Lisa Congdon - Whatever You Are, Be a Good One: 100 Inspirational Quotations Hand-Lettered by Lisa Congdon

For Clay Walsh.
You are my sun, my moon, and my stars. Introduction and illustrations copyright 2014 by Lisa Congdon.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without written permission from the publisher. constitutes a continuation of the copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. ISBN: 978-1-4521-2483-4 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-3033-0 (epub2, mobi)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-3226-6 (epub fixed format)
Design by Kristen Hewitt
Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, CA 94107 www.chroniclebooks.com You cant wait for inspiration.
You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London I remember it happened on a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon.

I tend to lose myself in big, thick, hardbound art books when the weather is dreary, and I was looking through a copy of the American Illustration Annual as I curled up on the sofa. I was marking pages I found pretty or interesting and making notes of illustrators whose work I admired. I noticed that on many of the pages I marked, the artists thoughtfully integrated hand lettering into their illustrations. I realized I was clearly drawn to lettering as an art form (and had been for years), and yet I used it minimally in my own work. So I came up with an idea. To practice, Id hand-letter somethinga letter of the alphabet, a word, a poem, a song lyric, a quoteevery day for a year.

I find enormous inspiration in challenging myself to try new things, and this seemed the perfect project to launch a new year. The project would push me to become a more proficient letterer and to develop my own style. Id publish the results daily on my blog. The project would be called 365 Days of Hand Lettering. And so it began on January 1. I started with letters of the alphabet, alternating between awkwardly attempting traditional calligraphy with a nib and ink and developing my own styles of lettering with a Micron pen (in the end, the Micron pen won out).

In February, I moved from letters of the alphabet to whole words and then phrases. A couple of months into the project, I expanded my repertoire and began lettering quotes by famous people and occasionally poems by some of my favorite poets. The truth was, Id been collecting quotes and short poems from some of my favorite writers and thinkers in my handwritten journals for years, but hadnt until then found a way to bring them to life. I went back and searched for many of the favorite quotes Id previously collected and then started collecting new ones. I began to keep a running list on the desktop of my computer. I found that I loved lettering quotes.

That may have been because searching for beautiful or inspiring quotes from my artistic and literary heroes broke the monotony of the daily lettering process. It may also have been because my blog readers responded so positively to the quotesfar more so than to anything else I lettered previously in the project. Clearly the quotes that I found inspiring or funny were resonating with other people. I got e-mail after e-mail from blog readers about how different quotes and poems comforted them in times of darkness or reminded them to approach a challenge in a new way. Suddenly 365 Days of Hand Lettering became about more than just my hand lettering. It was also about celebrating the words of writers, thinkers, and artists, and about inspiring others with those words.

The combination proved to be magical for me: Just when I was tiring of the daily lettering practice, I gained renewed motivation to get up every morning and grab my pen. The quotes I selected began to reflect whatever was on my mind on a particular day. When I traveled through Scandinavia in September, the quotes were about adventure. When I felt sad, the quotes I lettered were about mourning or darkness. When I felt inspired, the quotes were about joy and hope. I am a person who wakes up every morning and thinks about the differences I can make each day in the worldthrough my relationships, my encounters with people, and through my work.

So many of the quotes were based on a call to action: how to be a better person. The daily practice of hand lettering became a way for me to express my innermost feelings and aspirations. This book is a collection of one hundred of my favorite quotes (and a few poems). Most are from my 365 Days of Hand Lettering project, along with several additions. It has been a joy for me to put them together into a book for others to ponder. I hope very much that you find something in this book that inspires you to do something new yourself, introduces you to a new artist or writer, or creates in you a new sense of wonder.

Enjoy!