"In my day job I facilitate a lively leadership program in a rural Wisconsin county. One of the features that I have introduced to the program is that I hand-letter posters featuring quotations that are germane to the theme of the day. The posters are made on 3M post-it flipchart paper that is 25"x30" in dimension and I letter with felt tip markers. The participants in my program are encouraged to take posters home with them. That way I get to make more.
I practice a little lettering every day and that's what Reggie has displayed here. I was delinquent on getting my homework done for the 26 seeds
class so i brought a stack of my daily practice sheets for show & tell.
The dimension of the sheets as shown is 3.5" tall x 18" wide. Rolled up, a 3.5" sheet fits inside a toilet paper tube. The size of these sheets allows me to knock out a practice session in about ten minutes first thing in the morning.
For me, there is merit in the brevity of the exercise - because I can have some sense of accomplishment by completing it, I don't feel like the
practice is a burden. Likewise, this is not fine paper - the brownish/red sheets are coarse builder's paper from Home Depot and the white sheets
are a sulphite drawing paper from Blick. We're all perfectionists at heart and some of the mind games I must play with myself are to allow for
imperfections and accept them - they're there in abundance. Being okay with the lettering where I am TODAY means that tomorrow's a new day
and a teenie bit of improvement as I move along is the goal. I now date each sheet and the focus that the 26 Seeds class has brought to my
lettering shows in my creativity and the gains in precision of the work.
When I lay out these posters, I am doing about ten at a time. There is (er, was) a genre of signpainting called Showcards. These were advertising panels that were brush lettered on Crescent board using tempera paints. If speed was the essence, then they referred to these quick & dirty 'cards as "knock-out" showcards. They laid them out and knocked them out. I kind of have to do the same with my posters. They go down quickly, so the time invested, the (im)precision of the tool - usually a chisel point marker (Neuland markers are the best) and the quality of the paper pretty much determine that the product will be average by our calligraphic standards.
No matter, for it serves a purpose to support my program, the participants really like it and I get to letter as part of my job. I have a stack of fancy firestarter papers as a byproduct of my practice, too.
Going forward, I want to integrate broad brush lettering into the mix and have been playing with DIY alcohol inks that don't pucker the flipchart paper. What fun!”
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