FINALLY FINISHED

A hallelujah to myself for finding time to complete a project that I started in an art workshop. First, I am a workshop junkie. I love to go to learn new things, meet new artists, and to create. I usually come away full of ideas to continue with whatever technique I had just learned. Then life gets in the way. And quickly, months pass, and I look through my stack and realize that those ideas languished undone for a long time. I've come to accept that process. I've found that even though I may not drop everything that I'm doing to concentrate on the new technique, I incorporate many of the ideas that I've learned into my artistic quest.

But I'm also happy when something clicks enough to continue my interest, as the chalkboard lettering did for me. Last week, I showed you the thought processes I go through to develop a design. This week  I want to show the final results. After last week's work, I enlarged my 6-inch high drawing twice so that I now had a 13 1/2 X 8-inch design to work from.

With a piece of white Saral paper* attached to the back of the design, I transferred the image to my final, I hoped, black paper. With a charcoal pencil, I retraced and shaped the lines. Charcoal doesn't rub off as easily as chalk does so I didn't use a fixative to keep the design from smearing (hairspray works well for chalk).

Voila! here is my finished chalkboard lettering poster.

*Saral paper is a wax-free transfer paper that comes in a variety of colors and makes it easy to tranfer designs to paper or fabric. It's available at JoAnn's, Michael's or Dick Blick's.