Calligraphy Flourish Friday - Purdue Boilermakers

Our family is pretty nuts during March Madness.  Even Sheba (the dog) has a bracket! Her picks are based soley on mascots, and no cats are ever picked to win.  Her bracket is busted now, because she had the Washington Huskies winning the tournament.  Poor Sheba.

Our Purdue Boilermakers are in the Sweet Sixteen! This is despite everyone picking us to go out early after we lost one of our leading scorers to injury.  Tonight they take on Duke.  I know they can do it, but it will be a tough game for the Boilers.  Duke's a great team.  We usually root for Duke, unless they play a Big Ten team (well, excluding I.U. of course).  My husband got his masters at Duke. We were newly married and moved from Detroit to Durham.  We remember those two years fondly.  It is a beautiful area.  I worked at a law firm in Chapel Hill. All the attorneys were UNC grads and huge Tar Heel fans.  We did plenty of trash talking around the water cooler. :-)

This lettering is fun to do.  I added the names of the players and the head coach into the letterforms.  I learned this style of lettering from Barbara Close.  You can check out Barbara's website here.

Here are some more "Textured Letters." This is a page from my Moleskine journal.  I misspelled the author's name. (Sorry Bruce!)  The correct spelling is Bruce Mau.  You can visit his website and read his complete manifesto here.

Whether you're a college basketball fan or not, I hope you have a great weekend.

Go forth and flourish, and Go Boilers!

....Boiler Up!!

Flourish Friday - September 18

As you may know, I love to make the circular designs that I learned in my guild's 2005 workshop with Pat Blair. I call them mandalas. I think I enjoy making them so much because the design possibilities are endless. I decided to keep a record of all the different elements I could incorporate into my mandalas. Keeping a record like this is something I learned from Barbara Close. I've taken two, separate workshops from her. Although the workshops were very different from one another, each time she had us keep a record of the techniques or variations we were learning. If only I would do this record keeping more often, because my memory is like Swiss cheese! I quickly filled the page with different ideas, and I could easily do more - and should!

I normally do mandalas that start in the center, and then I pull the strokes out toward the edge - like spokes on a wheel. These mandalas are different, and I think I will start calling them wreaths instead. I would like to do some very large. These are only 4 inch squares.

I have uploaded more mandalas and wreaths - and even some squares - over at Flickr. You can check them out here.

Go add some flourish to your Friday! :-)