Numbering my Week – Art Journal Page

This week’s Documented Life Project prompt was to use numbers related to your week.  As I am about to move house and have a lot going on, however, I did not have time in which to gather up the numbers from my week and then create a page around them in my art journal.  Instead I decided to just think of numbers pertaining to things that are going on in my life right now, whether confined to this week or not.  Short on time, I decided to create a straightforward background: handwritten numbers, coloured with cheap watercolour paint, to form a sort of patchwork.  Then I simply used black ink to write about the relevant numbers.  It’s all pretty self-explanatory.

This was another opportunity to improve my typography but, as you can see, it was an opportunity I didn’t take.  That is still just my own handwriting with the downstrokes gone back over to create some thickness.  Thankfully my handwriting is legible and fairly attractive but I really must find the time to work on different fonts.

I used to own a calligraphy pen.  I had it for years, since my early teens.  When we were packing up all of our belongings to relocate from Scotland to the US, it did not make the cut because I had not used it in almost two decades.  I have no idea why I thought sacrificing a single pen was going to make much difference to my shipping load but I guess I was just in the zone of being ruthless and using strict criteria to determine what was happening to each item in the house.  I had never gotten the hang of calligraphy.  The first thing I tried writing, back when I was 13, went wrong because of my poor spacing.  So instead of an encouraging motto to readers and writers, I ended up with a piece of vellum that stated that “the penis mightier than the sword”.  That pretty much set the tone for my aptitude with calligraphy.  Maybe I could have been making good use of that pen now had I kept it and kept trying.  But I didn’t.  So I just need to try and find the time to work on my penmanship and experiment with a writing style other than my own usual handwriting.