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Wow, was this past year as tough for you as it was for me? I felt unbalanced and a little bit like I was living in a tornado (cue the flying obstacles to dodge just like Dorothy did!). When those hectic times occurred, I would have to really boil down my priorities to the essentials.

As artists, we almost have this innate attraction to our craft, to our need to create. And, we all have something or someone that has fueled this passion. For many artists, the works of others steer the way they approach their own art. Annie O’Brien Gonzales, author of Bold, Expressive Painting refers to these influencers as our Artist Ancestors.

If you want to talk about a modern-day art medium success story, look no farther than the nearest brush loaded with acrylic paint. It was the medium chosen by famous 20th-century artists like Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko. It has put thousands (and counting!) of contemporary artists on the path to excellence.

The end results of hand lettering are fun, beautiful, often mesmerizing, and leaving many of us thinking, “I could never do that.” But you can! We have it on good authority that hand lettering doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, you can create easy to intricate letters from A-Z. Joanne Sharpe shares 10 hand lettering techniques, from simple to complex, that are all simple to follow and fun to do, excerpted from her book Artful Alphabets.

“Abstract art has been with us in one form or another for almost a century now and has proved to be not only a long-standing crux of cultural debate but a self-renewing, vital tradition of creativity. We know that it works, even if we’re still not sure why that’s so, or exactly what to make of that fact.” -Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock by Kirk Varnedoe