Fail

One of my hobbies is making word art.  I LOVE making art out of words!  This weekend, while I was listening to General Conference (click here if you don't know what that is), I spent a good 10 hours just sitting and working on this:  

This post was intended to be a tutorial, but I failed.  So now it gets to be a slice of humble pie and a tall glass of lesson learned.  You'll see in a minute why this is a failure.  First, let me walk you through what I'm doing here. 

This is a 16x20 canvas.  You can buy them in a 3 pack at most department stores for 5 bucks or so. I wanted it to say, "God our strength will be, Press Forward ever, called to serve our King."  This is a line from a popular hymn in my church, and the anthem of those who choose to serve missions.  Since my boys are planning on serving missions when they are old enough, I wanted to display these words in a prominent place in our house. 

I am not skilled at free styling my own words yet, so I got on the computer and picked a couple fonts that I liked.  I played around with the sizes a little.  I wanted the "Press Forward" part to be big block letters.  I never really found a font for those words that I liked.  So I finally decided to measure out out the space and draw the block letters myself.  (block letters are easy)

When I finally got the lettering the right size, I printed them out, cut them out and taped them to my canvas.  (pictured above.)

I have to admit that I was so excited to get to the painting of this project, that I didn't take many pictures.  Now I'm kind of glad.  My humble pie is already a big enough slice.  Let's not make it bigger.

Anyway, after I taped the lettering onto my canvas, I just traced around them lightly with a pencil.  Once I could see the basic outline, it was easier to fill in the spaces with the loops and the twirls.  And then once I got it penciled in, I untaped everything, measured off my block letters, and drew them in lightly with the pencil too.

Finally, I could get to the painting, which, we all know, is the best part. Here it is half way done.  (Can you see my major mistake?)

Honestly, there is not much of a tutorial to give from this point on.  I painted it the colors I wanted, following my pencil lines.  I used an extra small brush for the skinny lines and a fat brush for the bigger lines. In the picture below, it's still not quite done.  I still want to paint the bottom line a darker color like maroon.  BUT, this is the point where I realized my major mistake.  Can you see it?  I didn't see it.  Not even the 20 or so times I wondered into my craft room just so I could admire it.  I didn't notice until I got this text from my sister-in-law:  "Ok, I don't get it.  Why did you spell it foward instead of forward?"  (how precious.  She thought I did it on purpose!)

I am cringing.  Can you feel me cringing?  Oh. Holy. Cow.  I totally spelled forward wrong and didn't even notice.  I think what hurts the most about all this is that I pride myself on my correct use of grammar.  I proudly say that I am a student of the English language, that I love grammar and punctuation and reverence it.  I gripe about the grammatical mistakes I find that pass into print, and I roll my eyes and say things like "kids these days" when I see the incorrect use of to, two, or too.  Sigh. 

Humble Pie time.  I feel like an idiot.  But I'm trying not to.  Everyone makes mistakes.  And since my kids have been frustrated about their mistakes in the past, I made sure to call them over and point out my big mistake so they would see that Mom messes up, cleans it up, and moves on. 

I think I can fix this.  I will try.  That will be another post.  Today, I failed.  But I'm going to see it as a beautiful failure. 

Moral of the story:  if you try this project, and I really think you should, make extra sure that everything is right before you start painting.  Painting it is the fun part, but if you are painting on faulty lines, then you're doomed to repeat the process later.  That's where I am.