A New Passion

Whew! The month of April, 2015 was a big one for me - busiest month in recent memory, favorite project yet in Lilla Roger's Bootcamp that I am now halfway through, and changes at every turn. It's been an exhausting few weeks, but an incredible month for growth and inspiration! And I feel a new passion growing - Lettering! I first tried my hand at lettering in one of the MATS-A assignments, which was a children's book cover (shared a couple posts back), but this most recent assignment was a large (20"x30") poster design with lettering and illustration. Honestly? I could have spent twice as much time on it if I'd had the time to spend, and still been enthralled with the process. And as soon as I turned the project in, I was on to a personal lettering project. I think I've re-watched the skillshare courses I discovered 3-4 times each.

One of the most wonderful takeaways from the Skillshare lettering classes was the process of setting up a project - strangely, after 4 years of art school and 20 years of professional work, I had never encountered such a helpful process: the gathering of materials, the association, the many thumbnail sketches - not a rigid process but more of a roadmap. This has really helped me, as my creative process can tend to resemble a whirling dervish / Tasmanian devil mating ritual. As I finalized this poster project, which was a promotional poster for The Global Art Gathering in Brighton, I noticed how much the process impacted the final piece - and while this project was somewhat daunting in that it involves not only the class gallery, but it is actually a live contest with a winner (and a bunch of non-winners), I realized as I clicked "submit" that I don't care. I am overwhelmingly thrilled with my final piece; I printed it as large as I'm able with my home printer, so it's hanging 13"x19" in my workspace and it is gorgeous. It's one of my favorite poster designs yet. And I have my roadmap, which has already proven to help me in my various freelance projects, from a corporate white paper layout and design, to a just-for-fun lettering and illustration that I'll be sharing here soon.

Here, then, is my final poster design: