As I was prepping to write about my month of painting faces, I realized that I never wrote about my month of Lettering Quotes back in April.
When I was originally planning my monthly art projects for 2014, one of the ones I really wanted to do was this lettering exercise. I specifically signed up for Lori Vliegen’s class with the intention of doing this.
I am really grateful that it had the exact intended effect.
I started small with writing in my notebook and unsure of exactly what to do. My first five were basic and warm-up:
then I decided that I was having enough fun to pull out my watercolor papers. Each morning, I would pick a quote that spoke to me, find an image that I thought went with the quote and I sat down to make them both. I then colored it with watercolors and water color pencils.
and, most nights, I used the page and the quote to write my blog post.
some days, I struggled with what to draw but I still wanted to keep going.
Other days I didn’t know how to change things around so it would keep being interesting. But then I realized interesting is not the point. Practice was the point. So repetition is part of practice.
I tried to pick quotes that really inspired me. I am not one of those people who collect quotes so I didn’t have an arsenal. I just looked at a few sites and made a pinterest board with ideas.
I then used that board each day to pick one. If I found myself spending too much time picking something, I’d force myself to pick the very next one I looked at. That usually motivated me to pick quickly.
All in all, I ended up with 26 of them. I’ve come to realize that a good number is 20. If I can do 20 of something new each month, I am making tangible progress and it’s good practice. 20 also means I don’t have to do them on the weekend if I don’t want to.
I loved doing these and had to tell myself that I couldn’t continue on to May. It’s important to me to switch them around. So for may, I did faces, but I might come back to this on another month of this year.
Most importantly, it made me less scared about writing, which was exactly what I had hoped to achieve.
On to another month!
Wonderful work, as always!