Q&A With Pia from @Spokenstrokes! :)

Hey guys! Meet Pia! She’s one of the weekly features on Lovethatletters. Get to know her down below! :)

Q: How did you come up with the name SpokenStrokes?

Lettering is a combination of up strokes, down strokes, bad strokes, good strokes. But in its entirety, these strokes speak something. I knew I wanted a place to provide encouragement, and with Instagram’s format I did exactly that. I’ve learned God’s word is truth and the Bible is His instrument to speak to us. To mirror that, I got inspired to allow God to use lettering as another instrument to speak His encouragement to us. The creative side of me also wanted to have a handle that played on alliteration and something that could be easily remembered. Thus, SpokenStrokes!

Q:What initially inspired you to do lettering?

A lot of those “satisfying videos” that show up on Instagram’s Explore feed definitely planted a seed in picking up lettering. I found it so amazing how people were using Crayola markers to make these elegant looking fonts and I started to mimic those videos. However, a great amount of my interest in lettering grew through Ate Jenn. During JesusWalk, a summer youth conference, I attended Ate Jenn’s lettering workshop and was handed my first Tombow. I learned how to letter the alphabet, a few words (like my favorite word “minimum”), and slowly made my way to lettering Bible verses and words of encouragement.

Q:What’s your favorite food of all time?

TACOS. TACO TUESDAY TACO THURSDAY TACO EVERYDAY. I LOVE TACOS.

Q:Do you have any other hobbies besides lettering?

I really enjoy playing the piano and trying out new ways to practice wellness and self care. Lately I’ve been following Lavendaire and Honey Belle with their insight onto becoming a Student for Life and small knick knacks for appreciating ourselves in our own skin. Aileen’s podcasts are definitely ones that I can always look forward to because her topics are relatable and provide a mindset of growth no matter the situation. I also LOVE face masks and am always willing to play around with different kinds of skin care to take care of myself.

Q: What’s your favorite piece you’ve done so far?

One of my favorite pieces was actually done for Cityline Church’s women’s event, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” This was one of the first pieces where I did free hand watercoloring and was at a decent degree of satisfaction with it. I ended up mixing a lot of different watercolors together and was really surprised with the finished piece. I should probably start taking more risks in my lettering haha :)

Q:What was your biggest lettering mishap/ oopsie while creating a piece?

While making a piece, my roommate told me she had food for me and instantly I stood up and dropped my paintbrush. Food makes my other body parts dysfunctional, and dropping my paintbrush (which was, by the way, holding black paint) was not the greatest idea. Slowly, I looked down, eyes closed, hoping the brush went nowhere close to the pastel floral piece. Heart racing, hands shaking, I used every muscle in my eye to reveal this chaos. The terror. Right smack in the middle of the beautiful floral piece, was the daunting black blob. Again, food makes my other body parts dysfunctional; thus I thought to myself, “let’s make more black blobs to make it look like I meant to do that.” And so I did. I added more black blobs until the pastel florals were no longer seen. Did I think it was a good idea? Yes. Was it? Hee haw of the banjo man hands no.

*LESS DRAMATIC VERSION*

I was almost done with the piece and all I needed was a little bit of black watercolor. So I picked up some black watercolor with my brush but needed to stand up to readjust myself. Somewhere in between that process I totally lost grip of my paint brush and dropped the brush right on top of the pastel floral piece. I knew the black watercolor hit the piece somewhere, but when I looked down it hit my piece right in the middle. So! I tried to make more black blobs around the piece to make it seem I meant to make them but… I don’t think that was a great idea.

 

Q:Do you hope to inspire others with what you’re doing?

I definitely hope that what I do uplifts others with some encouragement. Especially by being in college, there are people who admire my pieces but don’t know God yet. By creating something that can catch someone’s attention and to simply get them to even read God’s word or any kind of encouragement of that sort, is all it takes to bridge that person to God.

Q:Since you began lettering. how has it affected your walk with God?

Lettering has definitely encouraged me to dive deeper into God’s word more. Most challenges I’ve encountered are only a single verse and though that single verse spoke plentiful encouragement, a part of my heart itched for more. Lettering has taught me the importance of learning the context of a verse by reading the verses prior and after the provided verse. Since then, I’ve been able to delve deeper into what God has to say to us and really learn to meditate on this through my walk with God.

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Thanks for chatting with us Pia! Check out some of her beautiful work below and follow her on Instagram @spokenstrokes for more!