Spotlight Artist for DLP!

Hi Everyone! 

It's me, Martha, in my favorite hat. 

I just can't express my excitement for being a

Documented Life Project Spotlight Artist

for this week!

This month's theme has been "Making Your Mark"  (Doodles and Mark Making). Goodness, how can you not love that one!!

The art challenge this week is "Create a Custom Element" and the prompt is a great quote by Gabrielle Roth--
"Ride the Energy of your own unique spirit."

As I thought about making my custom element within the mark making month I got to thinking about what a custom mark or element could be. I first thought I would make a rubber stamp and go with that which would have been fun. I love making custom rubber stamps! Then I thought that I really wanted to try and make a unique mark that I hadn't done in a while.  So I rummaged through all my ancient supplies in search of this soda pop folded pen that I made at a calligraphy conference many many years ago.  I hadn't used it since then so I decided that the marks this pen would make would be my unique calligraphic marks.  By the way---ANY mark that YOU make whether made by a brush, a pencil, a marker or whatever is your own unique mark.

I love the quote so I decided I just had to make some word marks.

So I just started marking while still thinking about where my quote would go.

Sometimes trying to figure out the layout with lettering can be quite challenging.

I also added some water to make the ink flow and run a bit to add some unexpected excitement!

As you see in this one I did use a regular calligraphy pen and a Tombow marker brush pen.

I was thinking about what type of layout would go into my journal so I decided to try and find some interesting 3x3 squares to cut out that might work.

Pretty cool!

So I guess it's time to show you how I made the marks. I used different colors

of fountain pen ink. Did I mention that I LOVE fountain pens?

So, here goes!

Making My Unique Marks! from Martha Lever on Vimeo.

Here is what finally came out. I had so many marks that I loved it was hard to choose so I did two layouts.  The one on the right was rather "energetic" so I decided to just write the quote

out on the left using the Italic calligraphy hand with a Speedball C-4 nib with red gouache.  

The paper has gesso on it to make for a better writing surface. 

It was so much fun to make my own unique marks for this week. 

Just remember--you are unique so every mark you make will be uniquely your own.

On your mark,

 get set,

GO!

(I just couldn't resist that one! :))