Today's story is, in many ways, the story of how I became a chalk lettering artist. It all starts with this little board right here:
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| Right here. |
I was asked to doodle this board as something to decorate the outside of Paper Boutique in Montclair, where I work as a custom stationery designer. I have always loved letters and fonts and type so any opportunity I have to write something usually turns into a larger project than it was ever intended to be because I can't help but try to make it beautiful.
One day, our neighbors at Java Love Coffee Roasters inquired as to who had made it, as they had a chalkboard menu at their shop in need of a facelift.
I have always loved the aesthetic of the Upper Montclair coffee shop - the raw woodwork and warm, rustic color scheme appealed to me from the first time I walked in (their countertop is a cool, roughly-painted old door with a piece of glass covering it. I wish I had a picture to show you). So I wasn't surprised during my meeting with Jodie when she mentioned wanting to draw inspiration from some of my favorite things - letterpress and the branding on vintage milk bottle caps. DREAM PROJECT.
So I got to sketching and came up with this rough sketch:
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| VERY rough. |
How they ever looked at that and said "Great! Please come draw that on our walls!" I'll never know, but I'm sure glad they they did. But I could see the vision in my head, it just didn't translate well onto tiny journal paper. One thing I'm sure helped is that in the time that it took from signing on to the initial project until we finalized a sketch, I did a number of smaller boards for them, so it was probably a little easier to trust the magic that happens between pencil and chalk.
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| See?! |
The good news is that I have gotten a lot better at the sketching process since then. Though I will say that my designs for Java Love since then (the hotlists and seasonal wall designs) have not been sketched for more than a few minutes right before I put them up. I swear there is an abundance of creative energy in that place from all the caffeinated creation that happens there all day because it really just flows. Even on the night that I put up the menu board, the process took over and it ended up even a little different than how I originally planned:
Believe it or not, that part at the top accounted for about 50% of the time I spent working on the board. I really wanted it to be a perfect focal point. The rest of it was just filling in words and numbers.
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| Before. |
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| After. |
