This is the fruit of my Sunday ‘labours’, and I’m quite pleased with it, truth to be told. Now that’s not something I say about all my works. However I am, quite pleased with it.

I’ve been playing around with hand lettering and design for a while now. From placing the words on curvy lines to straight lines. Trying having the word(s) sit above the drawing with white space above and using them to split the drawing, as in this case.

I’ve used simple hand lettering, like here, and a bit more ornate.

It has been a bit of an adventure, with some successes, some not quite so. With this one, though, I think I’ve found my kind of ‘style’ for it. I like the way the flowery ‘poles’ join the top and bottom part of the design. I really like the jewel-rich tones of reds and blues that I’ve used.

If there’s one thing I wanted to do, and forgot about until now, it was to use a metallic gold pen to add dots to the centres of the circles in the bushes at the bottom. Also, maybe tiny gold dots to the centres of those little purple flowers. It’s that inner raven that loves sparkle having an influence yet again.

I like my quirky hand lettering. It may not be the best, it may not be the most precise or even. If I wanted that, then using something like Publisher or the text tool in Autodesk Sketchbook would or could work. Or I could select and move individual words, or even letters around, in Sketchbook. That, however, would remove the imprecision that gives the art a ‘human’ touch.

To create this, I used a Pentel Energel 0.5 pen to draw the design and do the hand lettering. My Copic Ciao’s were used to colour the image in, and I added white dots with white Sakura pens – Souffle and Gelly Roll 08, both of which worked well over the Copics.

I enjoyed using the Energel pen. The line is consistent in width and intensity, and my heavy hand doesn’t wreck the tip within a short space of time. I also tried out a Uniball Eye Needle point 05 pen for some of the fine details, but it didn’t seem to like writing over the paper that had been coloured with the Copics. It does, however, write smoothly on plain paper, whether that’s Bristol board or Heavy weight cartridge paper. The solvents in the Copics changes the surface structure of the paper; the Uniball Eye didn’t write smoothly on it, and it also bled into the paper, which it doesn’t do on un-Copic-coloured Bristol board.