Practice Makes Progress and Purpose: Handlettering for the New Year

Practice makes progress inevitable...

If you keep working at anything long enough, you will eventually get better at it. This vectored sketch is proof of that, for sure!

Earlier this year, I started vectoring a project in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad for my husband’s birthday. Illustrator is not my native language. Well, neither is digital art, but we won’t get into that.

Vectoring that sketch eventually worked out. But, it was a trip trying to get through that program for the first time.

Cut to today and while it still takes me much longer than tracing a sketch in the Procreate app, my Illustrator skills have gotten a lot better!

In fact, this time around, I was even able to focus on the message rather than just practicing the vectoring process.

A couple weeks ago, I completed the #letterpdx challenge where I chose a word that would be my focus for next year. My word was ‘purpose’. There will always be the customary lettering pieces to welcome the month, a holiday, or the new year. But, I just feel more connected to my lettering project if it feels more purposeful. With the idea of being purposeful in mind, I started developing the idea behind my ‘Happy New Year’ sketch.

Most folks will recognize the words in this phrase from their bible. The entire verse reads:

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I lam making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
Revelations 21:5

During the last half of 2020, and for all of 2021, I had to lean heavily on my faith to pull through the challenges I was seeing at home…Still do. Up until that horrible day in 2020, I had been out of practicing any kind of devotion for so long, when my trouble hit, I was grasping for something to hold onto. Thankfully, even though we are not always so faithful to God, He is always faithful to us. But, inside, I just felt like I needed a fresh start with Him to re-establish my commitment.

I started attending church online and I even completed a pretty rigorous 30 Day Bible Lettering Challenge to marry my devotion with my lettering. Apart from dealing with those challenges I mentioned, I wanted to spend as much time with Him as possible. I needed to just to keep it all together.

Today, it’s a bit brighter as we see far fewer seizures than those days and we can breathe a bit easier. So, for my Happy New Year post, I thought I’d try to make something that might be inspiring for anyone needing a fresh start of their own here at the end of the year. I was so motivated by this idea, that I wanted the lettering to even feel like the words behind it.

To start, I began thinking about the word ‘fresh’. It occurred to me that the word had a few meanings that could be explored in the process.

For one, the word fresh is about being new or different.
Another definition could be described as full of life, zest and energy
The term ‘fresh’ is related to slang and can be substituted for the words ‘cool’ or ‘dope’.

I started a moodboard using Milanote for these ideas and I came up with these images and colors you see below.

The takeaways from this board to me were that vivid blue and warm, zesty oranges, the possibility of growing foilage or water and script lettering.

I started lettering with all this in mind. I decided to go with adding in some bold script script (at least as bold as I can render right now) because of the lettering on the hat in the moodboard (the tattoo script was beautiful, but more romantic than what I wanted for this). If the script on a hat that says ‘dope’ doesn’t embody ‘dope’, I don’t know what does!

After all this idea-generating and some initial sketches of what the letters could look like, I traced the sketch I chose first in Procreate for smoother lines to follow and to rearrange the letters a bit more. Then, I opened it in Illustrator to start vectoring.

It’s not very often that I do any lettering piece that is 100% script…But in comparison to the styles I usually like to letter, script looks much more modern and new. What I didn’t consider, but loved in the assembly of this board and the final result later was that script can also be as casual and accessible as a pair of denim jeans, and I really liked that.

The vectoring process for me took some time. But, I primarily only used the pen, the pencil tool, direct selection tool and the color palette for this part of the process. Aside from using the Image Trace function, that’s pretty much the extent of my knowledge in Illustrator…Once I reach ninja-level skills with the pen tool, I can take another deep dive into what all the program can do. But, for now, these functions are enough to chew on for me.

To use photos, I exported the lettering to Photoshop. From there, I was able to change the opacity of the layer with the lettering in order to erase sections of it allowing it to appear to intertwine with the leaves in the photo at the end of this post.

I just liked the photo of the oranges (directly below on the right), but I couldn’t figure out a way to make it look like it intertwined with the droplets without it looking weird spatially. So, I just left that one as is. Although now, I’m wondering if a few splashes or splatters to resemble the white ink could have worked there…

While I haven’t quite perfected my script game either (the eye of that ‘k’ could have used a bit more negative space…and I think the ‘Things’ is a touch off on the angle of inclination for me…a reason to take even more time in the sketching phase), I feel like the end result is very much like I imagined it in my head. It’s all coming along.

I can’t say every project will get as much attention. Holiday break is almost over and teacher time just doesn’t allow.