After watching all of the videos and finally managing to pick up all of my supplies from the art store, I'm so excited to get started on my envelope. I decided to send my envelope to my little sister who lives in Austin since her birthday is coming up and I just got back from a trip to visit her. Austin is an amazingly fun, colorful city and I'd like to try and capture the spirit of it in my envelope.

I. INSPIRATION

Los Angeles has so much beautiful hand-painted signage, so it's pretty easy to find inspiring reference. My inspiration was a mix of photos I took while I was visitng a friend in Portland and some photos (from online...I am the absolute worst about remembering to take photos) of my neighborhood in LA.

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 1 - student project

II. PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

Curves. Are. So. Hard. I think I used up about half of my tracing paper pad practing the letterforms and while I'm slowly getting the hang of it, it's still very challenging to get smooth curves on the letters. For the casual brush script, I ended up liking copic markers much more than the tombow...it's much easier for me to get nice variation in line thickness so I might end up using those for my final piece.

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 2 - student project

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 3 - student project

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 4 - student project

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 5 - student project

III. MORE PRACTICE, SKETCHING, READY FOR TRANSFER

So I finally got in the thick of it and started sketching thumbnails, which helped me hone in on more specific things to practice. My sketching process was very loose...did a bunch of sketchbook thumbnails to get ideas out and then started sketching right on the tracing paper using some decisions that I had made in my thumbnails.

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 6 - student project

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 7 - student project

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 8 - student project

I also transferred a grid to my envelope.

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 9 - student project

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 10 - student project

I ended up totally changing the hierarchy, but I still think the initial process was helpful. My tracing paper sketches were very frankensteined, but using the tracing paper like photoshop layers kept my decision-making and trial process quick so that was a nice tip!

Next steps are to transfer my sketch and get inking. Phew!

III. FINISHED

I was very happy to realize I got started, actually doing the final drawing was not nearly as nerve-wracking as I was anticipating. I didn't really consider postage for this thing and the woman at the post office was so worried about messing it up when she had to put the stamps on it! (Whoops!) Her reaction made my morning though.

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 11 - student project

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 12 - student project

And the back:

Everything's bigger in Texas - image 13 - student project

Adrienne Wollman

Designer / Animator

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