Quotables

It’s hard to be sad and useful at the same time.

This quote comes from a snippet of dialog from an old Spencer Tracy movie in which Tracy was admonishing a young, beautiful socialite who was down on her luck and feeling sorry for herself. I offer it here because it’s a reminder that an effective antidote for depression can often be a shift of focus away from our own interior struggles and toward others. Or to just be of use in the world, in […]

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Without aspirations we are nothing but meat with habits :: Nancy Ellen Abrams

I read this quote in a recent article by scientist/philosopher Nancy Ellen Abrams on the NPR website and let out a “bwaaa-hah” that sent my cat into the next room. Love the pull-no-punches ideas from this author and this quote from her is both inspiring and a little sobering. And because I can’t help from spilling my guts about new hand-lettering techniques, here’s the deal with this one: I

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Be the Hero of Your Own Story

I wrote this line but it’s probably not original—don’t care, didn’t check. It felt authentic in the moment. I’d created the little flying dude a while ago after looking at a book of primitive African motifs. He represents some kind of hybrid bat/man in African mythology. So… bat + man = Batman = hero = hero myth = Joseph Campbell = follow your passion = be the hero in your own narrative. And that’s the way that particular rabbit hole happened.  

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Rumi-nations

This quote hit me where I live, pun intended. A “guest house” is a perfect and profound metaphor for the daily experience of being human and standing at that threshold where we either invite in the “unexpected visitor” or send him packing along with his freaking “crowd of sorrows”. Rumi crushes it again.

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Trying not to try too hard

James Taylor’s Zen-like lyrics to “Secret O’ Life” wound up in my head one evening while my sketch pad was at arm’s length. The result is what’s above…which was easier said than drawn, which is sort of the point of the song. “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time. Any fool can do it, there ain’t nothing to it. Nobody knows how we got to the

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“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainty” — Erich Fromm

This poster is a commissioned piece by the Dutch magazine Flow for their upcoming DIY issue. The lettering was hand drawn and loosely based on the slab-serif font Rockwell Bold. The illustration was hand rendered using Illustrator and brought onto a layered, hi-res Photoshop file. One side effect of hand-lettering quotes is that you’re forced to live with the words for a long time, so they can really penetrate

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In the end only three things matter…

From the last few posts I guess it’s obvious that I’ve been playing around with a more free-form, lattice-type, scaffold kinda thing. What’s different about this piece is that after I scanned the inked page I brought it into Illustrator and did an image trace. All the little awkward joints and intersections got smoother as if it melted together a little. Then it was just about doing some clean-up

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