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Home2015 (Page 3)

October 2015

Color, Patterns, Roundups, Textures

Things have been all about watercolor typography lately – and having the versatility to create such specific detail with a waterbrush, I started to wonder – what else can I create fine detail in with a waterbrush? I am self admittedly not an illustrator – or painter for that matter. I’m a designer that has always loved to also doodle and create things with my hands. When I was young, I’d ask for an ‘art kit’ from the craft store every Christmas and birthday and I’m grateful my parents always found a way to deliver. I could doodle some legit cartoon characters (following an 8th grade standard), but realism or the patience to carry out long form artwork has always been MIA in my gifts department.

I’ve always had a passion for logic + mathematics (totally weird, I know – almost became a math teacher, but that’s another story). I think it’s probably the geometry of it all, but I am a complete sucker for textiles. Anyway, the idea of putting patterns and watercolors together prompted a pinterest hunt, which brought about this post today. If you like watercolors + patterns, this is some serious kind of eye candy. I had to make this post have a theme or I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from posting every beautiful piece of artwork I came across. So! Here are 10 dreamy watercolor patterns to go extra swoon-mode over 🙂 Happy Thursday!

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Color, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Tutorials

Happy Tuesday! Today is my official announcement that my newest Skillshare class, Waterbrush Lettering Essentials, is live! If you enjoyed this tutorial or this one on using a waterbrush for watercolor or ink lettering, this class was made for you. We’ll go much deeper than in the tutorials by going over typographic watercolor blending techniques and 3 methods for establishing your own unique lettering style using a waterbrush. The final project in the class is a waterbrush lettered greeting card you’ll be able to gift to a loved one – and with the holidays just around the corner, your cards will definitely be standing out. 😉 Enrollment in the class includes a resources pdf which lists all of the products used, a brush-style lettering inspiration pdf so you can find lettering to inspire your own style, and a greeting card template pdf you’ll be able to use to make greeting cards from any paper you have at home. For readers of this blog, I’m giving the resources AND the inspiration pdf away for free this week!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #3 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See Week 1 here and Week 2 here. This past week was spent vectorizing the uppercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator, which was created last week. I followed the same methods of vectorizing + cleaning paths as seen in this tutorial and this one. I found my pen tool and occasionally using my Wacom tablet to be the most helpful when it came to cleaning up lines (here are my Wacom recommendations if interested), but anyone handy with a mouse could do a very similar job. I tweaked my initial live trace slightly (exact settings I used are below) to create rougher outlines to start with, which gave me more room to decide how ‘hand drawn’ each letter could feel. Read on for more of my process and some time lapse videos!

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Freebies, Hand Drawn, Illustrator

Today is an especially happy Thursday, because 2 years ago today was the very first Every-Tuesday post! I can’t believe how much has changed in that time and I couldn’t be happier delivering new design goodies and tutorials here every week. Speaking of design goodies – it wouldn’t be a proper birthday without a few design gifts! To celebrate 2 years, this week’s freebie is a set of birthday vectors as an ai, eps and psd for versions of Illustrator and Photoshop, CS3 or newer. See the full preview below!

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Holiday, Illustration, Illustrator, Tutorials

Spence doodled out this adorable Frankenstein the other day and I just had to bring it to life in Illustrator! Since flat illustrations/icons are still very popular these days, I decided to draw it out in a flat illustration style with a half face shade and a long shadow. This would work great on a party invite, perched atop toothpicks on Halloween themed cupcakes, printed out life sized on a front door, or tied around candy goodie bags. This same style could be adapted for a ghost, witch, pumpkin and/or skeleton to create a full set. Video tutorial below along with the template sketch used in the tutorial!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

Welcome to week #2 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! This past week was spent drawing letters out…a lot. My font is inspired by the free font, Amatic, whose hand drawn quality and character I really like, but wish it had a lowercase and a bit of a stronger presence structure-wise.

I started out with a .25mm Micron using the 2nd font guide sheet which had a taller x-height. I really liked how things were looking, but decided to go with my medium waterbrush filled with speedball super black since it naturally gave my letters some nice varied line weights which will give the font more character overall. I played around with applying different levels of pressure on my downstrokes with the waterbrush and liked a lighter pressure best since it makes the letters more readable (and small counters wouldn’t risk being accidentally filled in with extra ink from the pressure). Process shots from the last week below!

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Freebies, Hand Drawn, Holiday, Illustrator

This week’s freebie is a set of 10 hand drawn vector spider webs to add a little more creepy crawly to your Halloween designs this year. 😉 Set includes corner webs and full spider webs to make positioning, cropping and usage a piece of cake. A bonus couple of dangling spider vectors also included for good measure. 🙂 All vector elements are included as an ai, eps and psd file for versions of Illustrator and Photoshop, CS3 or newer!

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Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Holiday, Illustration, Tutorials, Typography

Last week, I gave away some free October desktop wallpapers and I wanted to share how I created the typography before I digitized it 🙂 I’m calling it skeleton typography, since it was inspired by Day of the Dead sugar skull designs and we’re creating some decorative ‘guts’ for our type. In this fine art tutorial, we create our skeleton typography using 4 writing utensils and a sheet of 110# white cardstock. Get creative with your own Halloween typography this year using the same techniques for any words you choose! Read on to see how 🙂

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Personal

On March 5, 2012, I started my previous job. While I had met many of the people who worked there my first week, the sound of a guy’s voice who I was sure I hadn’t met yet (because I knew I would have remembered that voice) caught my attention. I could hear it coming from the stairwell, around the corner from where I sat back then. On a group lunch outing, we had finally officially met. Spencer – tall, dark hair, brown eyes and a soccer player’s calves. A girl could do worse, haha. But we both worked together and that kind of thing can get tricky if you’re not both 100% sure of taking that leap. By the end of that July, we threw caution aside and we’ve been inseparable ever since.

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

This is a big post for me. Like, bucket-list big. No kidding, Spence has heard me talk about creating my own font every week (if not every day!) for over a year.

If you’ve ever been here before, you know my love for type is pretty intense and I know I have some fonts in me waiting to get out. Maybe that’s you, too. On the chance that it is, I’ve decided to create a weekly post for the next 6 weeks for us to hold each other accountable and really do it – really create our own handmade fonts! I’ve never made a font before, so we are definitely in this together 🙂

Every week on Friday, I’ll share the progress I’ve made, resources I’ve used and tips/tricks I’ve learned. I’ll keep posting process shots over on Instagram with the tag #etfontproject and I’ll share the steps I plan to make for the next week’s font project post. At the end of this, we’ll have our own handmade fonts we can share with each other or sell online.

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Freebies, Hand Lettering, Typography

Happy October! I had so much fun creating the September wallpaper, I think I’m going to make wallpapers a new regular monthly post (it’ll also keep me from having the same wallpaper for 2 years – eek!). Since it’s Halloween month here in the US, I had to go a little spooky with this one 😉 . In the spirit of ghosts and goblins, I created some hand drawn skeleton lettering for your October desktop wallpapers! The download includes two common resolutions: 1920×1080 and 1280×1024 with and without dates; preview images below!

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Illustrator, Tutorials

After the tutorial How to Repeat Any Shape Along a Circular Path, I had a few questions on how to repeat shapes along any path, not necessarily a circle. In this week’s tutorial, I share a quick tip that will make repeating shapes along any path a cinch in Illustrator. In this video, we’ll utilize the shape tool and blend tool to create repeats perfect for borders, dividers or accents for your designs. We’ll go over repeating a single shape style and expand into a shape transition with a color blend for more complex results using the same technique. Read on to see how!

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