, email or word-of-mouth, the key is to make it lots of fun!

An April Fool's Joke on Me

April Fool's Day is special at my house. It is the day my husband and I met a million years ago. We considered having "My Foolish Heart" and "What Kind of Fool am I?" played at our wedding, but we resisted. It is also the birthday of our dog Max.

Today I set about making a new book. I'd been anxious to do so since returning from the Rosie Kelly workshop in Memphis a few nights ago. I had painted a piece of paper and had cut out the rectangles to be glued onto the pages. This morning I chose a poem to be lettered on its pages. I chose and cut cover papers and end papers. Everything was looking good. I was happy. I made the covers. I assembled the book, double-checking cover placement. April Fool on me! I glued the covers on backwards. The covers opened the wrong way. I used PVA glue which had set tight. No changing it. What to do?

I made it a two-fer. I turned the back into a two-sided book. The end papers were too pretty to not be seen when the book was open. So, two poems by Carl Sandburg grace this book now. "Mask" is the first part of the book, and "Choose" is the second part.

Rosie Kelly! Books! Fun! Calligraphers! Rosie Kelly! Books! Fun!

The Rosie Kelly book workshop a friend and I were headed to was worth enduring the rigors of the drive. The ride from Louisville to Memphis took 8 hours! Roadwork, a self-imposed detour and heavy, heavy rain caused delays. (Thankfully the trip home took more like 6 or 6.5 hours.) Shirley Sawyer and I met our other friends that evening and ate Thai food at a wonderful restaurant near Emily's condo. Donna Hacker's daughter was so sweet to let us use her premises while she was out of town. The nasty weather held throughout the weekend.

We only noticed the depressing weather when we were out in it. When we were inside the classroom with Rosie and other friends, or dining out in the evenings, the cold rain outside was a non-issue. It was all sunshine indoors.

The Memphis Calligraphy Guild hosted the workshop, with Rosie Kelly coming in from Chicago. Rosie is a wonderful teacher. She gives you just enough instruction and encouragement to let your own creativity take wing. (She is always around if you need advice, however, and her models are always inspiring.) In addition, there is an aura of creativity surrounding all the participants. What fun we had!

And what work we produced! I took over 300 photos, and when re-visiting them today I had a hard time in many cases telling which were Rosie's books and which were students'. Enjoy these photos:

The above are collage pages we did as our first exercises. They were a great warm-up to what was to come.

Some class books done on the third workshop day.

A classmate's book on day one. Yes! Day one! I think this is Mary Lou Sherman's.
(Can't forget the adventurous Mary Lou lettering on the toilet seat covers she snagged from the lady's room - unused, of course.)

Rosie's lovely abstract book. I want to play with this idea!

Another Rosie Kelly book.

And here are my books:

Here's my day three accordion book; the next photo is the same book opened. I did the cover of this book as one of day one's exercises to fill papers with lines and marks. These marks were made with a tongue depressor pen I'd made many years ago.

This is my first book from day one. Wonderful Sharon gave me the closure idea and wonderful Deb gave me the little square brads...round buttons just wouldn't have worked.

An inner page of the above book. This one has an attached quote done in black on black with Sumi ink. (Some were calling me a glutton for punishment for lettering the hard-to-see black-on-black, but I naturally preferred Rosie's complimentary term: elegant. When I prepared those pages, I had been working on wedding envelopes and used my usual wedding calligraphy style to letter this enclosure piece. I used other bits of black on black, black on white, white on black and also some white on white writing in this book.

The little triangle cut out on this page may have been the class favorite in my book. It was a sweet little surprise.

Another page from my first book. This one incorporates snippets of a page I did in Judy Melvin's Neuland workshop that I took last year in Indianapolis.

My little pink book. I did the lettering first then came up with the cover paper, a small doodle sheet I had in my 'stash'. Using it for the cover left only a little scrap left for collage elements in the book, but I had just enough, I think. When asked, "How little is too little of a piece of paper to save for 'stash'?" Deb replied, "When there is nothing left." We were making lots of jokes about our friends' stash elements and there was, I have to admit, a little coveting going on too. Peggy Kunkle had some gorgeous little pieces, and Leslie Barnes from the St. Louis Calligraphy Guild had to take first prize for the amount of stash* (*the papers we brought with us from home.)

I really like the way this delicate little pink book turned out. I selected two complementary quotes with an eye to the small amount of space I would use in lettering them in pencil in an informal pressurized Roman style. I love, love, love the way the embossing makes the pages pop in all the books. Unfortunately that hasn't translated too well in my photos. I can hardly wait to make more books. It's so much fun! (Read more about it on my website in the Handmade Books album, and on my Jan Hurst Letterlady blog. .)