01 Jun Hand Lettered ‘Stay Hungry’ Postcard #30

I’ve been working on hand lettered designs for a long time now and haven’t quite felt confident in my skills to share anything before but when I picked up my brush pen this week and started writing and rewriting the words “stay hungry” there was one in particular that I fell in love with.

Why did I hand letter “stay hungry”? All too often people give up on their goals or dreams. But if you stay passionate, stay engaged, and stay motivated… stay hungry about what the next step is and passionate about getting there… you can move mountains. So stay hungry and keep chasing your dreams by continuing to set manageable and meaningful goals for yourself.

You must be able to have the patience to keep repeating the process of writing something, study what you did and find ways to improve on it as you complete your hand lettered process. As you see in my photo of sketches above. Sometimes I abandoned my attempt when I didn’t like the S and I tried different ways of ending the letters. Sometimes straight down and sometimes curved in.

The brush pen left little marks on the edge of the letters in the one I loved the most. They add texture that you just don’t get with hand drawn fonts or digitally created letters. The one caveat is amazing brushes for Photoshop and Illustrator – these can create realistic and beautiful results. But these again are created with actual ink and brushed. I used a Koi Coloring Brush Pen on marker paper both are relatively inexpensive and widely available at art supply stores.

Once I selected the one hand lettered attempt that I loved, I first brought it into Photoshop to adjust the levels. This makes it easier to produce a vector in Illustrator.

I then brought it into Illustrator and used the Image trace settings to create a vector while keeping a lot of the jagged edges intact. At this point I adjusted the spacing between some of the letters. Like that giant space between the g and ry in hungry and moved up the H so it fit in with the entire piece. I also adjusted the t in stay and moved the ay closer together.

Picking the bright colours was one of the funnest parts. Hope you like the final hand lettered piece, if you do leave a comment and check out some of my other designs here at 100postcards.ca.