lettering love: cutouts

Lesson 20 in my LetterLove online class (given by Joanne Sharpe) is about making random painted backgrounds both in my journal and on separate papers. Then, letter a word or phrase, cut it out and glue to a decorated journal page.  This wasn't one of my favorite lessons, but the exercise was interesting.  First, some of the decorative backgrounds I made using paints, collage, markers, oil pastels, stencils, brayer, etc.  These are all on bristol paper about 6x9".

 

I started out hating the background below - the colors were sagey greens and golds and browns and it was a muddy, blobby mess.  You can just barely see the greens peeking through after I covered it all up with a buff color and started over - now I really like it.

I cut words out of 3 of them and glued them on prepared backgrounds in my lettering journal (a strathmore sketching notebook).

 I really didn't like this background - it started with gluing down a book page and painting over it, but it was too muddy and unappealing for me.

This was my favorite result - using the map just sparked the travel word and it's certainly one of our favorite activities!  Also it seemed to make sense with this background - very tropical feeling.

This word would have been much prettier on a different background, but this is what I had and it's .... okay.

Even though Joanne's class is drawing to a close, the videos and lessons are staying up forever, so the class is available to start at any time - whenever it fits into your schedule.  It was great fun and inspirational and encouraging - got me to experiment with and work on improving my lettering options.  If that's something of interest to you, check out her class and the flickr group.