Crossroads…

This week’s calligraphy prompt was the word ‘crossroads’. We were encouraged to create something inspired or reflective of that word and it’s many meanings. I had many initial ideas and found myself actually creating once I was on the road and in a hotel room. I created this piece with ink and glitter based brush pens, watercolor paper, and Copic pens of various tips.

I had a business dinner on the night I started working, so I created the background and let it dry on the carpet just inside my room door. The breeze from the hallway that poured through the crack near the floor dried the background very quickly. When I got back from dinner it was completely ready for letters. I tested the letters on another piece of paper and wrote it all out to confirm the layout. Once I started lettering on this piece I made a mistake…rats! I changed into my pajamas so I could stall and think about how to correct the error. I grabbed a wider pen and wrote over the mistake, which made that word darker than the others. To make it not look so strange I then used the wider pen to write a couple others words in the quote, so it looks like it was intentional. I think it worked out ok.

The great part about being creative is having to figure out how to overcome obstacles, barriers and mistakes. It’s like problem solving taken to a whole new level. Each level of your work requires you to move forward while not ruining the previous work. It forces you to trust in your own skills and abilities AND forces you to press forward through your fears. It means being a professional and working with the good, the bad and the ugly. Being a professional is not about knowing everything and executing it perfectly. Being a professional means knowing how to fix mistakes so no one knows it was a mistake.

As I read and reread this quote, it reminds me that each step along our journey is not simply focusing on trying to make only the right choices, it is about embracing the choices we make.