New Blog!

Hello everyone,

After a long hiatus from blogging, I have decided to launch a new blog through wordpress and I would love it if you could check it out! There's already some content up on the new blog, and I won't be updating this one anymore.

You can find it here: http://thebeeskneeswithmia.wordpress.com

If you would like to get email updates whenever I make a new post, you can enter your email on the righthand sidebar.

Please feel free to share the link to my new blog to anyone who might enjoy it!

-Mia

Lettering and Typography

I have been really interested in calligraphy and lettering lately, and have been playing around with them a lot. I am trying to learn calligraphy and I'm not very good at it, but practicing it has helped me to begin to approach lettering like you do drawing--focusing on the shapes, the line quality, and the negative space. From this I began looking at fonts present on Microsoft Word and tried to sketch them like you would a still-life. 

These are some of the initial experiments: 

This is a line from a poem by Anis Mojgani called "These Things are the Way You Make Me Feel" If you are interested, you can watch him perform this poem here. I think it's really beautiful and the video in the link is a wonderful performance of it. 

This is a quote from the film "Beginners," which is one of my favorite movies, and the font I chose was inspired by the scene from the movie in which this phrase is spray-painted onto a blank billboard. The plant pictures are cut out from an old Anthropologie catalogue.

From this, I went on to experiment further on little stationary cards. I found some scraps of vellum paper in my collage materials, on which I drew the lettering and then placed it over the collaged backgrounds. I really like how these turned out, as the vellum mutes the colors of the backgrounds and highlights the emphasis of the words. 

I made the Alaska card for my friend Setasha, which has personal significance to us and our friendship and some goals we have as people. 

The other two cards are based much more on aesthetic than on personal symbolism and have phrases that I thought had a nice sound and complimented the backgrounds I collaged with scraps from old NYLON magazines.  

I have been sorting through all of my collage materials, including old magazines, paper scraps, stickers, and many odds and ends and I have been finding a lot of inspiration in doing this. I am working on many little projects in my down-time and I hope to finish some of them up and share them on the blog. Keep checking back for updates… 

New Ties

I have uploaded some new ties onto my Etsy site! Check them out!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/EmmalinesUniverse

Bee Pictures!

Here are a couple of bee pictures that I forgot to post! Working with the bees is such a wonderful experience, and I am learning so much about how truly amazing bees are, while getting to sample some truly amazing honey along the way!

Collaged Sationary

My sister brought me an issue of Vogue Magazine for me to cut up and use for collages. I found a number of ladies in fancy dresses and decided to make little stationary cards from the pieces.

Collaging in one of my favorite art forms right now!

Dried Lemon Garland

I saw a lemon garland like this in an Anthropologie store and was very inspired. The thin slices of dried lemon caught the light so nicely, and I thought something like it would look nice in my room. So I made my own! I dried the lemon slices in the oven and then strung them on fishing line, separated by little golden beads.

I may even take this with me to school in the fall for my dorm room!

More Bee Adventures!

I got to film with the bees again this past week, and I got to learn about langstroth hives and I learned how to harvest honey!

Langstroth beehives

Bars of honeycomb from a top bar beehive

Fresh comb honey, its absolutely delicious!!

I am so thankful that it has worked out for me to work with these amazing beekeepers this summer, and to be able to use my passion for videography to help out our little bee friends!