Casual Hand Lettering: From Drawing To Digitizing

1. Course Presentation: Hey guys, my name is Linda. I'm a designer and together with my husband David, I run a creative studio and lifestyle blog called killing. This is something that we do while we are living nomadically, traveling around the world as much as we can, grabbing inspiration from all those experiences, and genuinely trying to expand our creative skills all the time. Always eager to learn new things, new creative things to try out. In our creative work as well as any visual tryouts that we tried to share, hand lettering elements tend to be very pleasant and this is something that I love to do, I love hand lettering, I love how it can bring such a unique touch to basically anything visual. Whether we're talking about simple things such as blue posts, social media posts, to poster designs and friend designs. It just makes everything look so much more interesting. Today, I wanted to share this with you in a non-intimidating way so that you too can get started. You can see my easy process from sketching to digitizing. I will definitely share some tips about what tools you can try to use, some techniques without going too technical. Because the idea is to inspire you to start your hand lettering journey from scratch, and to let you enjoy this co-creative process. If you're interested in trying this out, then I hope to see you in our course. 2. What makes lettering so special: Hey guys. Thank you so much for enrolling in my class. I'm really excited to inspire you to start hand lettering. My name is Linda and together with my husband David, I run a creative business called [inaudible] We run it while living nomadically, traveling around the world. We work on all sorts of creative projects. We also have a blog on the side, we really use this space to share our adventures and share our discoveries, so it's a place where we express ourselves and we also use it as an opportunity to be creative and to make everything in there look really nice and interesting. We use our photography, and administration, and of course, hand lettering. It's been something that I've personally been doing for a few years. It all started really when I realized that letter forms don't have to just be written out. They can be drawn. The hand lettering that I do is now present all over our blog posts and our Instagram posts and sometimes even client projects and all kinds of things and I just love it. It brings such a unique touch to everything that we put out there. I'm still on this journey, I love learning even more things about it and to keep practicing it, it's an ongoing journey really, and that's what's fun about it. So there are many cool things about hand lettering and what I personally love about it, as a designer is that, it always brings a personal touch to whatever you design, whatever you layout. Instead of using a font that thousands of other people have used and that is maybe even generic, you can integrate. With hand lettering you can bring a personal and unique touch to whatever you're doing. I love how hand lettering always ends up being something that carries your soul to it, once you practice it, you can find your own style, your own voice. Another cool thing about hand lettering, especially for example, versus calligraphy, which many people confuse. What is hand lettering? What's calligraphy? Calligraphy means the art of writing well, to write appropriate. Calligraphy is very much based on certain rules and it's about perfecting each letter form and usually those letter forms are based on circumstandards that have already been placed before, with hand lettering, there are no such rules, there are no standards about it. You can do whatever you want. It's basically the art of drawing a word whichever way you like, whichever way you please and that's what's interesting about it. Experimenting with different styles, you can have so much fun. I mean, there are so many ways to do hand lettering as you will probably, or you might have already seen it online through other artists. I mean, there are so many different styles that one can experiment with when they are starting their hand littering journey. It can be more technical and square, it can be more of a free flow style. It's unbelievable how far it can go. In this way I really consider it an art. Through the years I've personally developed my own style of hand lettering, which I like to call casual hand lettering because I've never really been into the technical aspect any more technical approaches to hand lettering, that's just not me, because I'm really a clumsy person and I always like things to flow freely. I don't like to have boundaries and stuff like that and so this is more of the hand lettering that I'm going to display in this course. It's going to be an easy hand lettering style that you can start with anytime and eventually find your own style, your own voice with. 3. Essentials: Tools & Paper Types: So let's get started with your hand lettering practice. I'm going to share some tools that you might want to get started with. The first set of tools that I would really recommend for any beginner is a pencil, and your eraser and a ruler. These three are going to be really useful for you to practice with, to start experimenting, withdrawing your letters and just drafting out, and being able to practice and erase if you're not satisfied with the results, and practice, practice, practice. This is great for aligning your experience. Then as you go along, you might want to experiment with different pens, that's the fun part of hand lettering. I have a few that I'm going to share with you, and they're not all pens, I actually even have a brush. I have this faber-castell, 0.3 thin marker pen. This is very good if I want to make some really thin, really minimal hand lettering. Then I have this sharpie, we all know those, they are just a little bit thicker than the pens that I mentioned before. This is really good for getting a kind of lettering that has a really good definition to it, and that is just having one thickness to it. Then I have these brush pens which have a pointy tip, and I really like to use those when I'm doing something that has to be a little bit more dynamic. If you want to try brush lettering, you can go into any art shop and just look for brush pens. I don't really have any particular brand that I'm fascinated with, because as we travel around the globe, I get to try many different ones and yeah, there were some that were better than others, but it's just about experimenting really. Don't get too tied up into all the tools, it's not about the tools. Then I have another brush pen which was actually gifted to me from a Japanese friend, and it's a Japanese calligraphy brush pen. This one is really nice because it has a rough aspect to it, it's normally made for a Japanese calligraphy. It has that imperfect stroke to it, which I'm really a fan of if I'm looking for something a bit more rough. Then on some occasions, I like to use brushes. Brushes are really cool as well just do experiment with, I have this one from Darwin and it's really cool, because I can just put water in there or ink and just have it portable, go along with me anywhere and just keep practicing wherever I am. I really like this one, I think they have many different thicknesses. If you go into an art shop, you might be able to find those. I also have a classical drawing brush, which I like to use either with ink, black ink. Sometimes I dilute it if I want to get a bit more of a texture, and I also use it with watercolor, is just about experimenting really. These are the tools that I'm using at the moment. As you can see, it's not so complicated. When I travel it's even just half of that really, I really do not like to mess around too much with that because I don't think that's the essence of hand lettering. I encourage you to try a lot of different tools if that's what you want to do, but don't let that intimidate you in your process of learning hand lettering. So if you're starting out and you don't even have certain pen or anything like that, you just want to experiment your letter forms which I really recommend as a beginner, you have your trio here, the pencil, eraser, and ruler. I would then recommend to start practicing with a sketchbook, or a notebook, or something like that. Because you will be able to practice in there page by page, and track your progress. This is going to be really a cool way to experiment, to try many different things, and then you'll be able to go page by page and track your progress. See what ends up feeling better for you because the key is practice. As you go along, you might want to experiment with different papers as well because if you're trying out many different hand lettering styles along the way, you might also notice that using different papers helps you as well get many different results. You can start with something as simple as printer paper, just regular, flimsy, printer paper. If you're not using tools that are too watery, normal pens, no watercolor or things like that, then this is more than enough for you to practice with. You don't need to go crazy with the paper that you're using. Another good alternative is to use a multi-use paper that you can find in an art shop, that is going to be equally good for pencil or ink, or watercolor, anything. You can often find those in art shops, and they can suit whatever you're practicing with. This is very versatile. I have a huge sketchbook here, but you don't need to get such a massive one, you can just get whatever works for you really. If you want to later on experiment with lettering that requires watercolor or ink, much more watery surfaces, then you might want to experiment with watercolor paper, because it's really thick, it's sandy, and it will absorb all the ink, you will see that this creates a certain different results than if you were to use a printing paper. It creates a really, really nice texture which I will display later on, as well for sure. Then we have the optional tools that you might want to use if you want to perfect your hand lettering or if you want to digitize it. This is a little tip of mine, I really enjoy using tracing paper. Tracing paper like this one that you can find in an art shop or any paper shop I suppose. This is really useful if you want to practice your letterforms, and if you have been lettering and lettering all over again, and something just doesn't feel right and something that you've hand lettered then you want to perfection it a little bit, you can place your tracing paper over your experiment, and improve it from there on, keeping the shape that you had initially. This is really awesome to perfect your shapes. It's a bit of a changing tool, perhaps. But I love it, I just love it, because it saves me time and in the end I get the results I want. It's perfect, I'm still learning as well, so this is always handy. Then as you go along, if you want to digitize your hand lettering, and if you want to use it then for your blog, or Instagram posts, or whatever. If you want to use your hand lettering for something more than just the paper its own. If you want to transfer it to your creative experiments or your computer, then you will want different was to digitize it. You can either use a scanner, I have this little portable scanner from brother, and I use this one because it's great to travel with, but you can use any scanner really. The more they go high in definition, the better is going to be, especially if you want to use your hand lettering for something massive, you never know. This one goes up to 600 dpi. This is perfect for me if I ever want to use my hand lettering to produce a huge poster or something like that. But if you're not intending to create huge posters, and are just going to stick with some blog posts, or Instagram posts or things like that, you can perfectly just take photos of your hand lettering with a phone. You will simply shoot a photo of your hand lettering, and send it to yourself via email or Dropbox or something like that. Just make sure it's in the highest quality possible. This should be more than enough to do these more digital things with it. I suppose you're really excited to try some things out, and to check out the process and to start experimenting. Now, I will definitely share some more practical tips with you as we follow my hand lettering process, so that you can have something concrete to practice with as well. If that sounds good to you, then let's go right ahead and I'll show you the hand lettering practice that I do. 4. A Casual Lettering Process & Tips: Lets begin our hand lettering experimentation. In order to do that, we're going to pick a one word. I'm going to go for the word, simple, to keep things simple. I'm going to start with just the pencil, the gum, and the ruler. To just get started with sketching the word in different ways and seeing what is the best, what looks interesting and so on. Lets begin experimenting with that. At first I'm going to start without a ruler, I'm just going to use my pencil, sketch the word just like that freely and see what gives. I'm just starting to get used to this. Every time the result is something different. This is more of a freestyle hand lettering, just writing something as if it's a signature or something like that, just letting it flow. Let's try something else. How about having all the letters capital like so, with a bit of spacing between them or maybe something a bit of decoration to the edges of the letters. This is not my writing style, but why not? You can experiment with anything you like. Even anything that you've seen online and that you're curious about like a hand lettering style that has a bit of embellishments and things like that. Now's your moment. If you're using a pencil and a piece of paper, you can just experiment with hand lettering your chosen word and just try to design it in different ways. Since you're using a pencil, you can always just use your gum and erase something that you're not a big fan of. For example, here I'm not a big fan of this E. I want to make it a little bit more funky. What about this? If you're doing it with a pencil and you have a gum you can always go back and erase and make things better. But personally at the moment, I'm really digging this style. I want it to be airy and flowing and everything. I'm just going to maybe go back to this and just keep experimenting with this style. Maybe having all the letters attached like this. I missed my E, but it's not a problem. I can actually erase it and correct it somewhat. This is just a sketch. You will just pass your pen over it and see what gives after that. I really like having my first letter of every word to being a bit bigger when I do this style, I think it gives a really nice volume and nice aspect to the word. I'm maybe just going to try to experiment with a different kind of S. How about something more like this and a bit more decorate. This is not bad. I'm going all over the place here. This is difficult. My hand lettering experimenting I have no structure whatsoever. Actually talking about a structure, how about we try using ruler. This can maybe help you guys if you are not familiar yet with doing freehand and just going for it and not having any structure whatsoever. If you're using a ruler, at least you will have some line that will guide you to keep your letters on that line somewhat and make it look balanced. This is always a help. If you want, you can try it out. Imagine I want to keep my hand lettering nice and neat on this line. Let's try it with my fancy S. This was just to show you that you can start sketching out your words with a pencil and just start to experiment different styles and see what you feel comfortable with. Once you somehow see that actually you want to go with this hand lettered piece, you can just try different pens. Not bad. I'm liking the fact that this pen is actually a little old, so we get a bit of texture here. It's not perfect. This is cool. I'm actually really liking this design. I think it looks quite balanced. I could either take it the way it is into my design. I can imagine it being part of like a little square Instagram like post on a white background just to keep the focus on the word. I think this is going to look really interesting. This is going to be my first little experiment that I'm going to show you later. But before we move forward with that, I just wanted to share one last tip. If you're doing such a hand lettering and it requires a bit of attention to the details and you like the shape of the lettering, but maybe one letter, you're not getting it right or something like that, then you can try to use a tracing paper over it and just try to perfect those last details. This is a pretty cool thing to do because in my case, I missed my E again. This needs more practice on my end, I do recognize that, but for now, I'm going to trace the word over again just the way it is here, but I'm going to perfect the E thanks to the tracing paper. This tracing paper is going to give me a second chance to perfect this design. I'm just going to go for it, this. See. It's based on exactly the same shapes, except that this time is right. So I think I could use this for my design later. I think it looks good like this is exactly the way I wanted it to look. So that's cool. That was just a really simple interpretation of hand lettered piece, and now we're going to move on to things that are a bit more complex. So the next piece I'm going to do is going to be a little bit more complex than a simple word, because it actually wants to hand letter a quote and that quote is made of four words and I actually want to give it a certain style. The quote in question is, stay wild, mood child. I would like to place it on this photo that David and I took the other day when it was full moon I think it's going to look really cool. Since this is a quote that'll have several words in, it, is going to be a little bit more complex than just the simple word. I'm going to separate it into two different pieces and each is going to have a different style. So stay wild is going to be quite minimal and moon child is going to be a little bit bolder. So the two styles are going to complement each other really well. Actually this is something that I highly encourage you to do if you are hand lettering quotes and several words together, is to play with different styles complementing each other. If you want certain words to stand out, it's a good idea to have a more minimal style to compliment them with. This is going to bring a really nice balance into your hand lettered piece and it's going to make it look really interesting. So I'm going to start right away with this and sketch my idea of how I'm seeing this. So I'm thinking, stay wild could be on top. So I'm going to trace a line to place it there and moon child would be at the bottom and have a bit more space. So let's try doing this. So stay wild for me, I think it should stay really simple. So I'm going to go with my minimal hand lettering style. I'm just going to sketch out every little letter with some spacing between, I'm really thinking the style when I have to have more simple touch. So stay wild could be like this and moon child could be a little bit more free hand. Something that has a bit of an artsy feel to it, been dreamy so. Thinking, just going to go for something like this. But this could be cool. It's just a sketch and it's definitely, as you can see, it's not aligned or anything, but it's just for me to get an idea when I'm sketching something, I like to prepare the visual idea a little bit. Then I start to experiment with it with a pen and so on. By the way, when it comes to alignment, don't freak out. This is always something that, if you're clumsy like me and you never really get it right. Of course it comes with practice, but you can also just do this when you are digitizing your hand lettering. So don't freak out, don't panic. It's going to be alright. So I'm actually going to hand letter those two different bits of the quotes separately. I'm going to begin with Moon child, because it's going to be really fun to hand letter. I see it as something that's expanding like this. It's not so condemned as our word simple was. I could imagine using a pen like this. This is on of my favorite pens when I'm looking for something that has a bit of a rough aspect to it, a bit wild and so on. So this is perfect. This is a Japanese calligraphy pen, the one that I showed you before. Every stroke has a rough aspect to it, which is going to be perfect for this. So I highly encourage you to actually experiment with different pens to get different results. It's really fun to do that. So, whoops, see if it's even too rough. But I'm going to ahead anyway, okay, we're getting somewhere. But I'm going to need to handle my pen a little bit differently. That's also something that you learned by using different pens. They all react to them differently and this one needs to be handled with a bit more softness so that it doesn't end up becoming a rough mess. So just going to experiment with this right here. Just a little bit slower this time. Look why not? The shapes of the letters are not exactly as I wanted. But I'm going to keep practicing. That's what it's all about. Then we got something here. I think this could be all right. Now let's try hand lettering for part of the quote, which is stairwell. So again, I'm just going to sketch my little letters again in a clumsy way, typical me. That's what's cool about this hand lettering style is that it's closely friendly. This can be a way maybe to begin to do it one more time. Maybe without any pre sketching just to see if that changes the dynamic and yeah, why not? This is, this could be good. We got this first the quote. I'm going to keep this bit and for the other part of the quote, I'm going to keep this one. There we go. I'm just going to erase the pencil lines, clean that up and then we're going to be able to use these sketches, scanned them in and digitized them and make something cool than them. Now I'm going to try something completely different. We're just going to 100 utter a single word, but we're going to do it a little bit differently. We are going to use watercolor. If you're using watercolor or ink, it's very cool because you can get a really interesting texture in your head. Let's ring, and this is exactly what I'm looking for in this next piece, I'm actually thinking of hand lettering the word to thrive and placing it over this photo. Actually, I'm just going to hide it behind the blends and this is going to probably look quite interesting. Might've had a bit of color and let's see what gifts. I'm going to display what I'm using here for this technique. I have my painting brush. You can use a minty brush as well, or one of these that I've displayed before and you can go for water color, or you can go for ink on its own or diluted. You can just experiment without every time it gives a different feel to it. If you dilute it with more water or if you use it pure. It's very interesting because there are so many ways to go about this and I think for me, it's one of the most interesting techniques out here because it gives you so much to play with. When I'm doing hand lettering, I'm always using black ink because even if I have all these colors, black ink is going to be the most pure color. It's going to be really easy to process later on when I'm digitizing it because it's dark and we'll have a good contrast. It will be easy to remove any background or anything like that and I can add any color later on in the process if I'm doing them. Let's go ahead and hand letter this word graph and I'm going to actually do this without any priest sketching. Because I wanted to feel really, intuitive, and much more spontaneous this time around and it might even go in every direction. So be prepared for this. But that's what's fun about the process really. It's just the experimentation. Let's begin going to maybe start with a stroke right here. Makes the letters small. This is a bit clumsy to me, but it's a good start and what's good about painting with a brush is that you can easily pass through your strokes. Again if your hands are not pushing me. In practice is that as you practice, it will get better dorm. As you can see, there's a really interesting texture has started for me here already. That's what's cool about what color I love is really, well to see this coming to life, it's not flat. Let's say. It's always unexpected results with watercolor and yeah, if you are comfortable with this, then definitely try it out. As you will be practicing with this, you can look at different artists and things like that and see maybe you get some ideas and just keep experimenting and try out if you're wanting to bring a little personal touch to what you're doing. You can also try to sketch different letters of yours and try to bring a little unique touched to them. For example, if you are making your ease a little bit different of your TEUs or something like that. Just feel free to experiment with that really and find your little personal touch. What makes your hand lettering style, unique. Let's try something completely different. This is cool. It has a more bold approach to it. It's not exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm just showing this to you because it's fun to experiment with a brush and see what you can do. I love this, it's making me really excited every time I'm working with this tau. Because all these bold letters, they all come together in this big sheet of paper and it feels really correlate it feels like there's some space where you can just express yourself. I love it. Click on the correct the texture here a little bit because I went into a direction that they don't want it to go. Here. Always add a little bit more ink, make things a little bit more to it. That was my favorite one. I think that this is the one that I'm going to use. I've perfected at the little bit, a little bit more ink and anything that's not a really neat at this point, it's not going to be a problem because I can also make things a little bit cleaner or when I digitize it. Mark this down for using it later and yeah, this is going to be really fun to digitize and to do something cool. Out of all of these three experiments we are going to take into the next step, which is going to be digitizing, standing it in and putting it into photographs or creations, anything like that, so I'm going to show you how to do that. 5. Digitizing & Creating Lettered Visuals: Now it's time to make something fun with those hands lettering experiments. We're going to go right ahead and digitize this. Since I was working on large sheets, I had to actually cut my little hand lettering experiments and stick them on an A4 sheet so that I could import them with my scanner. This is something that I had do, but if you are working with a normal format, you should be just fine. You can use a scanner. I'm using my little portable scanners here for this. If you don't have a scanner, you can also adjust to use your phone. Just make sure to take your photo of your hand lettering from higher, and facing straight down, this is very important. Then you can just send it to yourself, save it to your computer, and you'll be ready to go. Once you've got your files all scanned in and saved in your computer, then you can start working on them. We're going to start right away with the first word that I hand lettered, which was simple and we're going to do a really simple square Instagram post with it. I'm going to take my scanned file, and I'm going to open it straight into Photoshop. The first thing that I'm going to do is to remove, see locked background. I'm going to select this. This is my hand lettering that I want to keep all the rest of the background I do not need so I'm going to make this simpler. This is still the scotch tape that I used to put my design into an A4 sheet. I'm going to Zoom right into this. This is what it looks like after a test just been scanned. What we're going to do is, go right into adjustments levels. Here, we are actually going to bring the contrast a little higher. You can see when the blacks start to feel much more black, then you're on a good way because this is going to appear really nice and clean afterwards. Now you're going to bring this scale down to make the wires appear whiter. This is helping a lot to get the contrast of the image right and much more clean. I think this is good. As we can see, maybe you can see this, the image is still in colors so what we're going to do just to keep things a bit simpler, we're going to desaturate, which means that we're going to have it black and white. In order to do this, you just go on image adjustment desaturate and you'll have a black and white result. Now we got our hand lettering on a white background, it's all clean. We just want that background to go away. What do we do? Select color range. This is my favorite tool if I want to quickly remove all of the background, in this case, it's just anything that's white needs to go. We just select this. It's going to sample all of the white parts into the design and off it goes. There we go, all cleaned. Now our word simple is ready to use. What I'm going to do with this, my idea was to create a little file for Instagram and lettering experiment you're one, let's call it like that. I made it 2,000 pixels- 2,000 pixels, maybe new file for that. We're going to open it. Right now there's not much going on. I'm just going to bring a little bit of a white background here. I'm going to select my little hand lettering word and drag it in. The first thing that we're going to do here is to create guides because this is going to be really easy when you are wanting to align your design, and make sure that its in the center of the image and so on. As you saw before, this file is 2,000 pixels large and 2,000 pixels tall. This is going to be easy to divide into guides, we're going to create the guide then a tough, which is 1,000 pixels, a horizontal one. We already did a vertical ones are now to a horizontal one, at a 1,000 pixels as well. This is easy because the performance is square, so it's easy to calculate. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller. Place it right here and I think that we're going to need to clean it a little bit more just to make sure that it's by itself. Sorry. I'm selecting anything that goes on to the lettering, and on this side as well, and we're moving, so pressing back. I think it could be a little bit smaller still, we're going to try to align it in the center. Just a little bit off because as you can see that E is taking a bit of space here. We're just going to try to align it from here to there. In this way is going to be visually good. Let's see what it looks like right now. We're going to remove the guides. In order to do this, we're going to go on view, show guide's so we're going to deactivate that and there we go. The guides helped us to get it right in the center and when we remove them, you can see the final result. I'm thinking that it looks really cute like this. I would just like to make it a little bit less black. I generally don't like to see designs when there are 100 percent black so I'm going to select the Layer, and by the way, I'm going to name it so it's easier for you to see. This layer simple is for the hand lettering. This is going to be the background, which for the moment is white. This layer, this is not needed. Back to our hand lettering, I'm going to reduce the opacity a little bit, so just dragging it down to 85, so it's a little less black, and it's just a little detail but I always like to make sure it's not peach black, it looks a bit more elegant this way. I think that I would like the background to not be completely white, just a little bit off, pink, or maybe a little bit beige, I mean, I'm just picking a color just like that. But generally I pick the colors I use from images that I've seen online where I think, oh this is a really cool color or something like that. Feel free to experiment with that if you're doing something like this, and experiment with different colors. In this design, I want to keep things simple, so I'm just going to stick around with this and I'm pretty happy with the result, it's really cute. This is a really simple way to proceed with your hand lettering in future so if you want to place it in a simple background and you could also place it in this way to create a poster or something like that, if you have a word in the mind or if you want to hand letter someone's name, and you just want to make a nice visual for them, or profile picture, something really simple, really minimal then this is a cool way to experiment. Now we're going to move into the more complex moon child visual. If you remember, stay awhile, the moon child, which was going to be on top of a full moon of pictures that we took. I'm going to go grab the photo that I want to place the hand lettering on, just going to open it right here on photoshop again and I'm going to grab the scans of the hands lettering that I want to place on the photo. Here we go. First thing, I'm going to do just as before, is just to clean this up a little bit and remove the messy tape, and just keep it to the lettering so that is going to be easy to use. I'm going to go on image first thing I'm going to do in this case, since this is not turned right, I'm going to rotate it clockwise, so I can see it properly. Then I'm going to actually, again, desaturate it. No colors will be there. Again, on adjustments levels to boost the blast a little bit, so they can appear good and contrasted and when I take this down, I can actually not see the tape anymore, which is really nice because it makes the grays go away as well so we just have the blacks and the whites. I'm going to drag this up a little bit more just so it can be even more clean. It's still a little bit dirty but no worries, we're going to clean this up. The first thing that I'm going to do here is actually remove a bunch of oops. I'm going to unlock this layer and we're going to clean up this file, at least most of it so that there is no clutter. Every time you want to do this, there's tons of ways to do this, but I just select pieces and I remove them just like that, with selecting and backspace. This part here, STAY WILD, seems to be clean, Moon Child needs a bit more clean up, so I'm going to use my eraser tool right here. We can make it big enough so that you can use it fast. There you go. This is a little messy, but I'm going to remove this too so that when we removed the background, it doesn't stay. This is why I'm cleaning it up already at this stage so that everything later will be clean right away. Now, I think everything is pretty clean. There are no stains or anything like that. Select "Color Range" and select "White". All of the white background is going to be automatically removed. So select it. It's all selected, press "Backspace" and off it goes. It's all clean now. Ready to go. I'm going to import STAY WILD into our photo file, I selected it, and I'll drag it right here. It's a little bit too big. I'm going to select it and make it just a bit smaller. I'm just fitting it in at the moment and we'll see about the details later. Here we go, selecting Moon Child as well. It's going to go right in and making it smaller. This one is really big, it's going to definitely need to be way smaller than that. So we got a good size, let's name the files. This is going to be Moon Child, first layer, let's say the bottom layer, and Stay Wild, which Is going to be the top layer. It doesn't really matter, but here we go. You're going to take Stay Wild and make it a little bit smaller, just like that to imagine it visually already. I'm just going to check how large this image is. It's 1500 pixels wide. In order to put the guides, we're just going to take half of that and I'm going to make a vertical guide, which is going to cross through at the half of it, so 700. This is going to be our guideline and it actually goes right in the middle of the moon, so it's perfect. It's really cool. I'm going to go ahead and take Stay Wild and place it. Make sure that it's right in the middle. When you're importing your hand lettering, you can see, is it all clean? Is there nothing on the sides? Just make sure to clean it well first and normally you should get the size right, then it will be super easy to align in the middle. What I really would like to do with this, since it is black now and it doesn't create enough contrast, is that I would like to actually invert it and make it white. This is something that I really like to do. I really tend to do it quite often, especially when I put hand lettering over photos, it makes the hand lettering just pop. I highly recommend that if you are using your hand lettering on top of a photo, especially if it's a bit dark like this one, it's going to be perfectly contrasted and look super nice. So we're going to go right in to "Desaturate." I'm not sure we've done that yet. I'm going to do that for both layers. Right now, I'm on the layer Moon Child. Both of these layers have been desaturated, they are black and white. We're going to go as well on" Invert." invert means that the colors are going to be inverted, they're going to go into negative. It's not going to be black anymore, its going to be white. Let's check it out. There you go. I'm going to do this for the other one as well. There you go. When we do we do this, it doesn't really go through. It seems a bit dirty. In that case, what I like to do is, when I have the layer selected, I go here, and I have it appearing on screen effect. As you can see now, it really looks like it has just been hand lettered on top of the photo right away, It looks clean and I'm going to do that as well here. This is really cool because it preserves the texture as well. This is looking pretty good. I'm just a bit bothered with the alignment here. I think the Child word goes a little bit sideways. I'm not sure how to explain it, but I will try to make this look a little bit better. So I'm going to select this and press "Transform." I'm going to rotate it just a little bit so that it looks in the same ax as Moon. This is going to be really important in the design. It's just a little difference, but it makes a difference when the words are aligned well. I'm just going to double check this. Again, I'm going to drag an alignment line right here, just to see. Not everything has to be aligned amazingly, but it's just good to keep an eye on it and see, maybe this word go a little lower, maybe this one a little higher, maybe this needs a bit of rotation, and so on. So you can always just select your elements and move them around. That's what's cool about digitizing. Anything that you've done in the process that you're not happy with, you can still correct and adjust according to the image while you are designing. I took the word Moon and I placed it a bit further. Now, I'm going to take the word Child and I'm going to put it a little further as well. I want to pick more space between the Moon and the words. Contact is just a little bit lower so that the H here is mostly aligned with the Os and that these as well look visually in the same place. That's a bit geeky, but yes, you will definitely develop your eye as you will be practicing with this, I'm sure. Back to STAY WILD. I want it to be just a little bit smaller, a little bit closer. Here we go. This is looking pretty cool already. Now, I'm just going to remove the guides just as I showed before. So "View" "Show" "Remove Guides" and there we go. This is looking pretty nice. I think Moon Child, all of it can go a little bit higher actually. So I'm going to select both layers. There you go. Awesome. Sometimes you visually see that things need to be aligned in a little bit differently, so that's not a problem. If you've got all your layers in separate places, you can always just move them around until you're happy with our results. This is looking pretty cool. I'm really happy with it. It looks really dreamy. For my last experiment, which is going to be with a word thrive, which I hand lettered last with the water color. I'm going to place it on this photo, which I imported on Photoshop as well. This is my botanical photo. Actually, I unlocked the background, so everything's ready to go. I'm going to go into the skin of the hand lettering that I imported to Photoshop as well. Here the image is also rotated in the wrong way. It was imported vertically, so I'm going to rotate it clockwise so we can see it properly. As you can see, there's a really interesting texture here. There's really nice thing going on with the tones, but there are a few things that you going to need to be in a little bit neater, but that's not a problem. We can do that along the way. First thing we're going to do is unlock the background. There we go. We are going to go right away and desaturate this. So image "Adjustments," "Desaturate." Now, I'm going to play with the levels. Here you can see the levels are a bit different on this image, we actually want to keep some texture, so we're not going to go crazy on the contrast here. Just going to boost a little bit, just to flex a little bit. It makes it look a little bit cleaner and by dragging this way down, we can actually remove the tape which is pretty awesome and boost this part right here. It's not exactly clean yet as a file, but I'm going to prepare it. I'm going to select around the word thrive and then I press Shift Command and I to invert and there we go. We can just deselect this, just removed this other side. Now I'm going to clean up any remaining mess that is around the hand lettering so any bits that remain from scanning and maybe in these themes that I see or anything like that, so this little line still remains from the tape that was used during the scanning process. This way, I'm just roughly removing everything. Here we go, this should be pretty much good to go. It doesn't really matter how it looks right now, we're going to go and to select ''Color Range,'' select the white background and press ''Backspace,'' boom. It's gone. There you go, you have your hand lettering, your watercolor hand lettering ready to go. You can just import it into your file, I'm going to import it right here into my botanical photo. I'm going to already put it in the size that I want it to be, yes. Something, be careful not to stretch your hand lettering. That's really important. Always when you are downsizing your hand lettering like this, always press ''Shift'' so it stays in proportion. But this is looking pretty good, right there. Just going to select. I'm still on that layer, yes. I'm going to select any bits that are still needing some clean up on the size just to make sure that the layer itself is clean as you can see it go really from the tip of the E to the tip of the T so it's perfect, now it's all clean. This image is 1,500 as well so if we want to put a new guide, we can do that with no problem. It's 750, so half of that and there we go. If I would want it to be really well aligned then I can use that as a reference. So I think this is good, right there. I'm not placing it up here because I actually want it to go behind the plants, so I'm already placing it where I want it to be. We're going to try to do some magic here and just make the words try to appear behind the plants which is something that I sometimes like to do with my hand lettering, just experimenting with that, making it pass in front of an image or subject or something like that. This is just something cool that you can do with your hand lettering if you have a photo like that, you have an idea, why not experiment with that? First thing I'm going to do here is to select the layer of the lettering and actually bring other mask into it. When you do this, you can zoom in and then select the brush tool and when your brush tool will be white you will be adding from your design and when your brush will be black, so just by pressing ''X,'' it will shift to black. When it will be black, you will be able to actually remove things from your layer. Let's give that a shot. Here we go. With the brush, we can see that I'm removing part of this lettering. If I'm pressing X again, I can correct the bits that were lost and just add them back in again. There we go. Now the leaf is passing in front of the lettering which is looking pretty cool already and I'm going to keep doing this for the rest of the design. Here we go. This is done very roughly. I could spend more time on this but I'm going to keep this quick. Now I'm going to actually remove my guides. There we go. This is looking pretty cool already, I like how the plants are passing in front of the lettering. It's looking pretty funky. Now, one thing that I would like to experiment with is actually to bring some color onto this lettering and one way I like to do this is to actually create an extra layer and on this layer I will simply place my color. I'll use my paint bucket tool and I will select the color that I wish to use and I think I'm going to go for something like these perhaps. Yes, this could look cool. It's a nice contrast to the green so I'm just going to dump that in. Now, all this layer is pinkish and no worries about that. We are just going, if your layer is going to be on top of the lettering, then you can just right-click and create clipping mask so that your layer is just going to go on top of your lettering. There we go. This is looking pretty cool already but I want it to look a little bit more like it has been printed on. This is just a matter of adding the effect on it, so we're going to set it on screen and there we go. We start to gain the texture back again which is looking pretty cool. I like this a lot. It's really tropical and yeah, it makes me smile. So I definitely recommend that you try some crazy experiments like that with your hand lettering. Don't be afraid. Experimenting with your hand lettering like that is really cool if you want to create some unique visuals and things for your blog or for your Instagram or even just for fun and just like that. It's really cool to do so. Just feel free to give it a try. There are so many possibilities and it would be a pity not to try them all. So this is it. I hope you guys enjoyed this class and I hope that it inspired you to actually start your own hand lettering journey and that you're excited to try some creative experiments and no matter what level you're in, no matter how maybe intimidated you're about hand lettering before, now is the time to try some things and I hope you're excited about it. I would really like to give you a little challenge so that you can share your experiments with us. You can feel free to pick a word that you like, whether it's a word or someone's name, just something and try to handle it in three different ways and then you can share three different interpretations of this hand lettering, three different creative experiments with it. You can share those experiments with us on Instagram by hash-tagging Key Like courses. We will then see it and give you some tips and feedback or you can share it here on Skillshare by posting it under projects. We will definitely have a look at it and give you some advice. This is going to be super cool. I'm really excited to see what you're going to come up with. Thank you so much for enrolling in this class and I wish you a lot of fun with hand lettering.