Happy Valentine's Day

I know I'm a few days late for Valentine's Day, but I finished my Valentine bookmarks this morning and gave them to my co-workers today.  Better late than never, I guess.

Because I'm in a year-long class with renowned calligrapher Reggie Ezell, I have been practicing the basic Blackletter hand as well as a few variations.  I decided it would be good to incorporate these into my Valentine project this year, and I can also use this as homework to bring to our next class.  These are a few of the finished ones.

These were quite a challenge to make, and I must admit that I kept only about a dozen of the over 30 that I made. One of my biggest mistakes was to forget the "g" in extravagantly, so the word read "extravantly" on many of them!   The white is Dr Martin's bleedproof white ink, and the red (which is a bit hard to make out) is Windsor & Newton gouache.  I mounted them on red cardstock and embellished them with ribbon, hand-painted paper hearts and hot foil dots.  

You might remember that I did these last year.  They seem to have been easier, but perhaps I wasn't as worried about having good letterforms as I was this year!

I think it was the year before that I made actual Valentine cards using Zentangle hearts.  It's fun to see the various projects that I have given as Valentines over the years.

I would love to see what Valentine projects you came up with this year!

Daily Treasures and some fun Apps

Where does the time go?  It's good that it's February already -- we are that much closer to spring!  And speaking of spring, this was one of my daily treasure photos that I posted to Instagram recently.  I was very delighted to see seed packets in the store and I had to take a photo of them!  Then I added to it in an app on my phone called Rhonna Designs.  It wasn't a free app, but it lets you do lots of cool effects.

 

 Last Friday the late afternoon sun was out, and I took a wonderful walk to enjoy the rare bit of sunshine. The photo below shows two trees glowing in the sunlight, but then I added a bunch of extra texture and color with an app -- I think the one I used was DistressedFX.  Lots of cool stuff on that app as well.

On Sunday, Chicago got hit with quite a blizzard.  It was also the first day of February, and my cousin made a calendar in which the February page was a wonderful explosion of lovely colors.  I used an app called DXP to blend our snowy backyard tree with her calendar page, and the result is this fun treasure!

 The photo below was of the full moon rising in the blue light of dusk, with tree skeletons in the foreground.  But I played with it in a fun app called InstaBlender and came up with this fun abstract.

 I worked on Saturday, and was perusing one of our books when I found this poem by Vachel Lindsay.  I memorized this poem in grade school, and haven't seen it since, but snippets of it have been floating around in my head.  It was fun to see the full poem and realize that I had remembered a good bit of it!

 Today it was time to begin work on my Valentine bookmarks.  Here's two versions -- both a little rough, but I think I can tweak the design and come up with something by Valentine's Day.

Wishing you sunny days and warm nights!