Introducing the Paper & Letter Arts

receiving a handmade article, be it of paper or other material. It shows a personality that cannot be captured in the massproduced. It allows the recipient to not only have a gift, but a gift of heart from the creator's mind.

There is a spirit to hand-crafted papers that lacks in the gloss of UPC label items at your local shopping center. There is texture, life, body, and movement in the weave of hand-crafted paper that mirrors the spark that makes each of us an individual. Like receiving hand-crafted items, I like to create them myself impressing upon each one a bit of my own personal aesthetic and approach to beauty.

It is my hope you will join me in my adventures with paper, from the basics of paper making, to the arts of lettering, calligraphy, art stamping, embossing and other applications for beautifying paper. Journey with me into a world where aesthetic is a function and paper is the medium. Take a look at the papers around you and appreciate them for the craft that went into them. Note the difference between one and two-ply, and realize the same difference exists between buying something someone else made, and seeing things others have made as merely tools for your own creativity. You can have a thicker, more dimensional reality or you can have that stack of bright white and never go beyond its homogenous glare.

Join me next month for the first in a series of how-to articles on papermaking, where you will learn the meaning of words like pulp, sieve, couching and sizing. Where you will discover the joys human beings have had for centuries making their mark on the fibers of life.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic