When I started The Nerd Lady, one of my many hopes for my creative projects was to create artwork that could get girls excited about science and adventure. I wanted to create dinosaur and outer space art for little girls like mine so they could dream about discovery and exploration. There’s plenty of this for boys, but not much for girls. As I started focusing more and more on literary lettering, however, I let go of this hope.
Until this year.
One of my college girlfriends contacted me about creating an outer space chalkboard for her baby girl. You bet I jumped on that opportunity!
Here’s how this nursery art went from an Instagram message all the way to a chalkboard that landed itself in Midland, Texas!
It all started with an Instagram message…
Y’all. This is my dream message. Something where you know you want a thing, but you’re not really sure of the design. That means that I can play!
To be honest, designing this piece challenged me. Combining both her name and “We love you to the moon and back” was tough. When I sketched things out, I would get the name right, but not the phrase–or vice versa. Because Katherine wasn’t under a time crunch, I took time to research, practice, and research some more. I used Stefan Kunz’s technique of forcing myself through multiple designs, then landed on these 8 that I sent to Katherine:
From there, Katherine and her husband picked their two favorites. She asked if I could possibly combine the two designs. Here are all three:
She picked my favorite.
My heart squealed. I cannot tell you how exciting it is to get to work on a project where not only does my client get what she wants, but *I* get to have fun, too!
The work started…
And I sent her all the process pics.
Until we finally had this beauty.
I am so so happy that Katherine found me and asked me to do this piece! I am learning that I absolutely love working with chalkboards… and I love painting moons and stars 🙂 And it fills me with such gladness to know that little Kalleigh Ryan will grow up with the moon and the stars to inspire her!
The Nerd Lady 
Simply fantastic! Love the process and the final. And you know, there are some steps in the process that would look great as finished product too.
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