LETTERING + GRAPHIC
DESIGN LEARNING
Hope you had a wonderful holiday! Since we’re just about to welcome the new year, this week I thought it would be fun to make a custom resolutions list in Adobe Illustrator! We’ll create it in a printable style, so you can reuse it every year, too. Grab your free holiday vector pack and create your own below!
If you’ve been here for any length of time, then you know I have a slight obsession with watercolor. Part of it is mixing beautiful color combinations together, and another is creating abstract and unique textures. Creating unique textures allows you to then use them in designs, producing an outcome no other person is capable of replicating – ever. And that makes everything even more special. As you might imagine, I’ve spent many hours experimenting with watercolors and this week I want to let you in on 3 simple tricks to create unique watercolor textures of your own. It doesn’t matter which kind of watercolors you have on hand, either – these tricks will work with em all 😉
Creating custom brushes in Photoshop is one of my favorite things to do! I love using them for lettering (paired with a wacom tablet), extra decorative elements or just to add a little bit of unique style to whatever I’m making. What’s even better is that they are really quick and easy to make and Photoshop offers a ton of settings to truly make them original. If you’ve checked out my Intro to Photoshop class, you could easily integrate a custom brush to really make your layout special!
In this week’s tutorial, I’ll walk you through what all of those settings do and we’ll create a custom brush in Photoshop together. At the end of the tutorial, you’ll have everything you need to start creating and using your own brand spankin’ new brushes 🙂 Everything is below!
As we get closer to the end of April, I looked up when Mother’s Day was this year and was surprised to see it’s pretty early – May 8th! Looks like we’re also getting a Friday the 13th in May, which happens to be both my mom’s and my youngest sister’s birthday. I see a lot of card making in my near future 🙂
Speaking of cards – if you’re short on time or want to go DIY this year, here’s your opportunity to take care of things early for an on time mailbox delivery. This week’s freebie is a printable Mother’s Day card with a folded size of 6″x4″ (perfect for any A4 sized envelope). The card is laid out on an 8.5″x11″/A4 sized sheet of paper with all trim marks included so you can print it out at home without any hassle. Download link and preview image below!
Happy Tuesday! I want to start by saying wow to everyone who has checked out Bounce Lettering! I’m so grateful for all of the kind feedback and I am so impressed and inspired by all of the wonderful projects that are coming out of the class! I thought I’d take bounce lettering/waterbrush lettering even a little further this week with a free add-on tutorial to both classes.
A style that is gaining in popularity over on Instagram is rainbow brush lettering. It would take foreverrrr to alternate colors to form a word, let alone form the word as pretty as you’d like with so many re-dips. In this week’s video, I’m sharing a trick for applying a rainbow of color to your brush lettering without a zillion re-dips in the process 🙂 There are two methods shown in the video – one to ease you into the process and the other to take full advantage of all the colors you’d like. Links to the products used + everything you need to know to start rainbow brush lettering below!
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!
I have been working well into the wee morning hours this past week preparing for my new Skillshare class coming early next week. I don’t want to give it entirely away, but there are some pretty vector elements + watercolor textures involved! I’m sooo excited about the class I wanted to give a tiny sneak peek of what I’ve been spending all that time on! Since vector elements play a big role in the class, I created a monster set of over 100 hand drawn vector leaves and flourishes. This set was created for people who may not want to spend as many hours as I did making them 🙂 Today I want to give away 5 of them for free!
Did you know the 21st was the first day of Summer? 4 days ago, the world’s position said ‘I grant you Summer’ and we here in the US said, ‘why, thank you. I accept.’
Maybe that was just me.
I moved to Savannah, Georgia in 2006 to finish my undergrad at SCAD but also to escape the 6 month winters (that’s not a joke) Upstate NY so generously gifted me the previous 20 years. I grew a special love for summer waiting for it to come, while I shoveled snow every October through March. So, summer and I go way back, and even though summers are a bajillion times more intense in the South (now Atlanta) than I ever experienced in the North, it’s something I look forward to every single year.
Did you know the 21st was the first day of Summer? 4 days ago, the world’s position said ‘I grant you Summer’ and we here in the US said, ‘why, thank you. I accept.’
Maybe that was just me.
I moved to Savannah, Georgia in 2006 to finish my undergrad at SCAD but also to escape the 6 month winters (that’s not a joke) Upstate NY so generously gifted me the previous 20 years. I grew a special love for summer waiting for it to come, while I shoveled snow every October through March. So, summer and I go way back, and even though summers are a bajillion times more intense in the South (now Atlanta) than I ever experienced in the North, it’s something I look forward to every single year.
It’s time for another Text Drive post! To be honest, there’s nothing I love typing with more than a beautiful script. There’s something about the way all the letters connect so seamlessly, so beautifully, all at the same time. While brush scripts are definitely in the spotlight these days, there’s something to be said for more subtle, personality driven, simple scripts… Scripts that have *just* enough decoration where you scale them up or zoom out a bit and take them in. Bonus points when you’ve got a great quote to typeset 🙂 As with all text drive posts, here are two similar fonts, one for free (Daydreamer) and one for a fee (Mulberry Script) as well as a little summary of what I love about each and what fonts I’d pair them with!
I think this blog makes it pretty obvious I’m a big fan of anything handmade 🙂 And I loveeee typography – it’s the reason I got into design in the first place. So, if we put those two together, we get this post! Handmade fonts are gaining popularity in a big way, especially on Creative Market (the best seller from all of last year was a handmade font!). So here are 8 handmade fonts to add to your collection, all of which happen to be super affordable, too!
Happy Tuesday! In this week’s tutorial, we’ll create a retro type invitation postcard from scratch using Adobe Illustrator. We’ll start by setting up our document, organize our layers and apply a simple typographic effect. The final result is a print ready, 300dpi CMYK invitation postcard which can easily be colored however you like.
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