July Hand-Lettering Challenge

As a newbie to hand lettering, I thought Mary Kate's class would be a good place to dive in. The concept of diving in along with shark week seems to have influenced my lettering choice. I chose the song lyrics "You're a shark and I'm swimming" from the alt-J song Tesselate.

For inspiration I was mostly seeking oceanic imagery. However, I am also trying to incorporate some triangular elements in order to pay further homage to the song I'm quoting

 

I began with some warm ups by playing around with the word shark

Then I moved on to some very rough thumbnails to lay down a couple of ideas

 

Next up will be a (hopefully much more refined) sketch! 

Update July 26, 2015. 

Going from a rough sketch to a polished one turned out to be a bit of an uphill battle! Having forgotten it's been years since I practiced drawing, I was surprised by how long it took me to put together a composition I could be happy with. It's been really fun though to just sit amongst a pile of paper and eraser bits and just melt the hours away putting pencil to paper.  

Here's my (after many attempts) final pencil sketch. 

The first inked version 

And with some additional details coloured in