This Horse is Not a Home

More hand lettering experimentation. Inspired by one of my favorite Miike Snow songs, “A Horse is Not a Home”

It’s worth checking out if you haven’t heard it.

A Life Lived for Art is Never a Life Wasted

I love this phrase by Macklemore. It’s from the song “10 Thousand Hours” and is definitely worth checking out if you haven’t heard it. The entire album is pretty great for that matter. As a creative, this is a great quote to remember if you ever question why you do what you do.

Words To Live By

“May all beings everywhere be happy and free and may our thoughts and actions contribute to that happiness and freedom for all.”

Go Confidently

This is the other half of the quote from the previous post with a little bit of a nautical twist.

Live the Life You’ve Imagined.

One of my favorite writers (Thoreau) wrote, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.” and that’s what today’s post was inspired by. So far, I’m sticking to my resolution of drawing everyday. Little wins. Baby steps.

My Second New Years Resolution

I’m not really one for making New Years resolutions. Or, at least if I do I don’t tell anyone about them. That way, I can’t be held accountable. I kid. But seriously, my resolution to myself was to try to work on being more patient. I’m not so good at that.  When someone else asked me what mine was I said I didn’t have one and then retracted that and said my resolution was to try to draw everyday. Specifically, I want to get better at lettering but overall I want to improve my drawing skills. So, here goes. Let’s Rock & Roll!

So Say We All

If you’re a fan of Battlestar Galactica (I know, nerd alert) then you might recognize this phrase. All joking aside, Battlestar Galactica is the best show ever and its not nerdy in at all. All the episodes are on Netflix streaming. Check it out. For this hand lettering exercise I went the route of very precise, laying out everything on graph paper to ensure consistency amongst the forms of each letter. It makes me want to create my own font. Even if I’m not qualified. Here is the in-progress sketch:

And here is the final product. I was trying to achieve the look of letterpress using photoshop, since sadly I don’t own a letterpress. The end result is clean and simple, not over designed.

Hope you enjoyed. As always, if you have any questions on how I did this or need advice on making your own, just holler! Thanks for reading and remember, today’s ideas become tomorrow realities.

The Mountains are Calling

This project was inspired by a quote from John Muir, who is one of my favorite writers. John Muir was an early American environmentalist who helped create Yosemite and founded the Sierra Club. If you want to learn more about John Muir click here. The process for this was the same as the last two posts so I won’t bore you with the details. Here’s the in-progress sketch.

And here is the final product. For the background, I was trying to achieve the look of multiple layers of cut paper to create the appearance of depth.

Hope you enjoyed. As always, if you have any questions on how I did this or need advice on making your own, just holler! Thanks for reading and remember, today’s ideas become tomorrow realities.

Hand Lettering and Typography Experimentation

I decided to take a more traditional approach with the style of type for this project and I think I’m struggling with the idea that hand lettering is not supposed to be perfect. A cursive or handwritten font is more forgiving since by it’s nature it’s more loose and covers mistakes, while a serif really needs to be precise to properly pull it off. If you want to see some amazing, classically styled type treatments,  go to Neil Tasker’s website. Obviously, you don’t accomplish this level of design precision and beauty overnight so I’m trying not to be too critical of my first attempts.

I will note that as far as process is concerned, this time around went a lot faster. I used approximately 28 fewer sheets of tracing paper to accomplish the end product. So I guess, that’s progress? The most challenging part of this project was just deciding on the message. Hopefully I don’t have to explain it but I will just in case…. The message is a play on words of the old adage, “The Best Things in Life are Free”. Get it? Today it feels like the best things in life are Fridays. Maybe if you’re the outdoorsy type though, the best things in life are trees. Here is the in progress sketch:

Once I vectorized the type elements I pulled a photo I took in Yosemite, which ironically is of a burnt out forest that really doesn’t have a lot of trees. I then applied layers and layers of texture and distress and then overlaid the type. Here is the final product:

Not my best work to date but enjoying the process none the less and learning a lot. Hope you enjoyed. As always, if you have any questions on how I did this or need advice on making your own, just holler! Thanks for reading and remember, today’s ideas become tomorrow realities.

Hand Lettering. An Exercise in Patience and Determination.

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time scouring the web high and low for design inspiration. Click here to follow me on Pinterest and see what I’ve dug up along the way. One thing that’s been peaking my interest as of late is hand lettering. In the age of computers we’ve all been taught that to get it done better and faster we should employ technology. While this is true to a point, it’s not always the case. On my quest for new and different projects I stumbled across artist Jay Roeder’s Flicker Photostream. His work has a quality that simply cannot be replicated solely using a machine. While the process of creating type and lettering by hand is more time consuming, the process is rewarding and the end product, in my opinion is more authentic.

I know it seems like a given that a graphic designer should always start with a traditional sketch. But, because so much of what I create in terms of graphics is intended for the web I normally skip this step. For this exercise, I was going old school. To kick this project off I bought two pads of tracing paper and a stack of sharpies. 30 sheets of paper and a lot of hours later I ended up with something that I’m relatively happy with, at least for my first time out the gate. Here is the “in-progress” initial sketch.

And here is the final product after it was taken into Illustrator and then Photoshop.

Hope you enjoyed. As always, if you have any questions on how I did this or need advice on making your own, just holler! Thanks for reading and remember, today’s ideas become tomorrow realities.