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 =)

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Mail Me Maybe?

Happy Friday!

Apologies for not posting for a few weeks. No, Free Textures Friday hasn't been cancelled. I just had to pause it for a little while due to the need to focus on a few other projects first. It shall resume next Friday and the theme will be "diverse denim".

Kay, but today I'll show you a few process steps for my latest little illustration I call "Mail Me Maybe?"

One of my fellow illustrators - Patrick Wong {his site here}- told me about this show happening in New York at the A.I.R. Gallery which I couldn't help but want to submit something into. The show is called "Wish You Were Here 12" and here's a little bit about it from their website:

Artists & Friends of A.I.R. Gallery:
We invite you to participate in our yearly benefit postcard show:
Wish You Were Here 12: June 27 - July 21, 2013 Reception: Thursday, June 27th, 6 - 8:30 pm
Last year's exhibit featured work by over 400 artists from as far afield as Australia and Guyana. This year we hope you will join us in our mission to provide leadership and community to women in the arts by exhibiting your work in Wish You Were Here 12. Artists of all mediums including writers and musicians are encouraged to donate.
**All the proceeds of this exhibition help fund our programs, including our Fellowship Program for under-represented and emerging women artists.

I got to work as soon as I could, though not without technical difficulties which derailed me a little. I roughly knew what I wanted to do right away so I just threw down some quick compositional thumbs to help me decide whether I wanted to work horizontally or vertically:

thumbs

My plan was to illustrate the endangered Scissor-Tailed Hummingbird (Hylonympha macrocerca), since I wasn't able to incorporate him into my Mail Me Art 3 piece along with the other endagered little guys. And to go with the whole post card/wish you were here theme, I was going to incorporate some envelopes into the piece as well.
So I got some paper, penciled and inked him. But then I discovered that the paper didn't like the ink too well and that it would erase along with the pencil...

inks 1.0

Instead of starting over entirely - I scanned what I had in and printed it on some thicker bristol paper I normally use. I printed the inks at around 20% though, so that I could re-ink on top and change it up a little. Eventually it looked something like this:

inks 2.0

 And then I coloured it with my usual mix of coloured waterproof inks, watercolour, and gouache and it was done! 

finished

I'm sad to say that it all came together a bit last minute and I mailed it out yesterday, but hopefully it will arrive safely in time, before the due date of June 7th!
 
Bristol Smooth Paper
Size: 4 x 6"
Media: microns, waterproof inks, watercolour paints, and gouache

Have a good weekend! And send someone a postcard or a card! They'll be so surprised! It will be awesome:)