One monogram dangle design, three different versions.
The first is just the black and white line art. This was drawn with Uniball Unipin pens on dot grid paper then scanned in so the dot grid and faint marks could be removed as well as making a transparent background. This dangle design is much more ornate in terms of pattern than is in my book ‘A Dangle A Day’ but is still easy to do if a bit time consuming.
The second is the line art coloured digitally with some texture added.
The third has the coloured line art floating on a golden sheet.
I’ve not quite managed to get my head around how to convert the black and white line art into golden line art where I can add colour. I suspect it’ll have to be re-drawn, which I’ll most probably do while I’m waiting for a delivery.
I kind of like the gold background, but it is a bit too much as well.
Which version do you like best? Let me know your thoughts!
A quiet start to Monday morning here with a spot of hand lettering and dangle drawing.
This is my first draft of a design, which is a bit wobbly in places and there are some ink smudges too.
I pencilled in the basic shapes of the letters, inked in the outlines and then added the inner decoration.
The dangles were drawn with pen directly on paper. The use of dot grid paper helps to keep things vaguely level usually, but this morning that’s not quite gone to plan. Of course as it’s December I’ve gone with December themed charms and a Moon for Moonday Monday!
I have a few tasks to do and then I may just re-draw this, or at least colour it in. Colour makes all the difference.
This could be a bit of a big dangle design to use in a BuJo, but just the word with one dangle to the left would make a charming header with dangle for a day. The beauty of dangles is that you can just add to them as you go through the day. If the charms are small enough you could even add ones that will go with your BuJo entries – event, note, task and so on.
I think that would work well for a big and busy day.
I did go away and create this sample BuJo page showing the kind of thing I meant above. The hand lettering has worked out a lot better. I also like the blue gradient I’ve used to colour the letters with. A grey shadow was added to the left and bottom of the letters too. I also like the cute little date box. The ornate ends on the bar through it give it a ‘feel’ that goes with the lettering.
I did have fun doing this. It’s maybe not something I’d do everyday in my BuJo. My BuJo is very much a working one, with lots of mistakes and rubbishy writing going on as I scribble down things. However, I do enjoy hand lettering, especially more so as I’m beginning to accept that I have to accept my own way of forming letters is perfectly acceptable and that I can work with that.
I have to remember that others don’t see my hand lettering (or art) as I do. They see it with fresh eyes, without the close up work that goes into it, without the small flaws that I see and are magnified by my inner critic into hideous blemishes and fatal errors in the work.
I can quieten the crtiic when it comes to my drawings/art, mostly. Except on any bad days I have in terms of my mental and emotional health. Because hand lettering is something that is a new focus for me, the inner critic feels it’s empowered to be hypercritical of anything I do. It’s only by doing, by doing what I can not to ignore the critic, but to check what it’s telling me as being valid or invalid and learning what I can from the valid points to improve in the future.
If there’s one thing that kitties know how to do extraordinarily well it’s stretch. So, that just had to be the drawing that went with todays Inktober Prompt!
And as it’s Friday, that drawing had to be a dangle design too.
I really do need to work on my kitties in different poses – this one’s head looks a little strange, a little flat.
But, part of the inktober challenge is to draw without editing.
I did use a pencil to sketch the dangle design out on dot grid paper from Clairefontaine. After inking it in and erasing what I could of the pencil lines it was scanned into GiMP. I use gimp to remove the dots of the dot grid and then produce a transparent background.
The drawing with a transparent background and no dot grid I then plonked into Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and added some colour and texture as well as a drop shadow.
I kept the colour palette fairly simple so I had a more cohesive look to the design.
Even with the problems with the cat’s head, I think this is cute – I couldn’t resist adding a sleeping mousie on the kitty’s tummy.
Of course, Friday is #dangleday and my book about drawing dangle designs, monograms and more is available for preorder. It’s called ‘A Dangle A Day‘.
I dug out one of my Lamy fountain pens, which had a black ink cartridge in it. I swapped the black for green, and drew this on some bristol board.
From time to time I dipped the nib in the black ink so I had some gradients and variation in the drawing.
It was fun to do. Also, it’s been a while since I drew with pen on paper; most of my work of late has been digital drawing, with the occasional pencil/pen sketch on paper.
Angela Porter 