[Webinar Recording] Joy Breaks with Lorraine Wilson: Lettering and Doodling

Lorraine Wilson Joy Davis Phinney Foundation

On May 4, we began our monthly dose of joy as Lorraine Wilson led us on the first of many “Joy Breaks” we’ll be taking this year. It was exactly what we needed, and we’re so grateful to Lorraine for offering these to our community.

Below you will find the recording, show notes, and resources you may want to check out to create your own joy breaks or use with us during our next session. If you’re just learning about these joy breaks now, head over here to register and join us on June 1.

You can read the transcript below. To download the webinar transcript, click here.

Mel Dizon, (Director of Education, Davis Phinney Foundation):
Hello everybody. And welcome to the very first Davis Phinney Foundation Joy Break. Let me introduce Lorraine. Lorraine Wilson is one of our Davis Phinney Foundation ambassadors, among many, many other things. A professor, an exerciser, a joy promoter, all of the things. And we are so grateful to you, Lorraine for doing this with us today. And for many days to come this year yeah, take it away. I’m excited to do what we’re doing today.

Lorraine Wilson (Ambassador, Davis Phinney Foundation):
Well, thank you, Mel. And everybody who is here it’s very exciting to me because I love thinking about joy and relaxing in joy and sharing joy and my very favorite quote, a simple two words, if you walk in my house, it’s written on a plaque right there in the foyer. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “scatter joy.” So that’s what we’re trying to do. And part of this is just so fun that I don’t want you to think “I have to be an expert.” People, I’m not an expert at this. It’s just, I really find relaxation, stress management, and just sheer joy in the joy of lettering and doodling. And you can get more serious and paint. I can do that too, but we’re gonna start with some fun things. I’m going to make sure that my camera will work for us. But before I do, I did wanna start with one little thing and I won’t read it all, but this is a book, “A healthier, happier you.” Who wants that?

Me. I do. So, this says be creative. I used to love coloring when I was a child. Do you remember how proud you felt when your drawing was posted on the fridge? You were giving a piece of yourself to someone, and they accepted it. As adults, it’s harder sometimes to find outlets for our creativity because people shut us down if we’re not an expert and the product is not beautiful. Well, I like to explore ways to express myself and my creativity and on and on we go. And so that’s what we’re going to do. And we’re gonna start with this simple lettering, because you guys all learned how to print and do cursive. I hope the kids are still learning cursive. Let’s see if I can make my camera work here. All right. Share screen. You should be seeing something that says ignite joy through creativity.

Good. Let me get this little cable out of your way. That better? Yes. Okay. Well, the first thing we’re going to do are some warmups. Now just as the song was getting us moving and by the way, we’ll explain that song. If you didn’t see the first little mini joy break April 2nd, but we’re going to do some creative warmups, some drawing warmups. I hope you have a piece of paper. If you don’t, you can actually do this in the air with your arms, by going counterclockwise, clockwise, drawing circles on nothingness. Please don’t paint on walls or things like that. But here’s the first part. If you will get a piece of paper, and I want you to draw two circles on the top part. I actually have a full sheet for you, but, and you can be using pencil.

You can be using a plain ballpoint pen, gel pen. You can be using anything you so choose. I like to use the pen. Now, normally I would use a thinner pen, but I’ve made these thicker so you can see them better. Your first circle can actually be counterclockwise or clockwise, and we all have certain preferences. And for those of you like me, that may have bradykinesia on one side thus far I’m left sided bradykinesia, but fortunately I’m right-handed, right hand dominant. But you’re going to draw a counterclockwise circle. If you do what I did and you don’t need an arrow, I just did that to show you the direction of this first one. The second circle. And it doesn’t have to be beside it. It can be below it. It can be any size, whatever you’re doing, but it’s going to be clockwise. So, these are some warmups for our fine motor skills for our arms, our wrists, our fingers. And believe it or not, if you’re just doing this plain, I got these started earlier. Maybe kinda cheated, right? You get piece of paper. I hid in my paper there it is.

But if I’m drawing circles just from scratch, I don’t know about you, but I like little ones and see it’s not. Yeah. See. And so, this is really good practice for us. Looks like a name and we go this way. See, I don’t like that way. Now, maybe if you’re lefthanded, do you like that way? I’m not sure, but the idea with this warmup is to engage your brain. Okay, we want a little cognitive. Now on these two circles, you should by now have your counterclockwise and your clockwise, just kinda put a little dot where you think the center is, where the hands would attach. Now again, you don’t need the arrow heads, but on these first two circles now, we’re going to draw from the center out. So, you’re going to just go up to midnight first, noon, midnight, whatever you wanna call it, then we’re gonna go to what you think is one o’clock.

And just taking your line out to the outer circle. Now you’ll notice and I’m tracing over what I did on this first practice. I don’t have equal portions and that’s okay. So, then you draw this one out to the line. Keep going. I’m on five o’clock, six o’clock. Now I’m just gonna be quiet and depending on where the line is, isn’t that interesting that I duplicated differently. Okay. Let’s do it again. We’re going on midnight again. Now, if you want to, you can do midnight, six, three, and nine. And I wonder, I feel better like that because then I can get a little more equi-distant on my one and my two, I don’t know about you. I also like to move my paper. Nobody said we couldn’t. So, I’m going to. Can you hear your pen? I can actually hear my pen on the paper.

So just like with exercise, I like to do warmups by sitting on an exercise ball and marching and kinda getting my body balanced, my core engaged. I think that’s what we’re doing here with just some nice, simple lines. Now the other two circles. Okay. I need to draw my circles. I don’t know if you did finish all of yours and yes, I penciled them in first to give myself hopefully a big enough space or a big enough size circle that you can see it. I know that I need to do things bigger. Just like when I used to write on a chalkboard. Yeah. I’m that old, or a dryboard that I write in like four-inch letters so my students can see it, but here’s what we’re gonna do now. Now we’re gonna start at the outside rim and we’re gonna bring our line into the center. So again, with the first one, let’s try to just keep our lines equi-distant for one, two and three. Obviously, that’s not my forte. I’m gonna keep my circle right there.

Now I’m having to push to get my pen up to that. Missed the center. It’s okay. Excellent practice for me and turn my paper. When I’m doing this with young ones, I like to use big fat markers or those big fat crayons, so they have a real good visual line. Obviously not my forte there, but let’s do this one. Okay. Outer edge in. So, midnight, six, three, the more you do this and especially if anyone is starting to have some micrographia or some issues with hands shaking, et cetera, or just being stiff, perhaps even I’m gonna show you a couple of alphabets you’re really gonna like, I think. So, finishing up my 1, 2, 4, missed 4, 5, 7.

So, that’s a simple little warmup. And yet even as simple as it is, you know, it’s the process. I do wanna point out one of the reasons I suggested having an eraser, when we get to doing either live well today, or hope whichever you might want to do or something else you want to do, this eraser is one of my favorite things because I can erase my draft or my sketch or what I don’t like. So, you can see some pencil here. These erasers gone and it leaves no pink mark, leaves no mess. Erase, gone. Oh, look, there’s a big one. Erase, gone. So, I love that. We will be doing at one point in the fall an activity that has basically no allowance for erasers. It’s like there’s no mistake, whatever you do, you go with it. I love that.

Okay. So, alphabet number one. And I don’t know if you’ve tried calligraphy. I don’t mind calligraphy. I enjoy it. I have some lovely pens and I used to do it a great deal. I actually used to prepare some envelopes for one of the big events they held at the university where I worked, but of course everything’s done on a computer and it’s beautiful fonts and they don’t have to do it by hand. But there’s a thing now called faux calligraphy. I say now, because I was introduced to it a few years ago, but it’s been around longer than that probably. But faux calligraphy here is the idea, get my handy dandy paper, and I’m going to be using pencil. Let me point out something if I may. Supplies… people, it can be so simple and basic. I’ve done it for a while. And plus, I’m a pen nerd, pencil nerd.

Can I say that? Hope I can say that. This is one of my favorites and I have two of them, teal and pink, because I like teal and pink, but here’s what I like. It’s got the white eraser and it’s I don’t know, I just like that because I can get rid of the one, I don’t want, this is a .07. This is a .05 and it’s a Pentel. So, whatever you like, but you know what? These pencils, here’s the 2H, there’s HB, et cetera. But here look here. College of the Ozarks, we went and visited college, you can just use a plain old pencil. Anything is wonderful. What I want you to think about now is this. If you will print kind of a print cursive-ish, let’s do an A. For faux calligraphy, most folks that I’ve read about or tried say, anytime you do a downstroke, which would be here and here, let me do it again, they say, just come to the right side of that. Well, I didn’t do it bad enough. Sorry. And that, of course it’s gonna be colored nicer, you can use a fat marker, different marker, I’ll show you, that becomes your thick point.

So, your A became a calligraphy A and when you’re using a marker and get good at, oh, that’s a great one. I want that one. Tombow makes some lovely pens. There’s so many brands, but you can see too, when you’re actually using a calligraphy type marker, which is a brush tip, brush tip right there. You’re gonna press coming down and then light going up, press coming down, light, going up. Ope, didn’t finish light. But you know, that takes more work. I like faux calligraphy and we’re gonna be doing some of that. On live well today you can see that the faux calligraphy is the top. The block printing is the bottom. We’ll look at that. This book, these are all free, folks, go to Tombow’s website. You can download all the practice worksheets free and print them. And here’s the one that says draw your letter in any lettering style, where your hand moved down to create the letter, draw a line.

That’s where you wanna add a line and then that’s all you have to do. Okay. Now another thing about lettering is we all know how to print and do a lot of things, but maybe we’re not very straight. I mean, look at this, that wasn’t very straight, but here’s what’s fun. We’re just gonna take advantage of it. These were some of the things I wanted to highlight in my life this year. When I photocopied it, it got a little wonky, wonky donkey, but I just drew some very fun dance-y lines, just drew them, and I actually wanted them to be visible. So, it would be like this, kind of imagine a rectangle or a square, get your lettering in. You could do it in pencil if for any reason you wanted to erase it, but there you have your wavy lines.

Then to write on it, I simply used a variety of printing. So, I wanted to return to my exercise without injury. Unfortunately, I hurt my hip last fall and so, it took me several months to get back to exercising and happy, finding much more joy now in my life with my exercise back. Good stress reliever as well as makes me feel better physically, I spend more time at the lake who wouldn’t wanna do that? Sorry I didn’t mean make it shake. So, this is fun, when you just letter, change up your fonts, your printing, your cursive. Try your left hand, your right hand, put in a few things. I got a little heart, got a smiley face, added some color. Now, I’m hoping you do know about watercolor pencils. I’m quite confident, you know about colored pencils. But for example, if you do wanna add a little color, here’s a traditional colored pencil. And so, I might just do a little color as a background.

And then of course use my black ink or another ink to go over it. When you go, if you don’t know about watercolor pencils, you’re gonna love this magic. When you go to the watercolor pencil and I’ll pick a purple-ish and you do this, I did pick a darker purple that’s, you’re not seeing anything. Then, there’s actually a thing called a water brush, but you can also just use, you know, a little brush and it’s wet, but what happens now, you get a little water on it, squeeze it from the barrel. And by getting that wet, you now can paint the watercolor better on a different paper, but you get the idea. So, color is optional. It’s fun. You can actually use of course watercolor paints. You might have noticed on hope.

If you saw the flyer, that there’s gold. Well, there are gold watercolors or a variety of sparkles. So, these are our two for, oh, here, I promised you this one I almost forgot. Here’s our scribble alphabets. It is just fun. And I have to tell you, it’s a great stress reliever, if you are angry, because then you can put things like this… What? It’s like, what just happened? What was that? Help! But it’s also just a cute way and a simple way to print. So those are a few types of lettering styles. And so Tombow, you can get it free. There are so many things online. I’m grateful you’re here with us today, but let me tell you, there’s so much you can do. Here is one thing you might choose to do today. And I just want to show you how I got that started.

Now some people really like everything to be freehand. That is marvelous, but with something like this, I needed just a wee bit of precision. And so, what I chose to do was use my ruler, which as you can see, when I cover up the word today, my ruler is one inch wide. And so that’s how I got that. And so here is a pencil sample I got started so you could see. So, and again, by putting, go ahead, put in your lines. So, if I was doing this again right here, I would just do this. Now, if your ruler is not the size you want, here’s a simple way to do that.

I’ll use the zero. Well, I better go to the inches. Oh, some of you may be not using inches. You may be in centimeters. Aha. I love my ruler. Here’s centimeters. Not that I know them, but here we go. So, let’s say I’m gonna mark down to the three, wanna be that far from the top. This is centimeters. If it was inches, should be inch and a quarter. Then I’m going to go down to the six. And if I do the exact same thing, a wee bit away, there we go. There we go. As you hopefully know, pencil here, pencil there, line it up. Great. Pencil here, pencil here, line it up. So, you can get your inch if you want it. And it’s not gonna stay there. Once we do our ink, we will just erase. Now how about the block letters? I usually start in the center.

I don’t know if your ruler does this. This is another favorite thing I have about this ruler, but there’s my center. See how it goes, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. So again, whether you call that cheating, you can also gently fold your paper. Now you probably don’t want a real permanent crease in there, but while you’re working that can give you a center. So, when we’re doing these block letters, we just bring down our line, think about how wide we want it. And I like to do this. And then I go back, and I finish this and this. So left side, right side, top, bottom. And again, since it’s pencil, if you don’t like it, you can fix it a little. My thicknesses, you decide what you want. It could be skinnier. It could be fatter, but there’s my letter D and I want a little drop shadow.

So, I’m gonna move it here, trying to stay equi-distant. And I’m gonna go like that. And you can see what that looks like once it has been inked. Here’s what’s fun. Well, it’s all fun. When I am. I keep moving my pens. Here we go. When I am finalizing. So, you know my pencil, it’s okay. Your pencil is maybe better. That’s good. But now in ink, because I know where I wanna go, for sure. I try to be very stable, as stable as I can be. And I bring that shadow in and I get that letter worked out and I do my little centerpiece and my shading and your finished product, for example, when people see this, they go, oh, it’s so complex. Well maybe when you look at it as a total, but break it down. Don’t look at it as a total. It’s kinda like when you get that PD diagnosis, don’t look at it as a total. In my PD, break it down, I made that little fat, so I’m gonna make this little fat. And granted, as I’m working here with you, I may not be as slow as I might be in real life. We’re gonna, let’s do the A very slowly.

Everybody here can do this. Now I imagine you know that if you go to the Davis Phinney Foundation website you’re sure gonna see live well today, big and bold and beautiful. So, I claim that, I try to live well every day and I love writing it. And I was able and happy to print this and then I photocopied it smaller, like 30% of this big one. And I printed it on, you know, photocopied it onto a nice sturdy piece of paper. I Believe it was watercolor paper, 140 pound, I’ll explain that if you don’t know. And then what did I do? I put a magnet on the back. You can buy those sheets of magnet and cut them. And I sent them to the offices of the Davis Phinney Foundation. I don’t know if any of you guys still have them on your, and if you don’t want the drop shadow, you don’t have to do it. And it’s not, you know, you could do it in a different color if you want to, or, oh, I wanna show you this.

I ran across this wonderful little pen. Prisma color makes these, probably other brands are out there, but it lets me do a gray shade in one fell swoop, and it has a point and a brush. And so, if I wanted to even do another one here. Excellent. So, what about our leaves? Again, I do sketch them on first. And so, I started with a few, but let me just show you what I did. If I wanna go ahead and make this leaf, and you might do flowers around yours. I chose to do leaves, but you can do what you want. And so, I came on in and I just kind of started a leaf. And I know that I did a little differently up there but I’m going to do what I want down here. And when you get a leaf, you can put a center line straight, crooked, to the other, you know, any way you want your center to go.

And then you can actually make everything match if you want to. Nature is quite amazing at how it does that. But you know, not every leaf is like that. You can also come in and you can do 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1. And then you can go over here and do so you can make it look anyway you want, it’s fun. So, that’s how you’re gonna get your block letters. That’s where you can put your leaves however you so choose. We’re gonna look at some flowers a little bit later, but I want to show you how we do this faux calligraphy for live well, because many of you are, maybe are getting ready for that. Now, for those of you that wanted hope first, I’m sorry, I did this first, but we’ll get to hope, and this will give you good practice on the live well, so I’m gonna do bold where I did the writing first. Okay. So, there’s the word live, nothing wrong with that. You could even just go over that with a marker. And instead, I’m gonna go ahead and make it faux calligraphy. Now I have to admit you can go, right, like most of the, I guess experts tell us, I find myself often wanting to go left, so my preference right here, for example, would be to go left on that E, I don’t know why, but you can do whatever you want and you can, you know, make these fancier, it’s all good.

So, there’s your live when you go to color it in, now see up on this one, the original, I just did a little line, here, kind of like hope, which is one of the ways I like to do it. I made a little, I don’t know what that is. Any questions out there, panelists? You doing okay?

You can also make these into greeting cards. I love making greeting cards, which I don’t know a lot of people snail mail anymore. Maybe that’s why I even love it more than before. So, my E got a little smushy, but that’s okay. I don’t mind. And I don’t know about you, but there are some letters I like making more than others. Ws? When I married a Wilson, I thought, what was I thinking? Because Ws and I just don’t get along. I don’t care if they’re, I love printed Ws. There’s so many ways you can do a W, it’s fun. Printed, cursive Ws, I’m not very good. I have a friend whose last name starts with a W, oh, she does one of those beautiful, guys I don’t even know if I can do it anymore, but she sure does beautiful Ws. So often if I’m actually making something for someone that I do want my initials on, or my name, I do this. I’m not trying to be E. E. Cummings. I’m trying to keep it simple.

Now in a sketchbook, it is so fun to start on page 1, 2, 3. And by the time you’re at page 97, 98, 99, you will see a significant difference in your printing, cursive, faux calligraphy, sketching, doodling, and it’s just fun to see the progress and you really do need practice. And personally, I do not like the adage practice makes perfect because indeed perfect is not the goal. It would have to be perfect practice makes perfect, but the practice definitely helps. I don’t care what we’re doing. Practice is good for anything you’re doing. I did note here. I forgot to tell you, but these letters I made 7/8 7 inch. And that is how I came up with the faux calligraphy, the block printing, the leaf doodling, and live well today. Also, for Davis Phinney Foundation. I may not find it right here right now, but you know our other saying, right, everybody, oh, here it is.

Arms up! Right? Let’s get some exercise in a little stretch, roll your shoulders, get, you kinda hunch over. You need to kinda stretch out. And so, we do the every victory counts, right? Oh, that’s good. And again, I kept these very similar with leaves, et cetera, but let’s look at, and you might want to just finish that. Please do. Often when we’re working together on things like this lettering, doodling, we may not finish everything together, but you are encouraged to finish on your own. But I wanna dabble a little, there are some projects we will definitely do from start to finish together. Now, here is the hope. You’ll notice, I wrote not no sight lines. This is just free. Didn’t want rulers didn’t want it technical. I tend to go more with rulers when it’s block printing, just to make sure I’m being consistent with height.

But part of the fun with faux calligraphy is having the letters go up and down. It just looks nice. And so, I’ve already, you know, done all the thick parts here and the thin parts. Some people might say that this should, since this goes up, that it should not be thick. And you know, you can, I don’t know that there’s a purist, but you can certainly just take that off and bring it up. Be fine. Okay. Technically that’s how they would want that. And this technically would not be thick, but I kinda like it this way. So, I’m gonna go back. It’s what you wanna do. And this is where I used the gold watercolor paint. And then I made sure to outline everything in black. And I wanna show you something I’m only going to do the first two letters. And I’m gonna explain a little bit about that photo in the example, As I mentioned earlier, one of the things I like to do, if I’m creating things, it’s really not so much for me. In fact, it rarely is for me. I like to give these away. It brings me great joy. Great, great joy to give things away. My birthday was last month, and I don’t even know how long ago I started this. It was a very long time ago. My birthday present to me is to make something for somebody else.

And so actually this year I got carried away because I was just having too much fun. And I made a few things to give away. Jackie has one of them. Happy birthday to me. Okay. So, there’s hope now that’s lovely. And if you fill it in with color fine, but if you don’t have watercolors or colored pencils or watercolor pencils, crayons, not a big fan, but you might really like them and that’s fine. Markers. Okay. But what I do like is just making pattern with the markers. And for example, if I put a lot of dots right here, it’s that simple, I’m just dotting. And I kind of go right around there, see that invisible line. I just drew that in the air. I was home, you know, doing this by myself. It’s quieter. I’m not talking to myself, at least not usually. And so, the joy is just the relaxation and pencil to paper, seeing what happens. And then here’s another thing if I start dotting higher, but not so densely, it gets lighter. And then if I happen to have a smaller pen, like I’m gonna go ahead and go down to a one. That also starts to make it lighter so I can actually dot the entire thing. It’s given it some character. I like it. So that’s fun.

And this right here, of course it’s interesting talking to myself, I’m hoping that helps direct and talk to you. But this was a gift it’s called an accordion book. It’s one of the things we’ll be looking at later if you’re staying with us this fall. But on the cover, this tree originally, I saw it on a cricket cut out if any of you are cricket aficionados. And so, I traced it and drew it. This was going to a friend whose name started with J and her husband passed away a few years ago. So, she’s a widow. And so his initial is on top, right? Can you see the little heart? Real tricky in there. Right? So, C and J, that was just the cover. The word hope. What happened was a few days prior to making this for her and I just kinda had her on my mind, I said, send me some words, some phrases, I wanna make something, but I don’t really wanna have to think about what’s gonna go on it, in it. She said, I can do that. I said, yay. So, she sent me some things about hope, a poem, a couple quotes. And so, this was the opening page, and I did all this, and I gave it to her, came to find out she had been diagnosed with breast cancer recently.

And she said she was taking this little booklet and writing notes to herself in her journal while she was sitting there undergoing chemotherapy. Now here’s some fun doodle marks, leaves, et cetera. You probably have seen many.

Another fun way to doodle. I know we’re past the halfway mark. So, I’m not gonna go too fast, but I just spread some color on a page and let it speak to me. And even though my flower didn’t end up just being orange, cuz I wanted it in the green as well. It’s whatever happens. And so that was that flower. With Ukraine being on my mind, here’s some lettering, some dots, of course, the red, the yellow sunflower for Ukraine. This one, I was more in an angry mode, and I still made it peace, but bolder color and different again, different letters and just a blend of letters, you can do that. You have permission to do anything you want. Here are some fun and wild and crazy flowers. I’m not gonna doodle flowers at this moment, because I want to go on and finish some other things with hope and live well today. Just showing you some things while you’re working, keep working just glance up on occasion. We’re gonna take a joy break in the joy break in a few minutes. Here’s a fun flower. Started out just as a black on white, decided color was necessary. Got a little B in there. This is one of my favorite birds to draw. I don’t even remember where I initially found this little guy, but that’s a favorite. And then this makes me think the heart took Wayne.

And then these guys, this was actually in a journal of mine. One more story. So, here’s some calligraphy, some pretty font, once upon a time. And then this is actually the last page where I put the birds at a little Bob Marley and in the end, every little thing gonna be all right. And so, this sketchbook was one that we sent into the sketchbook project for Parkinson’s awareness. And you can just see a few pages. My story began in San Francisco, California. Then these are all the places I’ve lived or been, this one, look at these doodles. It’s just circles and lines. Then this made me think of Harry Potter. It’s just fun watching where your mind goes when you’re doodling and when you’re lettering, this is my cursive in general. Yeah. You know, probably used to be better. Oh lookie, that’s one of the team DPF events.

All right, now we’re gonna take a joy break in our joy break. I have a joy break jar. There’s also such a thing as a joy jar. Now let me start with a joy jar and it doesn’t have to be glass. You know, you can get whatever you want, a box, plastic, something it’s all good. A joy jar, you write down things that are joyful, that have been happening. And then on one of those days or weeks, or hopefully not longer than that, things aren’t so joyful, you just take one out and read it and remember and reflect. Now this being a joy break is where, oh my gosh, I need five minutes to myself. You might not think I wanna start to draw or I want to letter or I want to sketch. So, you open the jar and you take out a joy break.

We did this April 2nd, which is why you got the wonky donkey because the joy break at that time was to read a child’s book and no one need to be present, but your inner child. Oh my gosh. Read from your favorite quote book. Okay. We could do that. I got one on purpose. Where’s my quote book. Here we go. See what our quote is for the day. These can be two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes. Here’s our joy break during our joy break. The best times in life are made a thousand times better when shared with a dear friend and then, Mother Theresa, joy is the characteristic by which God uses us to remake the distressing into the desired, the discarded into the creative. And she goes on to describe joy. And then she says it is a net of love by which we catch souls.

Mother Theresa was quite amazing. Earlier I sent something to Mel. I don’t know about you, but probably many of you with Parkinson’s sleep, kinda like I do or don’t sleep and that can happen to anybody, right? Don’t have to have Parkinson’s. But the wonky donkey was one thing we read. And so, I wrote the Larky Parky and it just came to me in the middle of the night. So, forgive me because it was the middle of the night, but Mel and I decided we’d read it for fun, for a joy break during our joy break. Keep writing or just close your eyes and listen, whatever you want to do. I don’t know if you’re working on live well today or hope or if you don’t wanna work right now. But here we go.

I was walking down the street and saw a fellow Parkie. Hello. She was taking herself for a stroll. She was a larky Parkie. I was walking down the street and saw a fellow Parkie. Hello. She was taking herself for a stroll and had a twinkle in her eye. She was a sparky larky Parkie. I was walking down the street and saw a fellow Parkie. Hello. She was taking herself for a stroll, had a twinkle in her eye and she stepped left, but shuffled right. She was a zigzagging, sparky, larky, Parkie. I was walking down the street and saw a fellow Parkie. Hello. She was taking herself for a stroll, had a twinkle in her eye, she stepped left and shuffled, right, and she was rather short and small. She was a fun sized, zigzagging, sparky, larky, Parkie. I was walking down the street and saw a fellow Parkie. Hello. She was taking herself for a stroll, had a twinkle in her eye, she stepped left and shuffled right, was rather short and small and she couldn’t smell anything at all. She was a skunk-loving, fun sized, zigzagging, sparky, larky, Parkie. I was walking down the street and saw a fellow Parkie. Hello. She was taking herself for a stroll with a twinkle in her eye, she stepped left and shuffled right, was rather short and small, she couldn’t smell anything at all, and that morning she got up early to ride her cat trike. She was a three-wheeling, skunk- loving, fun sized, zigzagging, sparky, larky, Parkie. I was walking down the street and saw a fellow Parkie. Hello. She was taking herself for a stroll, had a twinkle in her eye, she stepped left and shuffled right, was rather short and small, she couldn’t smell anything at all, that morning she got up early to ride her cat trike, and she loved improv. She was a comic, three wheeling, skunk loving, fun sized, zig zagging, sparky, larky, Parkie. I was walking down the street and saw a fellow Parkie. Hello. She was taking herself for a stroll, had a twinkle in her eye, she stepped left and shuffled right, was rather short and small, she couldn’t smell anything at all, that morning she got up early to drive her cat trike, she loved improv and Parkinson’s or not, she was smiling at the world. She was a joyful, comic, three wheeling, skunk loving, fun sized, zigzagging, sparky, larky, Parkie. I had fun writing that. I hope that was okay if I read that. And that was fun for you. Okay.

Mel Dizon:
Love that, Lorraine. Can we share that with the recording?

Lorraine Wilson: Sure.

Mel Dizon: Great, love it.

Lorraine Wilson:
I sent it to you. So, you could always just print or write or whatever you need to do. Correct?

Mel Dizon:

Yes.

Lorraine Wilson:
Okay, good. I wanna talk about substrate for a minute because earlier I said, I would talk about paper. You keep working, you keep working. Later paper might matter more for what we’re doing with lettering and doodling. Anything is good. Anything is good. Later, if you do some of the things we would like to do, you’re probably gonna want a wee bit, just maybe one grade, better paper. So just FYI, if you don’t know and I’ve got several brands here, brands don’t matter to me. This is by Strathmore. Oh, Strathmore also has a lot of free things online. Don’t forget to look at them besides looking at Tombow. But here is a 60-pound sketch paper. What does 60-pound mean? That is the weight of the paper. So, think thickness. Think whether something’s gonna bleed through like a marker. I think the worst bleed throughs I have typically are the alcohol markers, which I’ve really discovered I don’t like a whole lot, but I hope some of you like them if you have them.

So that is, and a lot of these, I think most all of these are gonna be cold press. There is a difference, cold press, hot press. I don’t really care too much, but real artists do. I’m not a real artist. 60 pounds. There you go. Now drawing paper, they take it a little bit heavier, 70 and 80. I’ve got both again. This happens to be Strathmore. And if you notice the colors are different, what they’re telling you, the green is their 400 line, which supposed to be the best. The 300 is their next series and is good. This is a different company. This is Canson. And this is a mixed media, which is probably my favorite paper besides watercolor paper, if I’m deliberately using watercolors, this one is 98 pound.

And then here is a watercolor, a different brand. This is actually Artist loft, which is Michael’s, here in the states. Hobby Lobby has probably their own brand other stores and have their own brand, whatever the, yeah, this is 140 pound cold press. For sure. Love this for watercolor. This is a watercolor paper. And so, you can see that the watercolors work well, and I didn’t mention Posca pens because they’re coming up, but if you do know about Posca pens, I love a white Posca pen for an accent. So that’s a little bit about paper. If that’s helpful to you. And I have that, we have 15 more minutes, if we go straight to the hour. Here’s one of my favorite substrates. You’re gonna laugh. Are you ready? Some of you know this, that know me. I love painting for whatever reason on rocks.

Woo. Here’s a bird I did for my husband. He used to be called J bird because his name is J. One letter, J period. That’s all he got. So, when he was younger, most friends wanted more syllables. And so, he ended up being J bird and J bird was always blue. I don’t know how or why, but here was a J bird for J that I did several years ago. So, rocks are fun. Inexpensive acrylic paints anywhere, Walmart, speaking of Walmart, Michaels, Hobby Lobby, et cetera, going to Blick, Blick materials online. The price ranges on these materials are rather interesting. So, I try to be, since I’m retired now, I try to be cost conscientious. And so, I looked for you guys where you would know, at Hobby Lobby. The other day I looked at the three pens, you can get three microns in a set. You can do a lot more than that, but typically the three set’s common, three different sizes, and $8.28 at my local Walmart, $8.98 at Hobby Lobby and $9.99 at Michaels. Hobby Lobby no longer does coupons, Michaels does. I don’t wanna go into all that, but just kind pay attention to your prices. You don’t have to spend lots of money. Coupons are great. Sales are great. And just, you know, you can also ask for a gift card for your birthday, and then go buy your arts and crafts materials. Now on our live well today in case you’re still working on that.

I want to come back to this one. You might notice that I was not traditional with some of my leaves, this one, for example, move that over here. I went ahead and I just kept drawing lines parallel to my outer edges. I made a thick, thick, and then a thin. What looks good to you? My smaller leaves, I only did a center line, and you don’t even have to have a center line. We played with these leaves. Let’s play with just a few flowers. What if we wanted flowers around this? Okay. Let’s say we are going to look at our flower page and I’m not even gonna do pencil first, but look at this little guy. For some reason that looks like a Bart Simpson flower to me. I don’t know why, but let’s say I wanna do that one right here. I’m gonna do my two circles and then I’m going to imagine about that much.

And then I’m actually gonna do my midnight six just where I can try to get a number of leaves, petals, whatever we’re calling us. I guess it would be petals if this is a flower and then I’m gonna connect. Often things are done in odd numbers. Interestingly. So, this is gonna give me 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. It’s gonna give me eight, which is even and probably not gonna be that desirable. Nope. Let’s see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, yeah. Five or seven I would like better. So, if you did it that way, but it’s just a fun flower. And then if we do something like this, I think what makes it unique here let’s do it on this side of the T, is you start with your little center grapes, let’s call ’em. There we go. I like that. And then we can do our petals. And what you’ll notice is that you’re going to have some petals that are the front petals, the ones that you’re going to see the whole petal.

And then those that might be, you know, a back petal layered. They’re going to show only part and I’m gonna do one here and I’m gonna do just a little one here. Now this one, what they’ve done is the reason I like this is they’ve kind of given us just a little bit of a hint that there’s a wavy edge to this flower. Oh, my goodness. I was at a friend’s iris garden the other day, she’s got a lot of really amazing irises if you’re into irises, but there was one, two in particular that had Swan in the title. And I mean the flowers, the pebbles were so leafy and waving beautiful on the edge as if it was a swan in flight. I really liked it. And then they took these little pistols, just super easy and I’m just gonna do three on these top ones. And then I might even take one taller. Why not? And then I might do stems over here. Might not, and then see how a leaf might go. And these are fun, when you just do an up-shoot sound effects.

And again, if you do have multiple pens to use thick, thinner, for example, let’s do this one and let’s make our stem maybe go like this, like this and like this like this. Okay. And then come back thinner just for fun. And if you have only pencils, no problem. Pencils are marvelous. You can shade. You can draw with pencil, leave it just pencil. Interestingly, some of my first drawing was actually technical drawing, ninth grade, Charles Evans Hughes Junior High, Long Beach, California. And I love technical drawing. Maybe not the subjects, like we got to draw screw drivers and screws and nuts and bolts at first, but that’s okay because my love at the time was architecture. And I think hopefully you have finished whichever you might have been working on. We have just a few more minutes and I want to maybe doodle a bird before we go.

We’ve looked a little at flowers. We’ve looked at hope as a word and a faux calligraphy type with the dots, we’ve looked at live well today in case you want to do that, I did mention being able to turn these into something that you might give to someone here’s a doodle I did on vacation a few weeks ago, because mostly I was reading on my Kindle, but I had a couple paperbacks and I forgot a bookmark and they weren’t my paperbacks, so I couldn’t dog ear. And some of you may be adamant non dog earers. But I did of course have my sketchbook and

some extra paper and my watercolors. So, since I was near the ocean, that was my bookmark that I made. And then I plan to give that to somebody. I just haven’t yet. And then you can also make greeting cards.

They come in, you can make your own and you can actually make your own envelopes if you want to. But sometimes when they’re on sale, there’s so inexpensive. But you can just buy them. They come like this typically, I imagine you’ve seen them. And then when you, this is one of my doodles, this was on the airplane going to Cozono the other day. And I had a little watercolor with me, and I just had a black pen, did some doodles, by the way, you might have noticed my corners. I really like my corner rounder. I don’t know if you guys have anything that rounds corners, but let’s, there’s a small piece. Here we go.

Sometimes I like straight, but sometimes I just really like round corners. And so, anything like this and there you have a round corner, you can cut it with scissors, which yeah, you’re really good. I like it. So again, this is a greeting card and if you get a greeting card from me, it’s going to say scatter joy on the back. So how about we try a bird, now you might want to do one of these little guys. Let’s yeah, let’s do a little guy. And I love the tall legs because I’m very short. I really was talking about myself. So if I’m gonna do a pencil, this is so fun. It’s almost like, you know, those orange marshmallow things, whatever those are. I don’t even remember. You just kinda make it like a little orange marshmallow thing and you notice I’m not holding my pencil tight like this. You can, but for these, it’s just like, when I want something more detailed, I come in, when I don’t, I stay out and I’m gonna give it long legs.

This is gonna have a forward facing little, you can also of course do one in the back, if you want, you can do little tuffs of grass. Is that too light? I hope you can see that. I’m gonna go back to the marker just so you can see it. Oh, thin marker. Oh, well, still better than the pencil. Grass. It’s just fun when you doodle that anything can becomes something so cute. And typically, when I doodle on the airplane either the person sitting next to me or we don’t call them stewardesses, hello, attendant, flight attendant might see what I’m doing. Especially if I’m getting into a Zentangle, which we’re gonna get to later. Notice, there’s nothing like perfect about any of this. He’s got sweet little eye. You could get a little eye. One more. Okay. So, there’s our sweet little guy and you could color, et cetera. And so that’s this one, the pink one. If you want one looking at you, well here’s his little rump and then you just kind of come like this, there’d be his wing, maybe. I gave him a little heart shape beak and we’ll give him a little shorter legs, he’s short.

And I still like the little curly cues for tails. I just do. Maybe do one more, two more. It’s fun. This guy, if you wanted to try him is so simple. Watch this. Okay. We’re right up here. Oh, we’re running outta time. We might not get to do that. I wanna preview. So, I’m gonna skip there. Any of this, we can, I don’t think anything’s copyrighted that I’m aware of, I’ll double check, but I do wanna preview what we’re going to do. If you already looked, if you downloaded all of the little sheets that got DPF-ified after I sent some information to Mel, this is if you’ve seen a scrapbook piece of paper, it’s just a 12 by 12 piece of paper. Some of you may not have 12 x 12 which is fine, but in order to get a 9 by 12, which is what you need for this basic project to be three inches by three inches, this is the project.

Okay. This is called an envelope book and you can use these flat scrunchies to tie it together or a little bit of elastic with a button. We’re gonna look at your supplies. If you do wanna do this next time, every time we’re gonna start with warmups and doodles and lettering, simple stuff, and you can continue and just do that or not do anything at all and listen and have fun as we take our joy breaks within our joy break. But these are simple tags. You can cut your own. You can do whatever you want. These are also fun envelope books. These are fun for giving gift cards to someone because it slips right in there. So, we’re gonna use the paper to fold our little what’s called an envelope book and then make the tags and do some lettering on them. I made one for a friend who is a mother, oh an employee at the university, she loves making quilts. So, each one, you have eight sides basically, right? Each one was something about her to be encouraging to her. And then you just kind of close it. I’ll use this this time.

And it’s just a fun way to send a letter without sending a letter or a notebook. It’s just different and unique. I had fun making it. She had fun receiving it and that’s a lot of joy being shared, I think.

Mel Dizon:
Thanks Lorraine. Can’t thank you enough. I’m so grateful to have you doing these with us. It’s very meaningful.

Lorraine Wilson:
Thank you for joining in everyone. It’s just a privilege to share my little hodgepodge.

To download the webinar audio, click here.

Lorraine also shared a poem she wrote the morning of the session called “I Was Walking” as a nod to The Wonkey Donkey. You can download it here. (If you want to see what inspired it, you can watch The Wonky Donkey video here or watch the recording of Lorraine reading the book during a mini joy break at The Victory Summit Event here.)

Show Notes

Lorraine opened the session by telling us that scattering joy is what brings her the most joy. If you’ve ever spent any time with Lorraine, in real life or virtually, you know how true that is. 

Soon after that, we got our supplies out and our hands moving with:

  • Drawing warmups for fine motor skills using our arms, wrists, hands, and fingers
  • Drawing exercises to boost cognition
  • Faux calligraphy practice (calligraphy practice sheets are available for download at the Tombow website)

Lorraine shared:

  • Some of her favorite pens, pencils, and watercolor pencils
  • Doodles, drawing techniques, shortcuts, and secrets that made us feel like artists
  • Different types of paper and why we might choose one over the other

Finally, one of the items Lorraine always brings to her joy breaks is the Joy Jar. Joy jars are a fun way to store creative ideas, funny prompts, and artistic dares. You can make your own jar with whatever container you have in your house, scrap paper, and a pen. Then, when you need a joy break, pick something out and give yourself a few minutes to play.

Next month, Lorraine will show us how to make an envelope book with tags. You can find the supplies list and register for our joy breaks here. (Note: If you’ve already registered, you don’t have to do it again.)

additional resources

Lorraine mentioned a few places she likes to go for art supplies. Here are some you may want to check out. But remember, you don’t need any special supplies to join our joy breaks. A piece of paper and pen/pencil can go a long way.

BLICK Art Supplies

Hobby Lobby

Michael’s

Tombow

about Lorraine

Lorraine Wilson HeadshotLorraine is a Davis Phinney Foundation Ambassador, professor, exerciser, scuba diver, artist, advocate, and spreader of Joy! We love having her guide us during these much-needed joy breaks, just as she has done during so many creativity workshops in the past. You can find some of Lorraine’s other work here.

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