Naturally with Christmas time come some fun holiday projects. I had the opportunity to work on some fun custom lettering for a Christmas event. I thought I would show some snippets of the lettering process. This was actually a pro bono project I did that I was happy to help out with. With that said, I was given the project to complete quickly, and while trying to squeeze in around other paid project on my plate!
I had a specific tall curly font style in mind but was not able to find what i was looking for within “budget” or time. This is a good example of where custom lettering comes to the rescue! I can usually come up with a custom lettering treatment faster than it takes me to perform that agonizing search. I have the freedom to get as specific to the creative need as possible! These are some of the great advantages not mentioning the lack of worry on right of usage.
Here are the somewhat refined rough sketches. I say that because they are kind of in the middle. Usually I like to go a few steps further with line refinement in paper but with the crunch in time I chose to refine from here in Illustrator
Tweaking the raw vector lines
In this case, (again with the quick turn around) I created a custom brush in illustrator to apply and manipulate on the vector lines of each letter. These turned out pretty well with some cleaning up on some corners and twists. Brushes are a great quick way to achieve a certain looking you are going after if you know how to work with them right. If I had all the time in the world, I would naturally prefer to control every twist turn and curve of this ribbon effect by hand.
Lastly, I Expanded my brush strokes when I cleaned them up and then exported the piece into Photoshop for the subtle shadow effect on the overlapping of the ribbon lettering. Wala!
I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas!
