30-in-30 Challenge - First Day!

Okay folks, this is the first day of the 30-in-30 challenge! For those of you who are reading about this for the first time, the month of September is a 30 paintings in 30 days challenge. In this case, however, I am including clay creations as well, that is small ones that can be done in a day; like jewelry, small statues, etc. Afterall, that IS art is it not? For the rules, please refer to this article explaining everything.

So, one of the suggestions I made to everyone was to come up with a theme for the month, which can make creating so many pieces of art in such a short time a little bit easier.  My theme is something different for me: hand lettering.  I started doing this (not knowing it was a thing called "hand lettering" at the time) last Christmas when I came up with the idea of creating miniature canvases to be used as gift tags with peoples names on them.  The idea went over well with the recipients so I've decided to do it again this year.  For this month, however, since I work so much outside of my home, I am making it a bit easier on myself by doing some "hand lettering", i.e. fancy letters often times accompanied with a picture or illustration. So, some days will just be a letter, some days a whole word or name, and maybe some days something else entirely. So yes, I am winging it.

 Last year I focused more on the background and just wrote the letters out as stylistically as I could. This time I have done some research on hand lettering and have practiced a wee bit ahead of time.  Hopefully it will all turn out all right in the end. This way of doing fancy letters is totally new to me, so let's just see where it leads me.

Posted at the beginning of this article is my first miniature canvas for the month. As you can see, I am not going in order of the alphabet. Again, winging it. I may not even do all of the alphabet, who knows? This was made on a 3"x3" miniature canvas with an acrylic background and Pigma Micron archival ink. I added quite a bit of glitter to the acrylic paint so it was rough going to use the pen over it to make the letter and dots. Lots of fun to make, simple and fairly quick.

I hope you enjoy this month of art, but I hope even more that some of you will join in with me!

And be sure to check out Leslie's 30-in-30 blog, which is the group I have joined in this challenge. So I will be posting my work here, and I invite any else who wants to join in to post theirs here as well. I will also be posting my painting each day over on Leslie's blog as well, and I will try to remember to include my facebook art page too.

Please enjoy and feel free to add your comments. After this month is over, I hope to go back to adding more drawing lessons to this page as I had been doing in the past. So be sure to come back in October to check them out!

As always .........

~ Happy Arting!