It's Day 2!! So for today's topic it's all about Creative Process. For my take on today's topic, I thought I would delve into my process for creating hand lettering designs. It seems to be the main thing I get asked about, both by people on Instagram and even in job interviews. So I thought I'd dedicate this post to how I do this, from planning a piece, developing the style then working into it digitally and lastly uploading it to socials! 

Step 1: Planning & Sketching

For me step 1 always involves coming up with what it is I want to create a design about or for. This can vary from lettering things into objects, an editorial design or something else for like a poster or merch. 

Once I've decided or know what it's for I write out the words to get an idea about the letters fit amongst each other and to also quickly experiment with the layout of the letters. From this point I'll start working on a medium sized scale in my leuchtturm1917 (usually about a quarter of the page) to define the letter forms a bit more. From here I will occasionally draw it up bigger if I want to add more flourishes and details at that point or it's onto the digital portion of it!

Step 2: Developing the style & digitising 

When it comes to developing the style, as I said it can be developed while sketching or by doing it on the digital side. More and more lately, with my ProCreate app on my iPad I have been developing the design on that. Using the app it allows me to be more experimental with the styling and it also means I don't have to use lots of tracing or sketching paper in order to work out the best way to represent the phrase, word or editorial use. 

Digitising can some times be the longest part of the process, as I will refine the letters and make the size and shape of the letters concise in relation to each other. Although it is also at this point I can realise that once the forms are worked out the way I want them to be, they might not work for the piece on a whole and so it means I need to re-sketch a new layout. After I've refined the design and perfected the colour palette I then save it.

Step 3: Posting to socials

Making the designs on ProCreate it makes the whole uploading to Instagram simple! There are options to share directly to IG but I prefer to save the image and process video instead. However, the app also makes it super simple to take into Adobe products which is great but hasn't been something I've particularly used so far. 

Is there something I've missed out here that you'd like to know about? Leave any Q's below or feel free to tweet me directly too!

Also sorry for the images being a total mix of designs! I planned to have the one design and show the entire process from start to end but then realised I didn't have videos for the ones that would show the best process! Learn for next time right?

Check out the communities posts:

Danielle Warman (Blooming special) - Working for free

Charlotte Kathleen G
Laura Campbell (The Floral Elephant)

Read my other posts from #CBloggers17

Introduce Yo' Self: Day 1
Facing Imposter Syndrome: Day 3

Want to join in? Get all the details in the link up! blog post.