An idea..an alphabet…an obsession

Lifelong friends are the best friends. Jules has known me longer than anyone who is not blood related to me—easily 40+ years. Life happens, but it throws you back together when you need each other. Which for us happened about six years ago. Even in middle school, Jules was an incredible artist—even more so today! Follow her on insta and see her wide range of creations she makes while sitting in a cafe or traveling around the world. 

A few weeks ago I was in her area for a Mobile Oodlearium, so we made a date for brunch.  After the normal catch up banter, we dove into talk about art. Every year around this time, Jules invites me to join in on the #100dayproject, where she commits to posting something she has created every day for 100 days. I nodded and reminded her that every year I start it and get distracted after a week or so. She laughed and said maybe this will be the year. As we were wrapping up brunch, Jules mentioned the idea of creating an alphabet with my doodles. I was intrigued! Our time together quickly came to an end and I headed off to teach my class. She had planted a seed! 

That evening I got home and I could not shake the idea of the alphabet. I looked at various examples of bubble letters and started playing around with Willy and Wanda. The first few were cute, but definitely unpolished. If you know me well, you know that I don’t like long-term projects. I don’t stay focussed and I don’t like having half-finished projects sitting out (despite having a dedicated art space). I worked my way through the entire alphabet with one set of letters, but I was not loving them. They were cute, but definitely needed work. 

The next day, I posted a few of the letters on my socials and people LOVED them. Everyone was suggesting ideas for what to do with them. Cute in a nursery… signs with kid’s names…monograms…posters…notecards…and so much more! Holy smokes! I had to make these letters even better. It had only been 24 hours since Jules threw out the idea and I was obsessed!

I found a different alphabet with big and chunky letters with a lot of personality to compliment the doodles. Again, I sat for hours and created yet another entire alphabet. They were crazy cute, but there was no consistency. I randomly selected a letter and randomly drew a doodle around it. I was using a boy/girl set that I had previously created, but I was not paying attention to how many boys and/or girls I had created or how consistent their bodies looked, etc. I was just having fun!

The next day I showed a few of the doodles to a co-worker and she fell in love with them. She asked me when we were going to see some of them around the shelter where we work. By the end of that day we had a plan for them to go up on the walls of the new children’s playroom that was being built. I was over the moon excited!

Panic set in because I wanted each letter to be perfect, reproducible, and consistent—with balance between the Willy and Wanda drawings. I grabbed yet another set of note cards. I needed a clean and perfect drawing of Willy and Wanda. With the help of a makeshift tracing table, I merged the drawings with the letters making they were consistent in size. I iterated and iterated until I absolutely loved each one! I spent an entire day scanning each one and cleaning up any imperfections. They are all set to be painted in the new children’s playroom at the shelter!

The next day a teacher friend asked me if she could have a poster with the entire alphabet for her classroom. I was in tears! So many people were loving this labor of love. But that also meant I had to digitally color all 26 letters! Fast forward to the next weekend and what started out as “I’ll just do a few today” turned into a marathon effort that ended with a completed poster and an alphabet that I am overjoyed with! 

I am so incredibly proud of this project and I learned so much about the creative process:

• Constraints really do unleash creativity rather than limit it.
• Iterating is liberating. It takes the pressure off of getting it perfect the first time.
• It isn’t cheating to trace parts of previous iterations that were successful. 
• Not everything has to be complicated. I created a simple tracing table with a medium take-out container, a light bulb on a cord and an 8×10 piece of plexiglass. 
• Sometimes you have to brain vomit ideas to get past your ego. Then you can go back and refine them into something special.
• Sometimes you don’t need to know what the end product is going to be before you start a project. I never would have guessed any of the things I am actually doing with this project. Normally my doodles go onto cards— not walls, posters, or coloring sheets. 

Until next time, oodle on!