Long Village Studio

Just finished participating in an envelope exchange - always such fun to receive and I like the motivation to meet a deadline. Here are the two I sent out.

  After admiring Jane Farr's mandala work, I finally sat down to give it a go. Jane's work is stunning! I spend time on her blog and especially her  flicker page. (If you click on the title of this post you will go to her blog - but maybe you already know this.) Recently, she posted instructions on making a mandala on her flicker - just the motivation I needed to get to play. What a great way to work on flourishing. Being my first, I'm not too pleased with it - but distance does improve it - so don't click to enlarge, you will be able to see way too many flaws. Perhaps I'll do one a week . . .

My power point presentation went well. There was a group of 40 lovely ladies who indulged me to talk about my calligraphic passion. I did share one personal story that I thought I would pass along. So how important are letters to me? Well, my main consideration while determining our twins' names was . . . their monograms! Really. Since our last name is an open letter L, I wanted to be sure that the first and middle names helped to balance the monogram. So, I limited name choices to narrow or 3/4 letters - Roman cap proportions. My son was actually easy, we used Evan (which is welch for John, his grandpa) and Vance (his other grandpa). My daughter was difficult. So, we turned to the intern to find names that started with N. And we got Nadine Heather. Now, what really makes me chuckle is that at the age of 11+, I have yet to design a monogram or even have anything engraved with their initials! Also, my daughters first letters are NHL - yes, National Hockey League! Perhaps when I

The ladies group at church has asked me to talk about calligraphy at their meeting this Saturday. Cover calligraphy in about 20 minutes was the only guidelines - and what got me interested in the art. 20 minutes!   I decided to take this opportunity to create my first power point - my 11 year olds are teaching me how to use the software! So I have 32 slides.  20 minutes? Oh, they also thought it would be great if I demonstrated a bit . . . really? 20 minutes? Such a wonderful challenge! Since I'm also looking forward to teaching at the community college, I've made it usable there too.  I also volunteered to create the name tags for the ladies attending . . . so here are a few. I finally opened up my Parallel Pens - not even sure how long ago I purchased them. They were a lot of fun to use, especially mixing the ink colors by touching the pens to one another! So, wish me luck . . . still need to decide what I'm going to say during the slides :) What a great name!

I delivered this piece yesterday. Customer pleased. Framer had great suggestions for mats and format. This one had me doing some research at the library on Chinese brush work. I wanted the flowers very soft. The client wanted it simple - thus the choice of layout, lettering and grayish flowers. The client will be adding a photo of the couple at the top. My photos aren't great, hopefully you can see past that. 

My last post was about not getting a job, but then getting several leads. To my excitement, two jobs came about at the same time with a similar deadline. Both jobs were wedding quotes for a spouse as an anniversary gift. How incredibly thoughtful. What a joy to be a part of the process. Let me start with the job I completed first. The image on the left is of my layout piece on the computer - made this job go much faster than hand lettering various drafts! The customer approved the piece based on this layout and then a sample of my lettering. And here is the final piece: I was so glad to get this off in the mail right on time! This is an interesting quote - it was read at their wedding. I hope I will hear back from the husband as to how pleased his wife was to get such a thoughtful gift! What a guy!