Little Dude

Here are some preliminary sketches for the Little Dude lettering design. This project is another example of how I change letterforms and structure while drawing in Adobe Illustrator. The tight sketch was a good start but was out of balance and the cross stroke of the double t did not read properly. All in all I am pleased with the final result and plan to continue developing this lettering style.

The Amazing SB

This is a project from last year that I'm going to enter in the Best Of 2009 at LetterCult. SB is a dog I've been taking care of for a few years and I wanted to create a lettering piece that honors his amazing personality.

The sketch was a quick wrist exercise with little detail. The scroll lines and flourishes were drawn freehand in Illustrator and adjusted as each letter was drawn. After drawing Amazing and SB I decided to make the design symmetrical and place The on top. This piece will probably be reproduced as a T-shirt sometime in 2010.

SkinnyBoy

The concept sketch was drawn on a 5" X 8" sheet of notebook paper.


The sketch was scanned for a template in Illustrator. The letters were drawn using single strokes of the pen tool. The offset path filter was applied to the strokes for the base letterform shapes. I added serifs to the path shapes and adjusted all vertical stroke thickness. Some letters required changes from the original concept sketch.


I eventually drew all the letters needed to build a complete character set and imported each letter to Font Lab Studio for output to OpenType format.

A Tattoo Lettering Project

I recently accepted a tattoo lettering project from a person in England. He requested the words My My Hey Hey. This was a complex lettering treatment to create with a interlocking letters and a swash on the bottom.

My studio wall was filled with sketches and overlapping tissue studies to find a visual solution for balance and flow of connecting letterforms. I eventually found the solution with the two lowercase y's and scanned the tissues needed for use as templates in Adobe Illustrator.