For this project I chose a quote by Mother Teresa - "Do Small Things with Great Love". This is my process from initial sketch to final product.

Original Sketch

I did one sketch of the quote and was instantly happy with how it looked.

Ink Drawing

Using my lightbox I went over the original sketch with my Sharpie ultra fine marker, tweaking bits as I went. I wasn’t happy with the G or the E, so just added them so i could add them in the vector tweaking stage.

Do Small Things with Great Love - image 2 - student project

Vector

I always tweak my lettering in Illustrator using the smooth tool to iron out any bumps. I tweak the anchor points to get slightly nicer looking curves to my type, especially the calligraphy style of lettering.

Do Small Things with Great Love - image 3 - student project

TexturePress

I spend a lot of time on dribbble and Instagram getting inspiration for my work. Every day I would keep seeing these awesome textures, especially ones that looked like they had been ink stamped. So I set out to find how to achieve this in Photoshop. After hours and hours I finally cracked it, producing a smart PSD that I could just drop my work in to and it would instantly apply the effects to it.

I then thought that other designers my be in the same boat as me, so I packaged it together and put it for sale on creativemarket.com. It instantly went to the top product of the day, which proved to me that others were also looking for that effect.

Here is a before and after of my lettering run through TexturePress.

Do Small Things with Great Love - image 4 - student project

Final Illustration

When I placed the finally piece on my Instagram account I got such a good response that I opened a society6 shop with this as my first piece for sale.

Do Small Things with Great Love - image 5 - student project

Hope this has been helpful for anyone else going through this process.

Ian

Ian Barnard

Hand lettering Artist

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