Last year, I took a hand lettering workshop by Kate White also known as @papergumboots on Instagram. I’ve been following her for a while now, so it was exciting to meet her in person! The workshop was organised by Eeny Empire, which runs various creative workshops in Perth and was held at St. Matthew’s Anglican Church. The Church was a small, wooden and brick building, which was the perfect backdrop for the workshop.
There were about 12 of us in the workshop and it had a fun and casual air to it. Kate provided us with goodie bags that included an A4 pad of grid paper, A5 pad of paper, medium watercolour brush pen, small brush, Pentel brush pen, Art Spectrum ink, watercolour palette, ruler and pencil. Last, but not least there was also a brush letter practice guide for every letter of the alphabet.
Kate started off explaining how hand lettering was essentially a more relaxed version of calligraphy and showed us the key strokes. We took turns watching Kate writing a letter before practising ourselves. It was a bit tricky at first and the brush felt odd in my hand. However, it didn’t take long to fall into a nice rhythm and we all soon sped ahead going through each of the letters. Some were more difficult than others and the trickiest thing I found was joining the different letters to form a word.
It was a lot of fun and near the end of the class, we got out our grid paper out to practice whatever we wanted. I started with some random words but gravitated towards writing “hello marie” over and over again! I was thinking of making it as the new header for my blog but I’m happy just playing around with it for now. It was such a fun afternoon and I’m so glad that I got to meet Kate!