lettering with makewells: crafting phrases

Hello everyone! I'm back with my guest lettering series, and today I'm talking about some of my tips and tricks for crafting phrases. 

Drawing phrases (or words put together), utilizes the same things we talked about when practicing drawing words, or drawing letters. We are now adding one more realm of possibilities: the infinite ways to combine words. 

Once again, my most trusted exercise when it comes to improving my hand lettering skills is practice and repetition. So just like the previous practice methods (1 letter, 100 ways/ 1 word, many ways), writing out the same phrase in as many varieties as possible is going to open your eyes to so many creative combinations. 

For this exercise, I picked a phrase on the shorter side (4 words): "Enjoy the Small Stuff".

To begin, I challenged myself to sit down for a solid two hours, and "sketch" out the phrase in as many ways as possible. So using a pencil, I sat down and started drawing. 

One thing to think about when drawing out a phrase, is what words you find most important. For this phrase, I decided to treat the words "small stuff" as one, breaking down the phrase into three sections: Enjoy - The - Small Stuff

You may find it helps to practice each section of your phrase on its own before putting them all together. Or even the first letter of your phrase:

I started with my phrase sketches by mixing different styles of lettering together, giving each section a different treatment. And from there, I moved towards using only script lettering (my favorite).

Above are just some of my favorite sketches, but trust me, there were quite a few that didn't make the cut. 

Once I had worked on these for the allotted time, I went back and chose a favorite to develop further. You can do this by using tracing paper, or simply looking at your sketch for guidance. I went back in pen to make a clean black and white drawing.

And then, I painted a final version using the tricks I talked about in my last post.

Enjoy practicing and don't forget to post your work on instagram using #redefinecreativelettering ! I can't wait to see what you come up with!

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