Wordy Wednesday - My Typographic Trials

Hi! Before you do anything else:

Now you may read at your leisure.

So, this past month of so I've taken more of an interest in experimenting with some illustrating text, hand-drawn typography, popular sayings and so forth.

Once I've worked digitally, using existing fonts and my textures to make a fun, quirky poster: "Keep Calm and Pattern On".

Another time, I enjoyed working mostly traditional - like when I entered Moo.com's calligraphy competition with my "Stop and Smell the Roses" piece.

Afterwards I decided to digitize it by cleaning up the scan in Photoshop and working with the Live Trace and Smooth tools in Illustrator:

black + white + red version

black + white + pink version

That's usually my preferred way of digitizing my letter line-work. If I neatly ink my letters the process of smoothing out any jaggedness from the live trace goes pretty fast. That's also how I completed my "Merci" piece:

Simpler version

At first I just concentrated on getting the letters into the shapes that I liked. Once I was happy with the letters, I scanned the image in, and printed it out. I then sketched over that in pencil the floral details. Then with the help of my light table (Also known as my window...I don't actually own a light table) I traced the sketched over image on to my good piece of paper. I did this extra step because I wanted a pretty original to keep. So...then I scanned that back into my computer and vectorized it.

I was quite happy with this "Merci" piece. I was going for an Art Nouveau feel and I think it came out to be a nice nod to that.

Looking back at "Stop and Smell the Roses" I thought it would be nice to turn that into a little series that would encourage me to work on my typography more, and so I went ahead and began to work on "Stop & Smell the Coffee". This piece didn't go as smoothly as the other one at all.

For some reason I thought I could wing it without doing any compositional sketches and instead just sketching it out a few times on to my good piece of paper...yeah, not the best plan. I ended up with this:

It had some good ideas, but the layout turned out to be awkward. At first I thought I could just fix the layout issue digitally by just nudging things around, but it wasn't as simple as that.

attempt #1

Then I thought I'd just move the top part down. A bit better, but definitely didn't feel right.

attempt #2

In turn, I decided to go back to the drawing board. I liked the "coffee" lettering so decided to draw the other letters with those kind of proportions. And then, after a whole bunch of fiddling I felt better. I was more calculated and methodical with this piece - vectorizing the letters using the precision producing Pen tool, as well as aligning and proportioning things in Illustrator. Finally, I also made some coffee stain textures (which I'll be sharing this Friday) and finished the piece off.

Currently I'm enjoying focusing on the lettering and adding a more illustrative touches, like a simple roses and coffee beans here and there. I'll save my detail-crazy tendencies for other things =)

Thanks for stopping by!

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Letters Can Become Reeds

Happy Wednesday!

I  got back from a trip to New York recently and there's lots to show and tell there. But that will have to wait till later this week, or possibly early next week. Right now I'm swamped with different projects here and there, so bear with me.
In the mean time though - let me share with you a little something I've been working on on my breaks. I'm trying to do more illustrated type and here's the result of a sketchbook doodle I started while the song "Smother" by Daughter was stuck in my head once, especially my favourite bit -

 "Where all my layers can become reeds
All my limbs can become trees"

And, eventually this happened:

This is simple a digital piece - a vector image layered on top of my textile textures. Nothing too fancy, but I like it. :)

And of course, some process steps for you:

sketchbook drawing

vector text/image layer

I decided to just work with the quote.

finished piece

I made the colours a little less saturated and earthy, and layered a leaf textile texture in the background.

I also played around with a darker background, but I think I prefer the light version.

Prints available at my Society6 shop {here}

Happy Holidays

A little last minute holiday art :)

I've had so many ideas for this year's holiday cards, but alas - they didn't get executed in time. They'll be good to go for next year though =) But I did manage to make this couple of patterned words.

7.5 x 10.5"

about 5.25 x 4.5"

Pieces are completed on Bristol Smooth paper with: red 005 Prismacolor fine line marker, Kohinoor vermillion waterproof ink and white gouache. All and drawn, and touched up a tiny bit in Photoshop.

Merchandise available at my Society6 and RedBubble shops

And here are some other versions of "Happy Holidays"

Happy Holidays!

Alphabet + Frivoli-Tea

This week's Decorative Illustration Project!
Our theme was illustrated typography and for the first part of the project we were to invent/illustrate our own alphabet. Mine was on things, mostly kitchen things, that are used to hold or deal with liquids:

Media:
`micron pens
`waterproof colour inks
`assembled digitally in Photoshop

And for the 2nd part of the project we were to illustrated an onomatopoeia word or a play on words of sorts. I chose to illustrate "Frivolity" which I turned into - "Frivoli-TEA". And I absolutely feel a series coming out of this pun. =)

This is the original version

But then I also decided to create my own hand drawn background pattern...

And I actually colorized it in Photoshop to be more of a light blue colour and put it behind my image=)

Materials:
`9 x 11 Bristol Smooth Paper
`Prismacolor pens
`Micron pens
`Koh-i-Noor waterproof colour inks

Oh, and now I'm also on letterplayground.com! A great place for illustrated letters and inspiration=)

Happy Thursday!