Nancy Hays Hills Workshop

How On Earth Did She Do That? - Nancy Hays Hills

An overnight snowfall of nearly 12 inches provided the perfect morning to begin our 4-day workshop with Nancy Hays Hills. Nancy, an episcopal deacon in Wisconsin, was employed for 35 years as a graphic designer and ad manager. She began her journals in 1997 but an illness in 2020 reframed things for her and retirement provided the opportunity to teach her style of journal writing. She works on her journal whenever she feels inspired, governed by the philosophy that a journal represents human life. It is “a dialogue between you and your heart and your mind”. A slide show of Nancy’s beautiful journal pages began the workshop. Each page was divided into many parts, which were then embellished with intricate drawings, inspiring quotes, travel references, doodling and a lot of colour. The items included all held personal meaning, some reminding her of specific events in her life. She spends hours to weeks on a page, often completing only an inch at a time, with her design experience always showing through. The materials needed for journalling are straightforward. Nancy creates her own journals by binding together sheets of Arches Text Wove paper and so she suggested we use it in the workshop. Also suggested was a 0.5mm mechanical pencil, eraser, ruler, a size 2 or smaller pointed brush with watercolour paint and a selection of pens. Nancy recommended a black Pigma Micron 005 or 01 pen, a white Uniball Signo or Sakura Gelly Roll pen and any coloured gel pens that we might have. Nancy’s particular favourite set of gel pens is Sakura Moonlight 06 series. Two other useful tools are a fountain pen containing carbon ink and a Kemper Fluid Writer. Following our discussion of materials, Nancy turned to address a main theme of the workshop, how to overcome a fear of the blank page. She had several strategies to help us deal with this common problem. All of them involved techniques to divide the page into manageable sections. We began with a scribble. Nancy counted to ten while we closed our eyes and made a large pencil scribble on the page. We followed this, eyes open, with a pen line on either side of it and then erased the pencil line. By overlapping some areas of the lines and adding shadows, we produced the impression of a rope going over and under itself. This created a framework of negative spaces waiting to be filled.

Nancy then led us through two more ways to approach a white page, starting with the creation of a grid. Leaving a border around the page, she drew two random vertical lines followed by four also randomly spaced horizontal lines. She painted the squares lightly with three different colours brought into harmony with each other by adding a touch of one colour to the next. Then she moved on to a fresh sheet of paper and painted wavy lines of varying widths. In the end there were numerous areas with which to work.

Much creativity came into play filling the now available spaces. Nancy packed them with an assortment of letters, text, characters, random shapes, spirals, dots, circles and stripes. Some of the letters in the block of text were joined and the resulting negative spaces were coloured in. “Dust” was placed where lines came together. The wavy lines were filled with text and imagery. Detail upon detail was added.

Here is where design considerations became important. Nancy gave some tips on creating a feeling of balance. Not all spaces need to be filled and if a texture is added on one side, perhaps it would look good on the other side as well. Colour can be added here and there to help simplify and reduce busyness. It’s also helpful to look at the overall piece and make any adjustments appropriate for producing a coherent look. Up until this stage, Nancy had us working with spaces that were joined. To teach unity she moved on to unconnected ones. After painting a series of separated shapes, she used a dark line of varying widths to go around and join them. This gave a very dynamic look. A different look appeared in her next demo. She painted more shapes but this time joined them with fine, curving lines, adding stylized leaf shapes and giving the impression of vines. To this she added ribbons of dots creating a delicate appearance. A finishing technique Nancy demonstrated was to take a page with a grid of squares, each already full of images and textures, and draw a double line around the entire piece. This brought all the parts into a whole. For more interest, she added tassels on the corners giving it the look of a carpet. There was space in the class to practice many of the techniques Nancy showed us and with our homework assignments the participants indicated they had taken the instruction to heart. We saw many lovely, very detailed pieces. It was clear that a lot of time had been spent producing them. Nancy was very generous in her comments on the homework, giving direction and encouragement. Our course with Nancy was filled with examples of her work, demonstrations on how she works, instruction on design and much practicing. Nancy brought a friendly, thoughtful approach to the class. The homework she assigned left us detailed examples to come back to for reference in our future work and we definitely learned not to fear diving into a blank sheet of paper. – Kathy Bedard

Kathy Bedard

Margaret Kells

Cathie Harrower

Jeanette Rawek