New to art journaling? Curious about this fun papercraft? Then join me for a series on Art Journaling Prompts, where I share a few of my art journaling ideas and tricks.
Art Journaling Prompt: Creating a Lettering Sampler
This weekend, I played with alphabet lettering in my art journal—a combination of letter stencils and doodled letters. Add colored pens and you’ve got a fun, relaxing Lettering Sampler!
Art Journaling Writing
I’m a word person, for sure, but very often I like to relax with my art journal and not have to think of something to write. This weekend, I wanted to take some time to just let my hand move across the page without trying to *write* something insightful.
(You know how, when you’re on hold on the phone, and you absently doodle letters onto scrap paper? That’s how I wanted to feel. Without the being-on-hold part, of course.)
The other fun thing is that letters—besides their ability to mix and mingle and form sentences and thoughts and ideas—is that they are also gorgeous graphic elements in their own right. Ever looked at Chinese, Russian, Hebrew or Arabic writing? Even when we can’t recognize the letters (or characters), we notice there is something elegant and beautiful about them.
Planning Your Relaxing Art Journaling Page
Despite wanting a relaxing activity, I am still Type A enough to plan out the spacing of the letters on my pages. You may be someone who actually is relaxed and if so, I wish I could borrow some of that sometime. But just so you know, you can plan your lettering too. 🙂
Twenty-six letters means 13 on each page, so a few visual notes helped to sort out which letters went on which page. Then I could consider the positioning and see which letters I wanted traced, and which ones I wanted to draw. I kept a balance of wide letters (like “m”, “w”) and thin letters (“i”, “l”) so I wasn’t using only the wide stencils for the wide letters and taking up too much room.
I also planned overlaps between some of the letters so they could all fit. Then I stenciled or drew the first and last letter on each page to make sure I had space, and began filling in from there.
Tip: I just thought of something else—you could fill an entire page with different varieties of a single letter, rather than the whole alphabet. You could do upper case, lower case, wide, thin, short, tall, plain and embellished versions of—say, the letter M.
Art Journaling Letter Stencils
I’ve mentioned before that I love my alphabet stencils. These are chipboard stencils I got ages ago, and you could probably pick up a similar set at the office supply store. For some of the letters, I traced around just the letter shape; with others, I traced the outer square shape of the stencil, too.
Art Journaling Pens
I drew with pen right onto the paper. Doing a first go with pencil makes me feel like I’m taking it too seriously. 🙂 I used my brown fine-tip Sharpie pen to trace the letters, then trace again to get a double or triple line. The double lines are to cover up any missed connections on the stencil tracing and to give a fuller, more casual look.
I colored in some letters and re-traced others with Distress Markers. Because the Sharpie is waterproof, it won’t smear with the Distress Markers.
Here’s another peek at the colored page:
Ready to try out this art journaling prompt? Grab some stencils and pens and have a go!
Happy Monday!
Intrigued by art journaling? You might check out my Art Journaling with Gelatos online workshop, available at Creative Workshops. It’s over 3 hours of video demonstration, featuring 15 art journaling prompts and techniques with Faber-Castell Gelatos, plus design tips and writing tricks. Hope to see you there!
