Hello, everyone! I hope you all had a lovely holiday season and new year. I'm getting back into work this week after taking some time off to spend with family and friends.
Lately, I've been busily preparing for the National Stationery Show in New York in a few weeks, so I thought I'd share some of my process with all of you today.
One of my big goals for the show is to update my greeting card line (which is the main focus of the stationery show, of course) to include cards with messages on the front. Since I already have a ton of illustrations to choose from, and I really love hand lettering, I'm adding hand-lettered messages to my existing artwork.
To get started, I picked out a bunch of illustrations I wanted to add messages to, placed them in a mockup file that was sized just like an A-2 greeting card, and started brainstorming message ideas. Once I had a suitable pun (can't resist!), I quickly jotted out the letters to see how they would fit into the card design.
I then sent those images over to my iPad to start the lettering process in Procreate. The first step is to add some lines to each block of text to make sure my letterforms are all sized approximately the same and that they line up well in a row.
Now it's time to start lettering. I experimented with a few different styles of lettering to see what felt like the best fit with the image. Here you can see I started out with a script font.
Once I find a font style I like, it's just a matter of drawing all the letters. When they're complete, I send the file back to my computer to make the final adjustments in Photoshop (the controls are much finer there, giving me better control than in Procreate), and I wind up with the final image.
So far, over the past few months, I've created about a dozen new cards this way (you can find them in my shop here), and I'm working on a bunch more. We'll see how many more I can finish before the cutoff date for the printer to get them in my hands before the show. :)