Hi all, my name's Francesca and I'm a designer-in-training working on incorporating more art into my daily practice. The biggest challenge I've run into so far is making sure I "do the work" it takes to become a designer and an artist. Below is my first step in creating more digital art based on what I've learned so far in handlettering. I think what I've learned from this course is not to be too "precious" about my art. I appreciated the casual approach of letting the lettering fall into place and identifying what feels good as I sketch and play with words.

Here are the sketches I did in my notebook. I used pencil, Tombow dual brush pens, and an artist pen. I ended up using an old black Tombow brush pen since it gave a nice texture from the used brush tip.

This the image I ended up digitizing. The left one is the one I uploaded, and the right is the stripped-down, cleaned-up version I later inverted for my final image. I wouldn't recommend drawing on dotted paper; it was a pain to remove all the dots after in PhotoShop. I didn't mind it too much since I was familiar with PhotoShop, but it would have saved me some time to do actual retouching. 

 

I chose two images I took from the past, one botanical and one coastal, to see which theme I preferred. I ended up like the botanical one more, since it had more 'energy.'

Below are the two final renditions of the "Do the work" lettering I digitized: