Angela Porter

I’m a tad out of sorts today, just a dose of gloomy emotional weather, that’s all. It’s also beginning to pass on by too, which is a good thing! Even with the gloomy weather, I’ve been able to feel the touchstone of contentment within me, but my thoughts have been on shaky ground concerning art.

I was drawing last night, and this morning a different page, and lots of questions came up about my art style. I wasn’t feeling happy with my hand-lettering journey and what my ‘style’ is. I’m finding it really hard to feel comfortable with the hand-lettering I’ve been doing lately. I don’t know why that is, not entirely anyway.

So, my solution is to draw! Well, hand-letter and then draw, but hand-lettering is drawing letters rather than writing. So drawing it is!

Instead of popping words/phrases into my ‘entangled’ art style as I draw, I thought I’d place them on the page first. Then I can do the pattern stuff, repeating various motifs to bring some coherence to the whole design. Not sure I’ve managed it.

Instead of filling the whole space with lots of black pen work, I thought that I could use a brown pen to add just lines to the spaces between. I think I like this as the spaces just looked cold and empty before.

I’m still not sure I’m finding my way with this. I know I do get all flustered and fed up with my art from time to time and start to question myself and be quite harsh with myself.

Working on this, and talking my way through some of it in today’s video, has certainly helped, and my mood is lifting. But regardless of my emotional weather, this was something that still needed to be thought through to do my best to pinpoint what I was struggling with when it comes to including hand-lettering in my art.