Ideas from others -- Marina Soria

This summer I got an email from Jan Milne, who reads my blog from Australia and wondered if I was familiar with the work of Marina Soria, a calligrapher from Argentina.  I wasn't, and immediately looked her up.  Among all the images I saw, one sent me straight to my sketchbook to emulate.

Marina Soria

Two ideas to play with: first, trapping the letters between horizontal lines, and second, filling in some of the negative spaces with pale washes of color.  Here's my version:

I worked with this idea for a while, then decided it would be interesting to use the wash-in-negative-space approach with other styles of lettering.  Here's what I came up with then:

I like to use washes -- about the only thing I can do with a brush that seems to look good (clearly need more practice....).  I've had fun with this technique (you can see all my daily calligraphy here on my Daily Art blog) and want to give many thanks to Jan for tipping me off to this new artist.  Almost every time you look at somebody else's work in the same ballpark as your own, you find ideas to test out and riff on.  Do they become a permanent part of your repertoire or just an experiment?  Only time will tell.