Here’s my take on a dangle design monogram using the Lombardic Capitals lettering style.
I drew the design in pen using Uniball Unipin pens on dot grid paper. After scanning the pen and ink design into my Microsoft Surface Studio I removed the dot grid and created a transparent background.
Then, I coloured the design digitally, using a Microsoft Surface Pen and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.
The Lombardic Capitals are very medieval in style and so I wanted my dangle designs to reflect this. I spent some time yesterday researching medieval, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic jewellery, floor tiles and ornamentation, which I then used as inspiration for the dangle designs.
I chose jewel-like colours for the design – these colours are often used in medieval manuscripts.
I must admit I’m not sure either about the blue background behind the letter A or the green border to it. Working digitally means I can easily change my colour choices here once I work out what I’d like to do with them.
The final step was to add some texture to the colours, some drop shadows and to create a background in colours and pattern reminiscent of vellum.
I say it every time but I mean it – I really did enjoy creating this one!
I finished this up this morning, now the migraine has lifted. I completed the embellishment of the letters. The next task was to scan the work in and remove the dot grid background in GiMP, as well as tidy up any smudges and so on.
Once I was happy with the result, I printed out the words so I could colour and add metallic highlights.
To colour, I used Chameleon Color Tone marker pens. For the metallic highlights (dots) I used a mixture of Uniball Signo glitter gel pens and metallic Sakura Gelly Roll pens.
Adding colour really helps with the read-ability of the letters. I chose to add simple color gradations and kept to one colour for each day of the week.
I really enjoyed doing this – it started as a sketch and I’ve ended up with some hand lettering that looks quite nice.
I will, at some point, do a sampler of this hand lettering style. That would be a great reference for myself, but perhaps a source of inspiration for others.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I really want to create a dangle design monogram for at least one of this style of lettering. I think that’s the next thing on my list of ‘to do’s’ on a day where I’m taking it all a bit easy; although the migraine has lifted I still feel a tad ‘fragile’.
Hand lettering and monograms are an integral part of my style of dangle designs. Although lettering as complex as this isn’t covered in ‘A Dangle A Day’, I still offer suggestions and step by step instructions for creating dangle designs.
I woke this morning with a dreadful migraine. Two emotionally draining days – therapy on Monday, an anti-stigma talk for Time to Change Wales yesterday – can cause such a reaction in me. It’s my body’s way of saying ‘Woah there Angela! Enough! Time out is needed! Self-care! Nothing else stressful for today at least, please!’.
So I’m heeding my body’s message. I was due to take all my accounts stuff to my accountant, but my vision and concentration is impaired enough that for now I don’t feel safe to drive. I know that with a quiet day and a nap later on I’ll recover.
Even though my eyesight is affected a bit, doing art actually seems to help with the headache. I think it’s a mindful activity that lets my mind and emotions relax.
So, I wanted to complete my days of the week in a Lombardic style script, and here’s my work in progress. You can see my pencil lines, both as a guide for letter heights and for the shape and spacing of letters. By drawing the outlines in pencil first it means I can easily make adjustments as I ink them in.
Next steps, when my head has cleared a fair bit more, will be to add the patterns in the letters. This really does help to define the letter shapes I think.
I definitely want to try some of these letters with dangles on them. Perhaps that’s what I’ll do while I’m waiting for this migraine headache to shift somewhat.
Today has been a bit of a busy day. I woke still drained from yesterday’s EMDR therapy session. No EMDR though as I was just too emotional and ‘raw’ to go through it, so it was a lot of talking around how one trigger event had caused several trauma ‘streams’ to rise and flood and confluence. I was stuck at that confluence where white water rapids had formed and I was being buffeted about in the eddies and currents and waves.
So, it was self-care last night when I got home, which involved a bag of chips from a local chippy, with curry sauce, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and starting to crochet an amigurumi ‘dumpling cat’ from a new book that was delivered yesterday. Then, there was the journal writing before I went to bed.
This morning I had to be up early to go give an anti-stigma talk to a group of police officers. That drained me emotionally once again. However, it was a good thing to do as they all found my talk really interesting and useful. My Time To Change Wales champions hat was polished up a little bit once again.
I came home and finally had some breakfast and ended up in bed to sleep. That’s one of my coping strategies when I’m so emotionally drained. I still feel dazed and dazzled by it all, but am on a bit of a more even keel now.
I didn’t want to let the day pass without doing something with pen and paper or screen. Hand lettering seems to be my thing at the moment so I thought I’d have a go at hand lettering some of the days of the week.
For reference I used the Lombardic Capitals set in ‘Decorated Lettering’ by Jan Pickett.
They appeal to me partly because the space inside the letters lends itself so much to adding patterns, but because of their oldy-worldy nature. I love Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Medieval illuminated manuscripts and this style of lettering, in a slightly more modern form, appeals to me.
I discovered it’s a lot easier to form the letters when you draw them big – hence why their size increased from Monday to Wednesday.
Dot grid paper is a godsend as it helps with the consistency of size of the letters, though I suspect that as I become more comfortable with my skills that I may experiment more with that.
A nice way to spend an hour or so this afternoon, and I have the rest of the days to look forward to doing, along with adding patterns to the open letters.
Mind you, the letters without patterns would look lovely just coloured with colour gradients, and I’d love to add metallic highlights/accents too.
First, I need to get a bit more proficient at hand lettering and working on plain paper.
Of course, I can always scan my lettering in and remove the background and dotgrid so I can print it out on paper suitable for a colouring medium such as watercolours and metallic paints.
Cheating? No. I don’t think so. I would’ve already done the work in the first place. Printing and colouring is, to me, perfectly acceptable.
But that’s for another day. For now, I had to get myself sorted to pop out for the evening.
I’m also musing about adding some dangles to the letters – dangles with charms that are reminiscent of medieval ornament or jewellery, for example.
I always have fun when drawing and creating, including this design. In it I’ve combined some of my entangled design elements along with winter/Christmas doodles.
To start, I hand lettered ‘Noel’ using a guide for the shape of the lettering I wanted. Then, I printed it out so I could add the black and white line art using a 0.8 Uniball Unipin pen.
Once that was done, the finished lineart was scanned back into the Microsoft Surface Studio, a transparent background created and some smudges cleaned up.
Finally, I could colour it. Today, I chose to use the color gradient tools, which does make the job of colouring a bit quicker, but it also results in a rather ‘shiny’ look too. Or perhaps that’s simply due to the colours I choose for the gradients.
I had fun adding the glowing stars and sparkles to this one, though I’m not sure I’ve got that right.A nice way to spend the morning and early afternoon as the weather has been wet and very windy at times here.
As one of my current goals is to improve my hand lettering I thought it would be fun to practice it with another dangle design.
For this one, I used some dangles from my book ‘A Dangle A Day’ to build the dangle designs with a wintry, Christmassy vibe to the finished design, thanks to the traditional Christmas colours of red, green and gold, along with with some blues, purples and cool pinks thrown in.
Of course, I could’ve chosen a non-traditional series of colours too, for fun. For example, the baubles on the dangles and the wreath could be done in pink, purple and blue. Whatever your decor at this time of the year it can be reflected in your colour scheme for your dangle design.
From the initial sketch to posting it on this blog it’s taken me around 6 hours to complete.
Yes, I started with a sketch and then inked it in traditionally, pen on paper. I scanned that drawing into GiMP so I could remove the dot grid and the faint echoes of erased pencil lines. This was followed by coloring the image. For this I used marker and blender brushes . The last steps were to add texture to the design, a coloured background, a drop shadow and then the watermarks.
I used a Microsoft Surface Pen, a Microsoft Surface Studio and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to complete the digital colouring and so on.
The charms on the dangles are a lot easier to draw than they appear, it’s the colour that really brings them to life and gives them dimension.
It’s always fun to string charms together to make these dangles. I often tend towards more symmetrical designs, but ones like this are good to do too. They all have their own charm, pardon the dreadful pun there.
I take you designing dangles step by easy step in my book ‘A Dangle A Day‘. There are lots of examples of dangle designs in the book that are ready to use, but it’s easy to rearrange things to suit your particular needs. The release date is 8 January 2019, a new style of creativity to start in the New Year, and throughout the year as all the seasons and many different celebrations are covered in the book, along with suggestions for projects using dangle designs.
December is nearly upon us and my mind is turning to ideas that could be used to brighten up BuJo pages with simple lettering and design ideas. And this sheet is what I’ve come up with … thus far!
If you use any of them for inspiration in your BuJos, planners, journals, or in card making or any other way I would love to see how you’ve used them! If you share on Instagram then tag me in your post @angela_porter_illustrator. On twitter you can tag me as @artwyrd and you can find me on facebook as @Artwyrd
All are hand lettered and hand drawn. I used Crayola Supertips to colour the images in. I used Uniball Unipin pens for the black lines and I worked on dot grid paper to help me keep the letter sizes and spacing consistent.
I can see that the bubble lettered ‘December’ has a weird looking M. It looks more like Decewber! Oops! Practice is needed with bubble lettering methinks.
This was a fun project, that took a bit more time than I thought it would.
Of course, the next thing for me would be to choose some of these and convert them to dangle designs, a process I cover in my upcoming book ‘A Dangle A Day’.
I’m finding that I’m enjoying hand lettering a bit more now that my conversation with myself in an earlier blog is setting in – about making it mine and accepting the little imperfections as they are what make it unique, just as they do in my drawings.
Today’s hand-lettering is just a variation on the one I posted on Monday.
For this one, I’ve used simple patterns to fill the white space in the letters and added a ‘line shadow’ to left and below the letters. To do this I used a Uniball Unipin 0.5 pen.
I like the graphic nature of just black and white as well as the intricacy of the patterns.That intricacy is something that warms the cockles of my artistic heart.
I didn’t only add details to the letters – I’ve added details to the dangle too! Simple additions but add a feeling of complexity.
I feel at the moment I’m in a position both in terms of demands on my time but also in how I feel about myself and my artistic nature to explore hand-lettering so it’s an ‘Angela’ thing that I’m comfortable with.
Not just comfortable, confident in my skills too. So, re-working a fairly open hand lettered word like this in different ways.
So, it’s possible you’ll see variations on a word appearing on this blog, my Instagram, deviantART, Twitter and facebook accounts as time goes on.
We’re rapidly approaching December so it’s time for a number of personal artistic pursuits :
my christmas/winter cards for 2018 need to be designed and printed
‘freebie’ templates need to be designed for the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group.
BuJo spreads and design elements
I’m sure there’s some other things that need doing, but this morning they escape me. Of course I’m going to note these things in my BuJo.
I’ll also be starting work on a new book for Creative Haven by Dover Publications.
So a nicely ‘busy enough’ time ahead.
Yesterday, I had a lovely day out to Aberglasney Gardens for lunch with my pal Liz. It was hammering down with rain during our journey there, but the rain cleared up by the time we’d finished a leisurely lunch.
It had been many years since I’ve visited Aberglasney and I’d forgotten how interesting it is. I’ll return sometime soon with sketchbook in hand for sure!
My evening and night until well past midnight were taken up designing a birthday card for someone. The design was finally uploaded to Moonpig ready for posting today near midnight. To say I was, and still am, shattered could be an understatement today! Still, I can have a semi ‘self-care’ day today to recover.
Yesterday, after completing the basic hand-lettering reference sheet and my blog musings about believing in myself, I was inspired to hand letter something. So the natural choice was the word inspire. I also added a little dangle to the initial letter.
I used dot grid paper to help me keep the letter sizes and heights consistent, though I can see there are places where the width of the letters has varied. I’m working on telling myself that is fine, that it is all part of my hand lettering style and journey, that it adds that ‘human’ quality of perfectly imperfect to the design.
I scanned the design into the computer and used GiMP to remove the dot grids and then create a transparent background.
I could’ve printed the word out and used traditional media to colour it, but I decided to use Autodesk Sketchbook pro along with a Microsoft Surface Pen and Surface Studio to digitally add colour, a drop shadow for the image and a colourful background. Today, I chose to use the gradient tools as I have a limited amount of time before I head out for an appointment.
I woke up early today and thought I’d organise my ideas about basic hand lettering into a reference sheet, and this is what I’ve come up with.
The foundation of hand lettering, to my mind at least, is to practice, practice, practice drawing your basic letter shapes, both upper and lower case. Bullet journaling can be a good way to practice hand lettering and to try out variations in letter forms and styles. My current bullet journal is very functional and minimal, but I do use different letter styles in the headings for each day and collections and so on. Mind you, I could do with a lot more practice.
Notice is said your basic letter shapes, not my basic letter shapes The reason I say this is that the more I’ve struggled with my hand lettering and it not looking like other peoples, the more I’ve come to realise that it’s MY hand lettering, my style, that I need to work on.
Yes, I draw inspiration from other people’s work, but at the end of the day I’d like my hand lettering to be mind, with my ‘stamp’ on it, my uniqueness, my quirkiness, my imperfections.
I struggled with this idea in the early years of my artistic journey, and now I’ve realised I’m having the same struggle with my hand lettering.
Hand lettering is exactly that – done by hand, not by machine. If I want perfect letters, then I can use fonts on the computer. What I can’t have is perfect hand lettering as in perfect like a computer font.
What I need to work on accepting is that my hand lettering is good enough, it’s human, it’s an expression of myself.
I spent a lot of time and effort in my teenage years to change my handwriting. I realised it looked a lot like my mothers. I didn’t want to be anything like my mother, even down to my handwriting, which actually is more like fast hand lettering as I really do draw each letter. I gave up joined-up cursive writing at this time too. My handwriting isn’t entirely print, some letters do get joined up.
I came up with my own style of writing that I like, mostly. It’s usually teeny-tiny too, so writing BIG is a problem for me.
Hand lettering is, for me, an extension of my own style of printing/drawing my letters.
This doesn’t sit all that well with me at this moment, but it feels more authentic to me.
I want to use my own letter shapes as the basis for my own hand lettering, along with all the imperfections that my bring. After all, it’s all the little imperfections in my drawings that make them uniquely mine, that make them human. Even when I draw digitally I make sure that there are imperfections in my work – the slightly wobbly lines, the imperfect circles and shapes and so on.
I am working on having the same kind of attitude towards hand lettering and stop thinking that mine has to be perfect like computer fonts, that it is just another way of artistic expression and perfectly imperfect.
Notice that I say this is about me and my attitude towards myself and my hand lettering. I’m not criticising anyone who has different opinions. I just know I can be incredibly hard on and brutally critical of myself.
It’s so easy in this day and age with so much available on social media that you compare yourself to others and judge yourself as seriously inferior or a failure. As my inner critic already believes that I am a failure and useless at anything I do and tells me this, it can be a lot harder for me to believe that what I create is good enough. I believe that about my drawings, I don’t believe that about my hand lettering, yet.
What I’d like to achieve is hand lettering that stands out as being ‘Angela Porter’ and for me to be comfortable with my hand lettering, not worrying that it’s nowhere near even good enough.
Art is the Adventure 