few weeks! Whether you think your letters and words are messy, neat, or barely legible, and whether you like it or not so much, below are some ideas for embracing your handwriting and incorporating it into your creative practice. |
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The first prompt for this month is… |
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How will you use your handwriting to lead your creativity this week? |
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- Take inspiration from a poem or story you've written. This can be recent work or something you wrote years ago. Focus on a line or paragraph and use that as inspiration for your piece. You can include an excerpt of the text or interpret it only with visuals. There are some talented writers in this group so maybe this idea will connect with you! :)
- Use words to create an image like this teacup, this shoe, this piece inspired by knitting, this artist painting, and this self portrait.
- Make your handwriting the focal point. Experiment with different mediums, sizes, layouts, and styles. Examples: black and white, loose and messy.
- Layer. Add layers of more words, photos, marker, paper, paint, pastels. Create a collage or mixed media piece. Manaz Raiszadeh creates amazing pieces layering text and more-- watch her in action here and here. More layered examples here.
- Utilize negative space and colors Inspiration from eL Seed: multi color, blues
- Write words in other languages. Explore the way lines and shapes are used in other cultures and parts of the world.
- Use different forms of your handwriting: cursive, print, your capital and lowercase letters, write with your eyes closed, use your best penmanship and messy scrawls.
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- Fill an entire page with one letter or word.
- Try hand lettering, the art form of drawing letters. Here are some examples to get the ideas flowing. This graphic shows different techniques (click the link on the pin for a detailed blog post for beginners) and here are some layout ideas (click this link for a more advanced tutorial.)
- Try brush lettering or calligraphy. Use brush pens and calligraphy pens, see how they feel.
- Fill in different spaces with your handwriting: within an image, in between the lines, in the negative space, in empty spaces.
- Cover pages with your writing then tear it up and rearrange everything. Add colors, paint, other cut out words or images.
- Experiment with letters and shapes. Here's something round and something wavy.
- Use water & color. Write something out using a brush dipped in water. Make sure it's wet enough so that it doesn't dry immediately. Go back and add ink or watercolors to the water marks and watch the letters appear. Play with mixing colors too!
- And just for fun, here's a graphology infographic Do you find any of these to be true of you and your handwriting?
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SNAIL MAIL SWAP & INSPIRATION |
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Thank you to those of you who signed up for the snail mail swap! Your swap matches will be sent out to you today! If you don't see anything in your inbox by the end of the day, please let me know so I can make sure you get the info you need! Whether you're joining in or not, I wanted to share some snail mail inspiration--you can use it now, save it for the future, or it might also spark some ideas for you about our current prompt! |
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Happy National Card & Letter Writing Month! :)
Talk to you soon, |
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