A Mini a Day: Week 1
So, this was the first week of doing my ‘A mini a day, a letter a day’ and it wasn’t a full week. I definitely enjoyed having a bit of a focus to my doodling and I think, though I still did my normal random (mostly floral!) doodles. I found myself being more drawn to the minis, rather than the letters, but I don’t want to drop the letters, because I do think I could use some improvement (or sophistication, perhaps!) in my hand-lettering. I didn’t really use the letters in any final designs/patterns, though. Maybe I need to wait until I’ve gathered together more of an alphabet.
Here are some of the doodles/sketches (on the first day, I had time to do a bit more, and was able to do some colour sketches, which I then used for the week’s colour palette):
Wednesday: Brollies and the Letter B
Thursday: Saxophones and the Letter X
Friday: Feathers and the Letter T
And the final designs I made last night.




The great thing here, is that I have lots of little icons that I can do stuff with at a later date, if I want to. I didn’t really do any digital icons this time, but I’d quite like to next week, if I can fit it in. I’d love to find a good vector app for my Surface (yes, I can use Illustrator on there, but I’m thinking a more basic app, maybe, for easy playing), so I can do a bit of digital icon creation on the train or sitting on the sofa or in the park… Then again, I do love sketching, so don’t want to let go of that.
Next week: Fruit
Next week, I want to go with a week-long theme, so that each day’s minis can be tied together a bit more and so that I can also have a word (or maybe even words!) at the end, to use in the designs. So, I’m going to go with FRUIT. It conveniently has five letters in it, one for each day (the weekend is for pulling together the minis) and I will do them in order. I want a warm and bright colour palette, so I’m going to go with yellow, orange and red fruit. I will pick one from this list each day:
- lemons
- oranges
- apples (red)
- strawberries
- raspberries
- bananas
- peaches
- pomegranates
- grapefruit
- pears (yellow)
- apricots
- persimmons
- guava
- cherries
- grapes (red)
Of course, next week is the start of a new MATS Bootcamp month, so I will also have a big mini to concentrate on for that. Going to make sure I do at least one page of mine for each day. (How convenient would it be if Lilla picked fruit for this month, though?)
If you’re joining in and have blogged about it (or instagrammed), leave a link here. I might even do a round-up post, if there’s enough of you! Thanks to Chiara and Sareka for joining in on Instagram! Do tag me on Instagram if you join in, so I can give you a shout out (and see what lovely stuff you’ve been drawing).
A Mini a Day; A Letter a Day; A Colour Palette a Week
I’ve decided to do a mini (*) and a letter a day for a while (I’m not going to set a specific time limit – I might do it for a couple of weeks, or I might do it for a whole year).
So, every day, in the morning, I’m going to pick a subject and a letter and whenever I doodle/sit down for 10 minutes with my sketchpad, etc. on that day, I will draw that subject and do a variety of hand-drawn versions of that letter.
Then, on the weekend, I’ll pick my favourites from the week and make some patterns and placement prints from them, using “A Colour Palette a Week”, which I’ll pick on Friday night/Saturday morning. I’m hoping that this will lead to a few natural/spontaneous collections, or at least a bunch of cool designs.
So, today is brought to you by the subject “Umbrellas” and by the letter “B”. I’ll try to share them on Instagram/Twitter with the hashtags #aminiaday and #aletteraday and will do a blog post with final weekly designs. I’ll probably also share it on my Facebook page.
I’ve scribbled down a list of potential subjects in case I get stuck, but I won’t necessarily pick from this list – something might jump out at me.
Potential minis
- skateboards
- flamingos
- meerkats
- strawberries
- vintage telephones
- doughnuts
- penguins
- teapots
- lighthouses
- monkeys
- lions
- diggers
- lollipops
- picnic baskets
- cactuses (cacti?)
- hedgehogs
- feathers
- cocktails
- umbrellas
- saxophones
Feel free to join in, if you want to. If you do join in and blog about it, let me know, and I’ll share your posts, too.
(*)Those of you have done MATS A, B or Bootcamp will know that this is essentially taking one thing/theme and drawing the heck out of it – in Bootcamp we’ve done cuckoo clocks, jellies and dolls/faces, some that people have done in the various MATS iterations include vintage pyrex, succulents, snails.








