Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Another Lettering Project

At the beginning of October my sister requested that I make her favorite scripture verse, Proverbs 3:5-6 into a art piece using my fledgling lettering skills.  I got to work right away.  My vision was to make each phrasing stand out in its own way but I wanted the words Trust in the Lord to draw the eye the most. I looked through my creative lettering book to fish for lettering styles that felt right.  First one that I knew I wanted only gave me a few letters to work from:  Back in 5 by Snowdon.  

I worked on it for 2 more months and finally got an acceptable printable form.  When I took it to Staples hoping to print it for my sister I learned that the bible is copyrighted work.  I can print it out personally but their largest paper was limited and thin and I was considering adding color to it.  So I decided to get some heavy weight art paper from Micheals and I managed to use my make shift light table to trace it out.  

Technically it was difficult to make it fit right because I used 3 pages of regular 8.5x11 inches.  I managed to get it all worked out with some minor adjustments I really liked the finished result.  My husband bought some more fine felt tipped pens with a variety of colors for my Christmas gift.  I am looking forward to working on more projects.  Below is a version you can save and print (hopefully).  I am willing to do inked versions by hand with a color or two but I would have to charge $50 per commission for time and materials it takes.  The one I did for my sister took hours.  

If you want to set up your own light table and do the work yourself here is how I did it.  I used windows Paint to divide the piece into 2 pictures (between Heart and Lean Not) and printed those out as portrait so they were able to fit on an 11x17 inch art paper.  I used water color but the multi-media would work just as well or perhaps better for felt tip ink pens.  Choose the colors you want to use.  The ones I used in T (pictured above) was a gold felt tip and calligraphy lettering pens in green and blue.  I outlined them with a gold ink pen.  I decided to use the bronze metallic felt tip pen for LORD because I wanted the gold ink pen outline to stand out more.  I used different color fine felt tip pens for the rest of the piece and ended with Direct in silver out lined in black and Paths in Black too.  Other useful tips would be to use a calligraphy pen on "and, unto thine own understanding" and then outline it in black if you can.  Or just trace the outline letters in the color of your choice and leave the inside white.  Enjoy!