Sketches

I decided on an ampersand as I feel it best suits my personality, somewhere lost in that grey area of "Is it a letter or is it a symbol!". I love the fact that you can have so much fun with the character, there doesn't seem to be a particular way that it has to be drawn, so is open to many interpretations.

Floral Ampersand - image 1 - student project

Photoshop Collage

I found this bit the fairly straight forward as I'm used to working in Photoshop and had the advantage that I already had a bunch of flowers pre-cutout as last year I put together a typographical floral product for my shop over on Creative Market. (Drop me a message if you want some of these!) I used some of these plus flowers I purchased from my local florists.

I think choosing a character like Gemma did with large amount of curves actually works to your advantage due to fact that flowers and foliage seem to be curved most of the time.

Floral Ampersand - image 2 - student project

Floral Ampersand - image 3 - student project

Inking up

I found this the most challenging part as I don't normally do illustration work, my focus is mainly on calligraphy and type design. So this was definitely a big step out of my comfort zone. It took me about 6 hours to complete the inking part. I think I'd made my collage too complex with some really detailed flowers throughout the whole piece. I use Staedtler pigment markers as I already had a pack of these and they are fairly similar to the Micron ones.

Floral Ampersand - image 4 - student project

Conclusion

I really enjoyed doing the class. I learnt loads about illustration techniques and just the process of trying to add different textures but keeping a consistent look. My illustration game has taken a step up and also made me realised (even more) that Gemma is a legend in her field of lettering and illustration!

Ian x

Floral Ampersand - image 5 - student project

Ian Barnard

Hand lettering Artist

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