for the invitation to contribute to Ladies of Hive this week with this great topic.
After reading your post about your passionate pursuit of learning about the medicinal values of plants which I found fascinating, I wrote down a list of things that I'm passionate about doing - things that bring me joy, where I feel my spirit and soul smiling. It's quite a list and I don't get to do most of them nearly often enough, but when I do, I try to make it count.
Illuminated Lettering
So today I chose to divulge a bit about linework, sketching and typography. Since I was a kid, I had a bit of an addiction to collecting stationery. This got progressively better worse as I got older and then I made this stupid discovery into the world of scrapbooking.
Oh gosh, I probably could have financed a mortgage on that addiction 😇 I'm not even kidding now. I had a set of stamps made from my sketches of Madagascan animals after I went there on holiday in 2007. What a memorable trip that was! My buddy Kareemah and I had this on our bucketlists and it was freaking spectacular. That deserves it's own post.
Penmanship - Typography & Calligraphy
I have always admired (coveted) a good pen. There was a Waterman Pen shop in Cavendish Square that I used to window shop at (read: drool over pens in the front window and annoy the shop assistants when I was a kid) - I only bought my first real calligraphy pen when I was in England in 2001. I wrote this poem from one of my favourite books with that pen.
There is nothing quite like the feeling I get after doing intricate line work of a sketch or a word in typography and looking at it with satisfaction. These days I don't get to do it much unfortunately, but these are some of the ones I did over the last few years.
Heraldry & Mythology
A family crest I created from different elements of a family history - It took hours of research into heraldry and the family tree to come up with a combination that worked. I was really pleased with the result in the end.
Illuminated lettering is a dying art but I'll keep it alive as long as I can and I hope that with Lory's love of creativity and drawing that I can pass down some skills and tools to her too if she'd like that.
Many of my creations are mythological in nature, I'm a bit of a weirdo like that. None of these have any real use case I suppose other than being pretty and that I like them, but they fill me with so much happiness when I get to draw them, it's a rather magical process to me.
All photographs are my own of original sketches and linework.
I'd like to invite 
