A highlight of my April was the completion of the first draft of my comic’s storyboard (in my last letter I was working on it and giving you a peek into my process :)). Yay!! Now I’m waiting for feedback from my editor. In the meantime I’m going to experiment with the final style for the comic – and work on more stories with Loukoum & co. that I can pitch to my publisher. But first, I’ve started a little side project 😁.
Art in April: hand-lettering
For a while now I’ve been thinking about designing a kind of logo for this letter – to use as a thumbnail here on the blog, and for promoting the letter on social media and with a postcard (or several). At the end of March I finally started something! Here’s what it looks like at the time of writing:
And on with a little behind-the-scenes :)
My first studies, playing around with ideas / style / composition:
At some point I thought I needed some more context and guidance on lettering, beyond just visual inspiration. I watched several courses, and I got something out of each of them! I’m not including links to these courses as they’re on Skillshare, who have on a subscription model that I obviously can’t recommend. But I’d like to mention the artist-teachers: Kristen de Palma (she also does murals! something I’ve been dreaming of for ages 😊), Chris Piascik, Gia Graham and Martina Flor ❤️.
More studies, including for a postcard design (the logo would be on the back side):
Starting with the detailed sketch – on paper, as recommended by Kristen de Palma:
I want to practice with purely analogue lettering, probably starting with single-word designs. But for this project I decided to rather go on digitally (using Krita and my Wacom Companion 2 tablet), in order to be able to move and reshape letters more easily:
As you can guess from the first picture, I’m not quite happy with the style yet, so I’m going to keep experimenting – and then add some decorative elements like leaves, maybe some flowers, maybe some stars or a moon, and maybe another animal (a black cat?). So stay tuned!
From my camera roll: trees and buds
I’m going for morning walks again (doing “Nordic walking” to exercise my broken/repaired hip), and it’s spring, so I’ve taken lots of photos of nature!
My favourite is this close-up of a bud / start of a leaf on which I spotted this absolutely tiny snail 😊!
Another close-up on the first flower buds on one of our apple trees 😊:
And a triptych of beautiful trees (including the mirabelle tree I already mentioned in a previous letter :)):
I had a lot more, and also a night-time photo of the “Easter bonfire” we attended (similar to the Midsummer bonfire… but on Holy Saturday or Easter Sunday – handy for getting rid of the leftover branches from pruning trees and shrubs at the end of winter), but this letter is already getting too long 😅️. I’m still thinking (or rather, thinking again) about making little booklets (“zines”) with these photos, at least in digital form (which would be available to download for free from this website), and perhaps in print too. So many ideas, so little time!
Inspiration: alebrijes
One of my motivations for travelling to Mexico was to see alebrijes “in real life” – fantasy creatures in psychedelic colours! They got (a bit) well-known through the Disney-Pixar animation film “Coco”. I personally did not see the film (yet :)); I first heard of alebrijes and Oaxaca folk art through Abigail Brown, a British artist I follow on Instagram, who collects folk art and sometimes shares pictures of her treasures.
In Mexico I learnt that alebrijes are a relatively recent phenomenon (from the 1930s), whose origins lie not in an ancestral tradition but in the work of a specific artist, Pedro Linares. Also, there are two more or less distinct traditions: one of papier-mâché sculptures in Mexico City (initiated by Pedro Linares, who was already working in this traditional medium, cartonería), and the other of copal wood sculptures in the Oaxaca region (influenced by Linares’s creations, adapted to a local, traditional craft).
In Mexico City, we saw an exhibition of papier-mâché alebrijes on Reforma alley (mostly in passing, from the tourist bus, so I don’t have any good photos 😅):
They had taken part (before we arrived) in a street parade, and I think in a contest whose winner had the honours of an exhibition space on the main square, the Zócalo. I love that one! Not least because, in addition to the main creature, there’s a second one on the tip of its (toad’s? chameleon’s?) tongue!
In Oaxaca I saw various stalls with sculptures at a craft market, but in a bit of a rush and I didn’t take any photos because I had planned to return later (to buy a few small pieces). But then I got ill and I was unable to 🥲. Still, as I was feeling a bit better and before I got a lot worse, I bought these two small sculptures during an evening walk. I almost didn’t “waste time” going over to the stall in a little courtyard, as I thought I’d go to the market the next day… I’m happy I did go in the end though! ✨
That’s it for this month!
As always, if there’s anything you would like to ask, something you would like to read about in the next letter, or anything really – send me an email at hello@reinekurth.com! It would be lovely to hear from you 😊.
With love,
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