Folded Pen Fanatic: Laurie Doctor's Class (Day 1)

Hello!! (to whoever may follow and actually read this blog of mine!) 😁(and thank you if you do!)

It's been a short while since I've updated, as although I do have things to share, nothing that stands out right now. PLUS, the main reason I haven't been posting, is that I've really gotten into my writing this past month.

It started in late 2022, and this year, I've really been at it, writing 2 books, one of which was a small tribute to my paternal Grandma (less than 100 pages). I wanted to record all the memories I have of her/with her, writing them as stories. This then lead to another book I'm currently working on, of which I've already written nearly 30 chapters.

I'm also continuing with my poetry here & there too.

It's been SO much fun! So much so, that my art kind of took a back seat to it all. However, now I'm taking a bit of a break from that, as I missed creating with my lettering, etc.

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Back in May, i bought Laurie Doctor's "Speak to Me..." class, and for each lesson, she suggests setting aside at least 1 hour. Usually not hard for me to do, but I just wasn't making the time. So, finally, I had a free day to play, and that's exactly what I did. (Plus, I also wanted to make sure my desk area was mostly cleared off so I had enough room.)

OMG, Love, love, LOVE day 1!!!

The theme was Near & Far (focusing on Scale), and I had such fun with it, that I plan to do again!

(And I even came up with ANOTHER poem!)

Here was my "final" piece, based on the exercises. Not my best lettering, as I got too excited, so I'll be redoing this as well, maybe even lettering my poem, and/or adding more words.

I used my healing journey as the basis for the piece, depicting what feels close to me right now and what seems far off/ what I want to achieve (with a lot of overlapping because of the "journey"!) 😉

These are the warm up exercises. I measured off 1" sections, and we were to letter words without picking up our pens (continuous writing). From R to Left: 1) fine pt black pen, 2) white color pencil (she used a china marker, which I do not have), then colored over with w/c ink (but I used my Ferris Wheel press fount. pen ink), 3) my radius cut Parallel Pilot, 4) again fine pt black pen, 5) pencil with various leads.

*with both 4 & 5 we were to start with very tiny lettering and get bigger as we made our way down the page.

At first, I did my column 1 "wrong" by lettering my words backwards, but since it's all unreadable, no biggie!

Close up

*I then went back and added to it, as I love how it turned out, and wanted to "correct" it to make it better/more fun.

This time, from L to Right:

1) White Glaze gel pen, colored over with a light layer of my FW Press ink

(*I erased some of the pencil, so I could do my glaze gel instead, since my masking didn't work out with the white color pencil)

2) I added primary colors to this fine pt black pen column, and also darker "effects" by outlining some shapes with a black glaze gel pen. (I kinda wish I had used a more maroon color to match the other ink vs. red.)

3) I kept this column the same

4) I tried lifting off some of the dark ink to see if any of the color pencil would show through (which extended over to the last column, and I thought that was pretty cool! #happyaccident!), but since it didn't, I decided to letter over it with metallic ink, using a ruling pen (the word "Near" repeated big; and "far" smaller and extended at the top). I then used more Glaze gel pens, lettering the word "Far" tiny at the top.

5) For the last column, I kept the same, except for the few strips of ink.

Love how it turned out!