Go with the flow.

Be. Here. Now.

My word for 2015 is CRAFT. I made a commitment to make art on a regular basis and Suzanne pushed me for weekly. Yikes!

Here's my first piece for the year, which I also submitted to Minted.com's Work of Art Challenge. Wish me luck! ;P

Finding the Warmth

My first artist's date per The Artist's Way: the climatron at the Botanical Gardens.
Why? Well, it's freezing here!!!
Loved all the patterns. Really looking forward to drawing some of these.

photo credit: Henry

Baby Announcement: Class of 2033

Not my baby!

Just baby announcements.

My achilles heel is stopping short. I can have a solid concept but I have a tendency to say, Good enough! long before it really is great. So I decided to submit to Minted.com's baby announcement challenge to see if "social design" would push me past my natural stopping point.

Step-by-step as follows...

mood board

sketches

drawing

inking

color palette

first submission

So... this is the point where I would stick a fork in it! :)

But I got lots of great feedback from the Minted community. Obviously, I'm a little enamored by my hand-lettering and was jumping at the chance to do this vintage collegiate thing but considering that the point of a baby announcement is to feature the baby... I gradually toned down the graphic elements.

revision 2

revision 3

revision 4

Final

Vintage hand-lettered 1-photo birth announcement riffs off of your 2015 new arrival being a future 2033 grad. Works well for your retro boy or girl!

I must admit, I LOVED doing the challenge! It was incredibly helpful to get input but it was also a great feeling being part of a community working on something together, so to speak. It was equally fulfilling providing constructive feedback to other. So yeah... I'm Minted! :)

There are so many amazing designs so who knows if I'll place but regardless, I think the process really helped my end product. Voting begins on Jan. 12, I think.

The Artist's Way: Permission to be a Beginner

Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant defensive hostility: "But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?"

Yes... the same age you will be if you don't.
So let's start.
~ Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

At a New Year's Eve party last night, a friend of mine casually mentioned that she had picked up The Artist's Way and thought of me! This is the third time that the book has entered my awareness in the last six weeks—a sure sign that I'm supposed to do something with it.

The Artist's Way has been around for years. I received it as a graduation gift 20 years ago but at the time, my artist was in deep hibernation. Like, really deep! Like, the book may as well have been written in a foreign language! And, I have to admit that I've never finished it all the way through but realize now that many of my own practices as well as those that I've prescribed for others who I've coached were inspired by this book.

If the book intimidates you, I'm thinking of boiling it down to it's essentials here and see if that works better for you.

What a perfect way to kick off 2015! 12 weeks of nurturing creativity! Who's in? If this feels like just the right thing for you and you want a little accountability, join me. This is my accountability!!! ;P

I'll do weekly check-in's on Mondays—for Chapter 1 on January 26 (...to give you time to decide/get book/get acclimated etc. to join the fun.)

Bare Essentials for Chapter 1:
1. Morning Pages: This used to be killer for me. Now, it's not. For a) I use my Moleskin journals which are 3.5 x 5.5! :)

If all you do is fill 3 pages every day with all the reasons why you feel wobbly and inadequate as an artist, it has served it's purpose. For reals. This a great place to contain your Inner Critic.

2. Artist's Date: If you need ideas, click the link. But simply and most importantly, spend at least 2-3 hours 1x weekly doing something you absolutely love, that brings you joy, that fills up your creative well.

3. If you have the book, pick any one of the tasks Julia describes for Chapter 1. If you don't have the book, do this one that has worked really well for me and my artist friends:

A Day in Your Dream Life
If you could do/be anything, what would it be and what does a regular day of that life look like. Paint the picture for yourself, use descriptive words! ;) What time do you wake up? And what time do you go to bed? What's the first thing you do? Where are you? What do you do for most of the day? Describe how it feels to live this way. Describe how you are in this life.

You can add a comment below—what you did for your artist's date. If you feel like sharing your dream life you can or simply write "done" if you've completed your tasks or "2" for number of hours you spent nurturing your artist child.

Happy New Year!
Until soon....

New Year Wish

Photo credit: Henry Lohmeyer

Weekly Word: Favorite

Next Word: Welcome

Christmas Crafty

So after a trip to the urgent care center for the 103.2 degree fever, we still managed some Christmas Craftiness. Well, at least the 13yo did. I watched. And cheered. Especially for the bead weaving.

Illustration Friday: Home

Well, I'm not really happy with it but whatevs.

I wanted to do hand lettering but I wanted the type style and ornamentation to reflect my home—in Manila, as I experienced it. Hence, the Spanish colonial "ironwork" and tropical palm. Meh. #volume

My mood board...

Type Walk on Christmas Day

Some lovely gothic type and embellishments—more hand lettering inspiration from our afternoon stroll. Photo credit: Henry Lohmeyer

Hand Lettering Practice: Sweet

Sweet Mood Board:

Next Week's Word: Favorite

Penmanship Lesson Courtesy of Martha

We had Thanksgiving dinner last night. I know, those of you who know me know I gave up all that nonsense six years ago, by nonsense I mean slaving away for days and hours making the perfect Martha Stewart Thanksgiving, by the book. But Henry's company gives each of their employees the choice of a turkey or a cheesecake so on Friday, he carried a bird home on the train!

So we whipped up a Thanksgiving dinner last night. Turns out that's possible! No days of prep. We started at 11 and were done at 4. Who knew?

For the occasion, I had to dust off Martha's Thanksgiving issue from 1998 or something. Yes, I actually had a subscription. Guess what I found? A penmanship lesson. Of course. :) So thanks, Martha. For the turkey, cornbread and sourdough stuffing AND lesson on the lost art of penmanship.

Nothing is wasted

That’s one of Jen’s “T-shirt statements.” You know, like the thing you believe with enough conviction to wear on a t-shirt. Like a bumper sticker for your personhood. So if you’re run over by a bus wearing that shirt, you would be okay with that thing essentially being your last words, hanging like a thought bubble—your own personal billboard for people to people to remember what you believed enough to put on a shirt.

Nothing is wasted.

... not my first graphic design internship where for over a year all I used was Illustrator.
... not my first job as a designer where I used Photoshop for 10 hour days and 80 hour weeks.

I do know how to use the tools. I can digitize type. I can use filters. I can make crazy cast shadows  using masks and alpha channels. I can blend textures to get the exact effect I want. I could take 10 years off your face, easy! And prep the file to print on a bus wrap!

But what I don’t know right now is how I want the letters to look and how to draw them. Because this.

So I’ll be over here with my No. 2 pencil.

The Gift

I’m really ambivalent about Christmas. Note: I added that link because ambivalent is one of those words that people commonly misunderstand. And I want no misunderstanding here.

I LOVE THE SPIRIT of Christmas. Adore it! But I am repulsed by the consumerism and use of Christmas as an excuse for people to mindlessly move junk around.

But yesterday, I got the best unexpected Christmas gift! It was a gift of such thoughtfulness and care that I get weepy just thinking about it.

Here it is, a gift from my dear friend, Sharon Derry of Secret Leaves Paperworks: the Speedball text book published by the C. Howard Hunt Pen Company from the 1950’s. Can you believe it?!?!

I have spent hours and hours scouring the interwebs for just such lettering instruction and here it is, in my grubby little hands. It’s a Christmas miracle! #believe

p.s. I'll share

This is the part where I suck.

Have you ever listened Ira Glass’ thing on storytelling?

BTW, I love Ira Glass. I just saw his show, One Radio Show and Two Dancers last month at Wash U. Totally see it if you get the chance. Love the segment where he talks about passion... and that if you are lucky enough to do what you love for a living you get to do it day after day, over and over again until... you beat the life out of it. Or something like that. I may be totally misquoting him.

I digress.

In this video, he talks about how creative people get into creative work because they have good taste. But, when you start making stuff yourself (because you have good taste), what you are able to make really isn’t that good. Your taste is killer and that’s why you think your work sucks because it falls short of what you think it should be. So Ira says, a lot of people never get past this phase because they quit, thinking, I’m never gonna be any good at this. :)

So yeah, that’s happening.

But lucky for me, Ira reminds everyone that this is totally normal and the key is ... volume.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

I think he might also say that it takes a couple of years to bridge the gap so ... you know, don’t look... until 2017, k?

Weekly Word

I've been bitten by the lettering bug and really want to master this skill. What better time to start something than with the coming new year, right? And what better way to learn something than... to do it. A lot. And, what better way to do it a lot than to say, in a somewhat public way, that you will.

So I'm giving myself a once-a-week prompt to draw a word, any word, and post it on this blog. There's nothing like the discomfort of being not good at something... yet. Right? To illustrate, yes, I inked "Weekly Word" eight times. I'm still not happy with it but oh well.

This practice is for hand lettering. I want to stay off the computer as much as possible and really focus on practicing the craft of drawing the letters/words. No digitizing, no adding effects in Illustrator, no colorizing, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, so this week's word: SWEET

Illustration Friday: Sea

Excited to jump back into Illustration Friday with this prompt. I was inspired by the idea of illustrating old fairy tales rendered in a more contemporary way, like this one for The Little Mermaid and a fave KT Tunstall song.

Holiday Hand Lettering Experiments

I'm trying out some hand lettering for this year's card.

Sunrise, Sunset

... and swiftly flow the years...

The days are long but the years are fast. And this girl just had her bat mitzvah this weekend. Whut?! There are no words that can capture the fullness of my heart so I'm just going to stop here.

Your Emotional Wisdom

So awhile back, I was working on illustrations for Your Emotional Wisdom. I posted 12 of the final collection on Fine Art America. Kinda fun to see them all in one place.