Laurie Doctor Journal Workshop Prep

We have some homework to do in preparation for the upcoming Laurie Doctor journaling workshop in Louisville. 1. Make some rubbings. 2. Keep some journal pages...text and drawings and/or ephemera.

Here are a few photos of pages I've begun.

Gallery Work

Delivered work for Koch & Co. Gallery today! Deborah Koch recently obtained a grant to open this gallery and invited me to participate. The work so far is stunning! She and her crew have designed a beautiful gallery space and she has contracted with some really fine artists. The grand opening will be coming very soon.

Some canvases.

Some framed pieces. The first is Prismacolor pencil.

This one is bleach.

Quotes on happiness.

Sorry about the bad angles. Because they are framed, I had to tilt the camera to avoid glare.

Clean the World, One Doorstep at a Time

I just finished this piece. It's another in my version of Yves Leterme's style, though he might cringe at the comparison. His words are often nearly illegible and are decidedly more artful. Mine is more of a bridge between traditional and abstract - a bit of both. I do love this style though. I love the layering and obliterating and the use of multi media, here watercolor, pencil and ink.

The lettering was done with Dr. Ph. Martin's Spectralight in sequins blue. As a final step, I added a vertical pencil line near what looked like an implied door and knob to further tie the quote to the background art.

Lucky Me! I Am the Winner of MB Shaw Stencil Giveaway!

I recently entered a contest on Mary Beth Shaw's blog for a set of her small stencils. And I won! I had previously ordered her new book, Flavor for Mixed Media, and include photos here of my booty (not THAT kind!) along with her book and the lovely inscription she wrote inside my copy.

I was thrilled to "find" Mary Beth in a Google search for collage and mixed media many years ago. Her aesthetic meshed well with my own; I loved her sense of color and her subtle layering of textures. A couple of years ago I was pleased to meet her in person at the Cherokee Triangle Art Festival in Louisville. Meeting her again in her book and on her blog completes the image of her as a fascinating mixed media artist and a lovely personality.

Here's a photo of Mary Beth's book and my prize package. The tiny work on the left of the book is the backside of her business card, and is a photo of one of her pieces.

This is a snapshot of the first page of her book, inscribed to me. (The blue stencil is a 'tip-in' that came with the book.)

Here are the three stencils in the prize package I won. Yippee!

Thanks, Mary Beth!!!!! I'm going to love playing with stencils again.

White on Black

Here's a snippet of a piece I did this week. It's McCaffrey's ivory ink on black paper in a copperplate script style. Since the piece was a poem written by a friend's daughter, I want to protect her copyright, thus not show the entire piece. The second stanza is not larger than the first one - it's merely a fool-the-eye of the camera angle.

See more calligraphy on my website: www.picturetrail.com/letterlady and my wedding blog: www.weddingletterlady.blogspot.com .

Lean on Me

I framed my new calligraphy piece, the lyrics to Lean on Me today. I like the way it turned out so I hung it in my studio near my computer. Under it in the small wooden frame is a piece by a calligraphy friend, Heather Lee - it was her birthday card to me last November. The Uncial lettering must be done with Turner's gouache because it looks like velvet.

My April 19th post shows the Lean on Me piece almost finished. The lettering is pressurized Roman in pencil on gesso and watercolor on watercolor paper. Below is a detail shot. I went over the lettering more than once to get it dark enough, and spray-fixed.

New Works - two books and a broadside

Here is what I've been working on for the past few days. I made two new books last week and added pencil lettering tonight. They are Greek Philosophy I and Greek Philosophy II. Each has one ancient saying lettered on its pages. The covers and end papers are made from papers I painted especially for this project. Bits of the same painted papers make the collaged pieces on each page. I did a metallic watercolor brushstroke across the pages before pasting and embossing around the affixed papers.

I folded accordions from Arches Text Wove paper to make eight more books. Four will be the size of these small ones, two will be larger with fewer pages, and the remaining two will be even smaller than these. I love having future books ready to go when the mood strikes. (Thank you, Rosie Kelly, for spurring me on to make more books! - See my March 29th post about her workshop in Memphis on my Letterlady blog: www.janhurst.blogspot.com.)

The other piece is Bill Withers' Lean on Me. I did a background in my version of the abstract style of Yves Leterme, a Belgian calligrapher whose work I admire. I've wanted to take a workshop from him, but missed my chance earlier this year when he was in Chicago. Coincidentally, Yves studied with Brody Neunschwander in Belgium, and I may have taken Brody's first workshop in the USA, which had serendipitously come about because of a friend's chance encounter with a friend of his in a gym. That was a wonderful workshop, many years before he branched out into a wonderful abstracted style of working.

I wanted text that would fill the space, I wanted the soft blue color. I'm not sure they're exactly fitting for each other, but I'm kind of pleased with the way it turned out anyway. (Yves' lettering would have been more abstract.)

I painted two more backgrounds and will letter something on them when the right words present themselves. I'm enjoying knowing that I have finished this one and have the others waiting.

See more calligraphy on my website: www.picturetrail.com/letterlady and my wedding blog: www.weddingletterlady.blogspot.com .