Look what I found!

Hello lovelies,

It's the weekend! So I hope you are all having a wonderful time :)

I was down in Geelong today teaching Class 3 of Art Journaling Basics (Art Journaling 201), and this class is all about words and lettering.  It's a great class - very scary for some students, but worth the effort - there's journal spilling and learning to love your handwriting, or perhaps I should say "learning to hate your handwriting a bit less"...

In preparation for this class I was poking around the internet & procrastinating (as you do) looking for a bit of inspiration to vary my class pages in order to film them, when I came across a fantastic lettering related TED talk.

Jake Weidman is a Master Penman - who even knew that existed?!? His art work is beautiful, but what I found really interesting is the link he makes between using a pen and how a person learns and thinks.


Pretty cool huh!

I hope that this talk makes you think about using your own handwriting in your journal, and not always resorting to computer print-outs and ready-made ephemera.  One of the messages that Jake so eloquently imparts is that if you really want to absorb something - write it down, and because we are all art journalers, we shouldn't just write something down, but make it super decorative as well.

Here's a few pages from my journals that incorporate hand-written quotes: 

As an update on my class pages progression, here is the page I had prepared for the first run of the Art Journaling 201 lettering class:

And here is the one that I completed this week and filmed.  Some of you may recognise this spread from the "Fude ball Disaster" post.

The techniques are obviously the same on the 2 spreads, but there are subtle differences - I was less afraid to make my focus word really really big this time, and I've gone for much stronger accompanying images - less doodley and more image oriented.

How about trying to write and decorate a quote in your art journal this weekend? It;s great fun, and you certainly think hard about what you are writing! Don't forget to let me know how you get on - either here or on my facebook page.

'till next time

~Liz