Fiona's first four for the year

It has taken me a while to get organised and sort and sift lots of ideas for this alphabet.  I ended up trying to set myself a bit of a challenge - to find peace each week.  I usually read the daily newspaper on my ipad, but three times a week we buy the real thing and sit in our local coffee shop and read the news.

I decided I would try to find the word peace in the three newspapers I read in hard copy - hoping that it might be there twice one day!

It has proven to be a challenge and I am surprised in lots of ways that I can scan/read many many pages of the newspaper and peace appears only occasionally.

I then chose to cut out the page on which I found peace and write a letter of the alphabet within the 7cm square.

I also wanted to use pencil/graphite - it seems a day to day material, not posh, not precious, not hard to find, and I wanted to feel as if peace could be all of those things. The choice of hand (font, letter style) was another challenge - I didn't want it to be fancy but I also didn't want it to be easy, so I thought I would try to write my alphabet in Neuland. This is a hand with which I am not at all familiar and I have never previously written a single letter in that style.

So you can see, I think a lot before I do.

Here are my first four letters.  Now that I have gotten the thinking out of the way they will become a weekly practice rather then pulling together four in a day.

 I am also liking the fragility of the newspaper in a way, and discovering that the graphite pencil doesn't go onto the newspaper anything like it goes onto beautiful paper! Always discovering...

'Miró's Little Toe' alphabet

Hello everyone! I am so proud of myself today. It's Tuesday 29 January and I have finished my first four letters for the ALAW 2013 project. It's quite a feat, because many things have happened in the past month. I'll write about them in my own blog right after I post this entry.

Miró's Little Toe alphabet

On 15 January I put in the mail my sketchbook for the Sketchbook Project 2013. I blogged about it, so I won't repeat the details here. I am only mentioning it because it was my work on the sketchbook that inspired this alphabet. Same style, similar doodles. It humbly reminds me of Joan Miró's work and I had great fun doodling out of character (for me). So I came up with a fun name for it: Miró's Little Toe.

a - A

As you can see, each design includes a lower-case and a capital letter. The palette changes on a whim, in keeping with the playful character of the letters.

b - B

I am using graphite, watercolour and china ink, not necessarily all of them on every letter. Everything has been drawn and painted by hand.

c - C

I started out with a large sheet of fine-grain watercolour paper where I traced the 26 7 x 7 cm squares allotted to each letter. Then I doodled haphazardly all over the sheet, without thinking about the letter-forms or their final placement.

d - D

Then I cut along the straight lines and shuffled the 26 pieces of paper just as if they were a deck of cards. Only then did I go through the random doodles to see which ones were suitable for which letter. A, B, C and D are finished. The rest of the alphabet still needs to be re-shuffled and investigated. More to come in February.

P.S. This is obviously my free-style alphabet for the year.  I wanted to start with the Peace alphabet but haven't been able to decide on the process. Too many ideas, some of them quite complex, involving fabric and/or stitching. I am pressed for time now that I am preparing my solo exhibition in May, so Miró's Little Toe was the easy way ahead. Please don't step on it!