I love Hand Lettering!

For as long as I've been able to hold a pencil, I have loved doodling and hand-lettering.  I love to make swirls and swashes and fit letters together like a puzzle.  And lately, I've been doing more lettering projects than usual.

I'm thrilled that chalkboard art is so popular right now!  This is a design I just did for the tote bag company I do a lot of work for, and it was just bought by a big store chain yesterday!  So, in about 6 months, it should be printed and shipped and in the stores as a large recycled poly tote bag. (and I think I'll make some prints and cards from it and offer them in my etsy shop).

Here's what it looked like when I was playing with the design:

I work out the "doodle" at about half size, doing a lot of scribbling and erasing until I like the result.  I like to work on tracing paper, which lets me jot out ideas and layer them, auditioning how they might look.

Here's another design I'm developing:

and one more:

Over the holidays, I did hand lettering on a mirror as a gift for a young friend.  The words are lyrics from a Justin Timberlake song that are meaningful to my daughter and her BFF:

I had some enamel paint pens that work great on glass.  HOWEVER,  working on that reflective surface about made me go NUTS.  It was hard to transfer a guide to the glass, and then hard to draw a line and have a doubled reflection of it show up underneath it.  Between the fumes from the paint pen and the double images, I ended up with one killer headache!!

And it was also really hard to photograph that mirror surface! I have to hand it to pro photographers who can do that so well.

Finally, one more lettering project I recently completed.....my daughter is an RA at college and wanted to give her residents (all 32 of them!!) a little belated gift for Christmas.  She came up with the idea of a little stamped charm with each girl's initial.  The charms were super inexpensive, ordered from Fire Mountain Gems.  While she was home on winter break, we stamped and then gave each a hammered texture. (They had been very shiny bright silver plated brass, and the hammering made them look a lot richer.)

 

Anyway, back to the hand-lettering.  On dark blue cardstock (school color!), I used a white gel pen to script each name.  She also had to come up with new little "Door Dec" nametags for the new semester, so she was able to use these little cards to serve that purpose as well.   Two birds ~ one stone!!

 And that, dear readers, is the tale of my latest adventures in hand lettering!