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 Linzie Hunter: Spam one-liners

For a while now I’ve been planning to write about using words and letters in, or as, images. Perhaps because my toddler is at the stage where we’re reading a lot of ABC books and playing with a lot of alphabet toys, or perhaps because I’ve always had a liking for signs and fonts, letter forms strike me as very beautiful things. They’re more than worthy of featuring in the background or even centre-stage in your image-making.

There’s a fine line here. I’m not really talking about calligraphy, which is an art in itself, and, once it shucks off the associations of after-school clubs, spluttering nibs, and ink-stained fingers producing wobbly Gothic lettering, an innovative one, full of potential.

No, I’m talking about lettering within a picture. That could take one of many forms:

> Signage as subject-matter. Imagine a street scene containing all sorts of signs, billboards and lettering. How cool is that?

>  Annotation - there’s  no rule against using little notes to add humour or depth to your work. (Here’s an example from an early Draw Anyway post - see the second picture)

> Speech balloons - the cartoonist in me emerges again.

> As mentioned, the alphabet book: a perennial favourite of all illustrators, since it imposes a framework whilst allowing great freedom and fun.

Anyway, what should pop up on my RSS feed today but Spam One-liners - a photoset on Flickr (thanks to Drawn), the thumbnails of which you can see above. Linzie Hunter has taken the subject lines of spam emails and made them into something decorative, fun and delightful (anyone who can turn spam from an annoyance to a source of inspiration has to be some kind of genius). I think you’ll agree that this is not calligraphy, but drawing with letterforms, and a real inspiration to us all.