My Wanderlust journey 2

Hi folks, hope your weekends have started well despite the rain! This week I have been catching up on some of the Wanderlust videos that I've missed and revisiting some that I've enjoyed. This resulted in me playing around with some ideas that became a mesh between Joanne Sharpe's video on Whimsical lettering and Beckah Krahula's video on Zentangling. I love all forms of calligraphy but I realised long ago when I took a series of Calligraphy classes at the school I was teaching at, that it takes a lot of practice. Now, I also knew that I wanted to enter a piece of art work into the PaperArtsy current challenge on 'doodling' having been inspired by Darcy's selection of samples last Sunday on The PA blog. See the link in the blog list to the right. So, using the epithet: it's just a piece of paper, I started playing in my journal. And this is the result!

I love this cursive linking style that Joanna Sharp demonstrates in the Wanderlust video but even more clearly in her 'Alphabet Soup' video (Craft Daily). I highly recommend her book too: The Art of Whimsical Lettering'. So be prepared for more blog posts on various font styles!
I started off with no real idea of where it was going. I have a cheap notebook where I just practise different font styles, so I selected one I'd tried previously and enlarged it onto a full page in my Strathmore journal. It has lovely vellum smooth pages. Perfect for lettering.

Now I had to decide on how to set this font onto a journaled page. I knew that I wanted to zentangle some patterns inside the letters and doodle around the name. But I took ages deciding on colours and media. Joanna uses copics for colouring her letters so I thought I would do the same then zentangle
on top of colour. But firstly I wanted to paint over the whole page. I chose PaperArtsy Fresco chalks because I love their colour range. No need to mix colours they have them all. My masking fluid had virtually dried up so I just went for it with the intention of at least being able to see the letters through the more translucent colours! Another great reason to use Frescos. They have delicious translucent
colours. I'm a wee bit addicted to scraping paint on with a credit card at the moment (as explained in
my previous post) so that's what I did first.

These are the paints I used but changed my idea for the copics as they resulted in too close a match. Now this was hard for me as I naturally gravitate towards warm colours: reds, oranges, yellows. But I wanted to challenge myself to use the blues and purples that I so admire in other people's art work. I love the colour combo here. Then, of course, I just had to drip a watery bougainvillea down the page. No idea why except it was fun to do!

Now, in true Emma Godfrey (of PaperArtsy) style, I scraped Fresco chalk Snowflake across the whole page, sadly losing my bougainvillea drips! Ah well. I enjoyed it while it lasted. Somehow I had to rescue my font from underneath all this once vivid but now toned down colour. So this is where I started using my fingers to blend the colours and the white Snowflake around and in between the letters. It looked vastly different from what it had been. The lovely result of just playing! 

Ah. It was coming together. I was really enjoying this. Now I needed to make decisions about which copics to use. I needed three colours in the same colour hue in light, medium and dark to enhance the zentangling that would go over the top. I ended up with greens. Not a 'go to' colour for me at all! But I was determined to resist going for my usual colour palette. 

Now came the fun part. Adding patterns and doodles with my Faber Castell Pitt artist black pens and my white sharpies and uni ball pens. I do have to be careful not to go too mad when I start doodling as I tend to overdo it. So I started simply.

Until, after much doodling, it transformed into this.

Os! The more I looked at it, I realised it needed a border. So what do you think? Better with border or without? 

I'm loving that blue and purple background! I had such fun with this. Thank you so much for dropping by. I would love you to leave a comment so I can visit your blog too! 

Have a great weekend! I'm off to Harrogate in the morning with my best bud, Linda Regan. We are making a tag book with the lovely, talented Sandra Botham! Photos to follow.