valster73

Artwork by Irvan Ridwansyah @_rdwnsyh Hello, I’m so happy to be able to share my lettering experience on Val’s blog. This time the focus is on how to find your own lettering style and some useful tips to help you find it. I hope that my experience will be helpful for you guys. First, let me introduce myself. My name is Irvan Ridwansyah. I’m a lettering artist from Jakarta, Indonesia. I love creating lettering work using the brush pen script that is modern and dynamic. I also love exploring typography layouts and trying out different brush pens to practice my brush calligraphy skills. Ok so let’s get straight to it. In my opinion, the key in finding your lettering style is consistency and honesty. Simple, right? The first moment that I started to have my own lettering style was roughly in 2017, when many friends could easily recognize my work on Instagram. At the time, I was consistently using one of my favorite mediums: Posca markers on black paper. The lettering style I

Hi Guys! Val here. I’m back to talk about the campaign #inspirationvsimitation. I know that in the previous blog posts I have mainly shared about the issue of copying or imitating. This time I want to focus a bit more on the ‘inspiration’ side of the campaign to help inspire people to create their own style (rather than copying people’s artwork). I have asked a few of my lettering friends to share a bit of their journey in discovering their own style with the hope that it will give some of you newbies an idea of how to do it. Now there isn’t just one way of doing it. Also, there isn’t really a step-by-step process you go through in finding your own style. Everyone has a different and unique journey when it comes to this. So, first up, I’ve asked my dear friend, Muli Ong, to share about her creative journey. If you are not familiar with her style of lettering, please take a moment to check out her IG profile ( here ). I first discovered her back in 2015 and was

--> Artwork by @just.drawing.words & @valster73. Do not use without permission. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not the only one who misses the old Instagram days, when you could just go to Instagram and scroll down to your heart's content and see the posts of all the people you follow, with no algorithm telling you what you should or should not see; where we had the freedom to make our own judgment on what we wanted to see and not, without having to spend so much time choosing and engaging just so that these posts of the people we follow keep appearing in our feeds. So when I saw this campaign/initiative by Matthieu Tarrin (IG @tarwane ) and James Lewis (IG @jamesllewis ) about making Instagram great again, I knew I wanted to participate too. Part of the challenge of this campaign was to collaborate with another creative person, so when Sonia from @just.drawing.words and @soniaydesigns approached me to do a collaboration with her for this, I was more th

Hi! Let me first start by saying thank you to everyone who has shown love and support for this campaign #inspirationvsimitation. So many of you have shared my recent blog post “ An Open Letter To The Girl Who Sent Me a DM ” on Instagram. It warms my heart to know that this spoke to a lot of people, and I love in particularly how some of the newbies in lettering have found the article helpful. The goal has always been to help others and to encourage people to do better. Now, it has come to my attention that there are artists out there who are completely okay with people copying their favorite artist’s work, or any work for that matter. Some even encourages it. I believe this causes a bit of confusion for some people, if not a lot. So you may ask, “What are we supposed to do then? Is it okay to copy or not?” If you’ve read my previous blog post than you’d know that I do not recommend copying people’s artwork. I personally suggest that you focus on copying techniques and th

--> Photo and artwork by @valster73. Do not use without permission. Q: Can we copy and post on Instagram and then tag them (the artist) saying we were inspired? Because I’m a beginner and I just want to be consistent with my practice. I copied your work too but didn’t post it on Instagram yet. I want to show off that I can paint like you, and of course tag you that I’m inspired by you. Can I do that? Today I woke up to this question in my DM from someone who saw my IG story about asking permission if you want to copy someone’s work. There was no short answer to that question and even though I have already given the person an answer, I thought that I'd share my answer here too on the blog for others to learn. ---------------------------------------------- Hi girl! Thank you for messaging me. I’m glad to hear that you love my work and that it inspires you, and to answer your question: Can we copy and post and then tag them (the artist) saying we were insp

Hi There! So glad that you decided to pop up here and check out my blog. It’s been years since I’ve last blogged and even that didn’t last very long (Oops!). But, if you are here, I believe that means that you saw the campaign that I’ve started on Instagram called #inspirationvsimitation. Photo and artwork by @valster73. Do not use without permission. I wrote a very long caption to go with the post on Instagram that kick-started the campaign. But in all honesty, I felt like there were still other things that I wanted to mention or address on this topic that I couldn’t fit in the IG post.  And so, with the encouragement of a dear friend, I’ve decided to write it all in a blog. This blog. In case you missed the post/caption on Instagram, let me give you a bit of a background story first (and if you have read the caption, I’ll just be repeating a few things). Several months ago I discovered someone copy my artwork along with someone else’s. This was not the first time