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November 2015

Freebies, Hand Drawn, Illustrator

One week to go! I’m so excited (and counting down the days) to see my sister a week from today, who Spence and I will be celebrating with. Since we’re only a week out, I wanted to put together a few freebie Thanksgiving vectors for any last minute craft or design pieces you might be putting together. These could easily be used on seating cards, greeting cards or stenciled on napkins 🙂 The download comes as an ai, eps + psd file for versions of Illustrator and Photoshop, CS3 or newer. Download + larger preview below!

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Freebies, Patterns, Photoshop, Textures, Tutorials, Typography

Today is a big Tuesday! I just went live with my newest kit, Glitz + Glam, Digital Hot Foil and Glitter Textures, AND I’m giving one of those textures away for free in this post! I’ve gotten a few questions on how I apply gold textures to some of my Instagram images, so with the release of the kit, the free texture, and the holidays coming up, I wanted to share how to create hot foil typography using Photoshop and Illustrator this week. This week’s freebie comes as a seamless pattern file, high res tileable jpg and layer style. Read on for the freebie, tutorial, and more info on the kit!

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Freebies, Hand Lettering, Holiday

Thanksgiving is exactly two weeks from today! Seemed about time for a thank you card freebie 😉 Use this hand lettered card for any thankful occasion! Card template can be passed through any home printer on 8.5″x11″ or A4 sized paper. The pdf printable download comes in two (folded) sizes: 7″x5″ (for any A7 envelope) and 6″x4″ (for any A4 sized envelope). Get the download link and see preview images below!

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Holiday, Photoshop, Textures, Tutorials

Happy Tuesday! This week’s tutorial comes to you courtesy of Lauren, who emailed me last week asking how to create a realistic paper cut out effect. With winter well on its way (my family in upstate NY has already had their first snowfall!), I thought a winter theme would work well with the effect. Do you remember these free hand drawn vector snowflakes from wayyy back? I thought it would be a good time to bring them back for this week’s tutorial and pair them with a more intricate snowflake to really show off the handmade look of this effect. I also happen to have a digital recycled paper pack and handmade paper pack which I thought would bring some nice authenticity to finish off the whole piece (pick up some free ones here). Read on to create your own!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

Happy Friday! I’m so excited to announce the conclusion of the Font Project this week! It’s been a great 6 weeks learning how to really take a font from some doodled letters on paper, to typing on screen. I know I still have a ways to go with learning the ins and outs of Glyphs Mini (as with any kind of software), but it’s a challenge I’m looking forward to take on. I have a few final tips I wanted to share from this week’s work, and I also want to announce that my new font has a name and it’s available for download! Read on for it all!

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Crafts, Hand Lettering, Tutorials

Happy Thursday! So, today I’m doing something a little different..a written craft tutorial 🙂 I created a Happy Birthday block print a few months back to save a little dough on birthday cards this year (plus, who doesn’t love a hand made card better anyway?!), and I took process photos as I carved. I came across the process shots the other night and thought they’d be fun to share. Lucky timing too, if anyone wants to block print some holiday cards this year (wink, wink). The process is super simple and the final outcome has such a crafty, love-injected feel that just looking through the photos again makes me want to break out my carving tools 🙂 Photos, instructions + links to the products used all listed below!

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Photoshop, Tutorials, Typography

A while back, I shared how to create dimensional typography in Illustrator, which is perfect for artwork that needs to be rescaled to different dimensions. But what if you already know the biggest your type needs to be seen at and you’d like to use Photoshop instead? In this week’s tutorial, I share how to create that dimensional typography quickly and easily in Photoshop using the rectangular marquee + pen tool to create selections and a soft brush to create those dimensional shadows. And! Since it’s Thanksgiving month and all, we’ll finish everything off with a small fall detail 🍃 😉Feel free to use these ideas for Thanksgiving invitations or greeting cards! Let’s get started!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Happy Friday and welcome to Week 5 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! I can’t believe next week is our last week! This past week was such a HUGE week of learning for me. Taking your letters from Illustrator and putting them into Glyphs Mini is definitely not as simple as copy/paste – but it isn’t hard, I promise! Just a *little* tedious. You shall see 😉 Below I have a full video on how I set up Glyphs Mini and how I set up my Illustrator file to bring everything in at the right sizes and finished the video off with kerning in Glyphs Mini and exporting the font, then typing with it in Illustrator. As tedious as this week was with a learning curve and just the steps in general, it was so incredibly satisfying. Read on to see these letters become a font!

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Freebies, Hand Lettering, Typography

With November right around the weekend, it’s time for a new desktop wallpaper! Here in Georgia, all of the green has officially transitioned into oranges and browns and sidewalks carry a little rustle of leaves with every step. I’m really enjoying the cooler breezes, the absence of humidity, and I’m soaking in every fall walk we can squeeze in before I’m bundled head to toe 🙂

I decided to go a little ‘harvest’ themed with these November desktop wallpapers, incorporating the geometric feather we created in Illustrator this week, along with a hand drawn leafy stem from the leaves + flourishes pack. The download includes two common resolutions: 1920×1080 and 1280×1024 with and without dates; preview images below!

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Illustration, Illustrator, Tutorials

Happy Tuesday! As we approach Thanksgiving month, I thought Katherine’s request for a tutorial on feathers in Illustrator was a great idea this week. Since no style was specified in her request, I decided to share how to replicate two styles I love – organic and geometric/iconic. We’ll go over a bunch of quick tips, like easily altering paths, applying clipping masks, expanding strokes and utilizing the pathfinder palette. At the end of this tutorial, you’ll have an organic and geometric/iconic style feather you’ll be able to apply any color or texture to, alter easily, and implement to any application in both CMYK and RGB. Read on to see how!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #4 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See the previous 3 weeks here. This past week was spent vectorizing the lowercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator in the same manner the uppercase was vectorized last week. Since the uppercase portion has a pretty smooth/clean aesthetic compared to the original live trace, I worked to maintain that same cleanliness with similar weight contrasts throughout the lowercase. One of the biggest lessons this week was that creating consistency throughout the lowercase is definitely more challenging than with the uppercase. There are far more details in the lowercase letterforms that you don’t really realize until you get into it. For example: the weight contrasts and curvature of the ‘c’ should be the same as in the lowercase ‘o’ should be the same in the lowercase ‘e’, etc. This created quite a few differences in the original drawn letters to the cleaned versions, but when placed together to form simple words, the font really started to come to life! The personality I had intended is coming through and it has me really excited about getting this into Glyphs Mini. As with last week, I took a bunch of timelapse videos of my Illustrator work where you can see me pulling portions of other letterforms to define new ones. Read on to see it all!

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