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!

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.

Isaiah 40:31

A fun fathers day gift commission from a friend.

I haven't had a good excuse to draw type for a while, it was fun to work on!

Isaiah 40:31

A Farm Wedding

This was for a wedding at farm that housed (among other things) a kookaburra and a bobcat. They got a little shout out on the rsvp, because who else gets to claim that? I was super excited when the bride and groom asked me to design these, they were very open to ideas and we have similar styles so I got to go a little crazy and design a wedding invitation suite entirely with hand drawn custom type. LOVE.

How awesome are those vintage stamps??
 I can't take credit for that one, but i have the guy's name if you're interested!

Cannot get over this lovely combination of color and texture!

calendar card/rsvp info

invitation

dessert rsvp

type detail

my apologies. and hand drawn typography.

Hello friends!

It has been WAY too long since we last chatted. (Sorry Aunt Ruth!) Believe it or not, this has been a productive summer for me, and I do have things to show for it. I'll finally be sharing those with you over the next few posts. I have a few new projects that I'm really excited about too, so stay tuned!

To start, here is a save the date for a wedding coming up in december. They sent me the photobooth pictures and gave me free range in the design department. I had so much fun working on them! I'm in love with the pictures, the couple took them 10 years apart, and they look fantastic in both.

So here it is:

front

back

Everything (other than the photos) is hand drawn. It's a combination of wacom drawing, and paper and pencil drawing - scanned and cleaned up. I'm really happy with them, and I'm glad I had such great material to work with! Their invitations are up next on the to-do list, and I'm excited to see where they go!

A few more images before I head out- I like to make my friends pretty typography things for their birthdays, and then take pictures.

Thanks for your patience you guys, I'll be better at keeping you up to date on my making adventures in the coming months!

Misery & Happiness

This book is a summers worth of reminiscing about four years in Trinity Christian College's art department.  It's the life and true confessions of an art major.  It's an exercise in hand lettering, printing, and book binding.  Mostly it's just 50 pages worth of inside jokes and a giant thank you to five awesome art professors who made Trinity a great place to be!

Inspired by Misery for Everybody, a hilarious account of childhood. You should check it out.



The book is set up with happiness on one cover and misery on the other so that it can be read from either direction.

center spread, which some of you may recognize...!

A sampling of some of the pages that don't require too much explanation.

people who think art is fun

when people use thumbtacks in critique

living in a barn for 20 years

stories that start with "I shouldn't be telling you this, but..."

a 1992 toyota previa with 250,000 miles

art department potlucks

Abby and I gave these to Bakker, Ellen, Josh, Dayton and Rowley yesterday when we were out at Trinity for Ken Steinbach's closing lecture/reception.  They loved them!

Thanks for 4 great years!

Girl Party!

As many of you know, my sister got married yesterday.  I'm a little biased, but I'm pretty sure it was the most wonderful wedding I've ever seen!  It consumed pretty much all of my making time this summer, and it totally paid off. Everything was perfect.  I don't have have pictures yet (sorry!), but I'll get some soon.

In the meantime, here's some bachelorette party fun!  Much classier than Party City's options, in my opinion.


I made Claire a tulle veil and giant bachelorette button/pin/award, which she actually wore in public, along with the awesome sequin dress that I brought for her to wear. And the giant gold jewelry. The rest of us had matching (and much smaller) buttons.  All the pink and orange paper I used came from this awesome vintage wrapping paper.

Brownie recipe courtesy of Joy the Bakker

All us lovely ladies in Fells Point, Baltimore.

It was a fun night!