Nulla dies sine linea

For this project, I've chosen the Latin quote "Nulla dies sine linea", which means "not a day without a line", because it has sort of become my motto lately. 

After sketching some layout ideas, I found out that there weren't any descenders and only a couple of ascenders in the quote, so the solution i came up with is to close the space between words as much as possible. from the initial sketches, I chose to arrange the words in a centered layout, so that would give me the chance to fill the lateral spaces with flourishes.

Here you can see some of my sketches and the final one below:

I'm still not sure about those flourishes but I could spend ages twinkering with them, so I think I'll get on with the inking process. 

Inking

I'm glad I finally decided to follow Molly's advice and didn't touch the flourishes in the design, so here's the inked version. I used iron gall ink and a Hunt 101 nib. I chose that nib because when I started inking I realized that the sketch was pretty big, so I wasn't getting the thicker lines with the Brause 66EF, but I quite like the result at this point.

Scanning and vectorizing  

After scanning and thanks to the process we're learning, I was able to refine the curves I wasn't happy with and other details, again I could spend hours refining everything, but here's the final vector and some colour variations, I thinks this would make a nice notebook cover with gold foil, or maybe a stamp to use in my sketchbooks.