Hand Lettering and Calligraphy Learning

Over the last few months, I've started working on my hand lettering and calligraphy skills much more consciously and posting them to my instagram as a means of accountability. I have almost 200 followers so far, it keeps me motivated knowing that someone other than myself gets to watch my progress!  (you can follow me @emilyvanhoff if you're interested.)

Here are a few highlights. Mostly just little sketches, but I'm learning a lot and having so much fun!

Craft Fair!

On September 6 I received a mailing from Trinity (my alma mater) that told me there was going to be a vendor market at homecoming on October 5. Naturally, I signed myself up with a handful of my snowflake pattern books, some earrings, and very little else. Over the next month I designed, printed, and folded like a crazy person. I ordered stickers and buttons and business cards and envelopes and packaging and tried to keep my brain organized. Nothing like a deadline to seriously motivate me!

I'm really proud of what I managed to pull together in a month, and I hope to do more craft fairs soon! I don't often work with actual things (my etsy site is all e-mailed pdfs), so having all these objects and figuring out how to display them and package them was rather heavenly.

Business cards designed for the occasion.

Stickers / envelope seals 

Lots of button designs!

The rest of the images are all the cards I designed and had printed for the fair.

Calligraphy & Hand Lettering Workshop

Last weekend I had the privilege of taking a calligraphy and hand lettering workshop from Molly Jacques. You should check out her work,  it's beautiful!  I took a one hour class with her at the Sketchcamp workshop I went to with Hyde Creative in Grand Rapids a few months ago. When I saw she was teaching a 2 day workshop in Chicago, I signed up immediately. It was everything I hoped it would be, and I'm totally in love with calligraphy. I don't know what I want to do with it, but I'll be working to figure out how to make it a regular part of my work. So expect to see much more (and hopefully much better!) of this from me. :)

There were 10 of in the class, we met at
Magnificaent Milestones, a paperie in River North.

The space was right by this lovely little park. I think
I know why it costs a million dollars to live here.

The next photos are some of practice pieces from the workshop and from playing around this weekend.

White guache on black paper.

new logo?

They Moved!

I designed a moving announcement for some lovely folks a little while ago, which I was reminded of when I got it in the mail today! Always fun to open your mailbox and have a piece your own work fall out. :)

On a semi related note, If you mail me a postcard, it will end up on my fridge. and probably stay there until it's my turn to move.

Sketchcamp Grand Rapids

Hyde Creative took an educational day off today at Sketchcamp Grand Rapids. My favorite workshop was, of course, the fantastic hand letterer and calligrapher Molly Jacques. She was super inspirational, I've never had any kind of lettering instruction and watching her work was wonderful and made me want to go draw letters all day long. :)

Here are a couple of my sketches from the day: 

Bella Approves.