I have taught the year-long course "26 Seeds: a Year to Grow" for over 30 years, sometimes in as many as four different cities in a year. Classes in some cities would create a keepsake book to give to me at the end of the year. I wanted to share with you some of the beautiful pages, spirit of generosity, and sense of humor from out of these books. I hope you enjoy them as Pics of the Week.

This work is by Jill Overley.

This is a page from out of a keepsake book presented to me in 2002 by the Salem Oregon Year Long Class. 8" x 7”,
So. The Naughty Pen came about in class when we were doing our own variations on Romans. By this point everyone and her pet canary knows how to use Adobe Illustrator, but this is probably more a description of how playing with a new tool inspired new ways of working with text. I had been experimenting more and more with digital stuff, starting with Photoshop and moving into Illustrator because letters rescale better as vectors and Illustrator invites me to jump right in and start playing around. Now it does - I began using it to trace the Romans we were studying at the time so I’d had my
apprenticeship. I thought it would be fun to base each letter on very simple geometric shapes. Furthermore, we didn’t have that much time so I figured “playful” would take the pressure off.

In Illustrator each shape one creates has a border that can be a different color from the body, any width, or invisible; each shape can be moved around within a letter (this is most useful in the initial design phase) and all letters can be moved about. Configurations and different color combinations can be tried with a click even after the various bits of a particular letter have been locked together. I also have a tried and true digital color palette that I developed a long
time ago - this is particularly useful in a brightly colored composition such as this. I think the most important thing is just to start - I just played with the shapes I saw emerging.