Hand lettering project: Sketches to final artwork

Yesterday, I blogged about the hand lettering class on Skillshare that’s been my main creative outlet this fall. I shared the inspiration behind the phrase I chose to work on, which was a song lyric from the ’80s fantasy film Labyrinth.

Today I want to show you how the inspiration I gathered evolved into sketches, and eventually, into a final inked drawing. Letterer Mary Kate McDevitt goes through these steps in detail and packs lots of tips and tricks into her video lessons. So I highly recommend signing up for the class if you want to learn more about the whole process!

After soaking up visual inspiration, it was time to prop up my mood boards in front of me, put pencil to paper and warm up by trying out different styles of lettering.

I hadn’t drawn anything in months, so my first warmup (on the left) was painful. Personally, I found my first attempt quite atrocious. “Que horror!” I thought to myself in dismay while rubbing my aching hand. “Maybe hand lettering isn’t for me?”

But soon I discovered why it’s called a warmup—muscles need to loosen up and get used to producing letters. If you look from left to right, you’ll see my succeeding warmups improved. After a few tries, I was able to start playing around with elements from my inspiration boards, like gems, jewels and floating or tumbling letters.

The next step was to sketch small, quick thumbnails to try out a few possible layouts. At this point, I decided to contain the entire phrase in a tilted globe to convey the idea of a turning world.

Then I chose the most promising thumbnails to refine and develop in more detail.

This was my first detailed sketch. Patience is not one of my virtues, so it still shocks me to think I spent almost three straight hours working on this—drawing, erasing and redrawing, over and over again. I like to obsess over little details (something my watercolor teacher hated), so drawing all these tiny jewels felt almost therapeutic for me.

Once I reached a refined sketch that I was happy with, I laid a sheet of tracing paper over it and retraced it (no way was I going to draw the whole thing from scratch!). Thanks to feedback from Mary Kate and my Skillshare classmates, I knew that everything south of the banner was pretty solid—I just had to work on the top half of the globe to make the words more readable and fit together better.

After lots of trial and error, retracing and redrawing, it was finally time to commit—to do the final inking.

And here it is: my final inked hand-lettered quote! I want to print it out and put it up in Tala’s room, so I’m eyeing Mary Kate’s class on how to add color, texture and finishing touches.

It all seems easy when I sum everything up in one post, but this took more effort and time than I expected—an hour here, two hours there, carved out and compounded over weeks. I wouldn’t have been as patient if I hadn’t watched the videos of Mary Kate developing her own artwork with such care and attention to detail.

What do you think of my attempt at hand lettering? I’d love to know!