Category: Crafts

crafts

Fun with lettering: paint marker brush pen comparison

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I’ve been working on my hand-lettering lately; I’ve always been able to do several types of regular handwriting, but now I’m getting fancier, so I can fold that skill into my graphic design portfolio. (Did you know that there’s a whole handlettering / calligraphy community out there? Tons of great stuff to check out. The Instagram hashtag “#handlettering” alone has almost two million entries.) I’ve acquired a few brushes and pens, most of them on the cheaper side, to see what I like. In my quest to find something that. . . Read More!

New art toys: watercolor gel crayons

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I’ve been upping my art lately, now that I have a permanent home where I can unpack all of my supplies, and a nice big desk with good lighting to work at. The other day at Target, I spotted a product that baffled me, so I had to check it out: Watercolor gel crayons? What the heck are those? The instructions on the box make it seem simple enough, and they were less than four dollars, so why not give ’em a shot? The tips are rounded and kind of. . . Read More!

More fonts, now available at FontBundles!

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As previously noted, I’ve been making more fonts. Here are a couple of fresh ones! I have a portfolio of all of these fonts over at Behance, but they’re also being picked up by a few sites that specialize in providing fonts, or graphic design elements, or both. One of my favorites is FontBundles.net — they have great bundles of really nice fonts to buy, and enough great individual fonts that a fontaholic could go broke, but they also do a free premium font every week! They’re carrying my most. . . Read More!

Creating my first connecting script font

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted here! (Although, of course, I post every day over at Holiday Doodles.) I’ve been busy with graphic design school, and work, and not only did we move across the country back in September, but we also then bought a house and moved again in January. So it’s been a busy first quarter of 2016! As a birthday present to myself, I got some font creation software. There are programs out there that cost upwards of $500, and are apparently the gold standard for. . . Read More!

I really enjoy drawing weird things.

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The Holiday Doodles continue on, though I scaled them back from 7 days a week to Monday through Friday. It gives me a little more breathing room, and they’ve always felt like a work/school kind of thing to me. One big change this month is that I’ve gone from drawing them on 4×6 notecards with a pencil and pen to drawing them completely on the computer. Less wasteful of paper, and I can re-do the final black lines as many times as I want, instead of having to get the. . . Read More!

Photoshop Text Effect Tutorial: Road Stencil

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I’ve been learning a ton of new tips and tricks from following Photoshop text tutorials lately. As we were driving to the grocery store the other day, I looked down at the chipped up, grimy, beat-to-hell turn arrow and text on the road and thought, that’d be a cool thing to create in Photoshop! I looked around for a tutorial, but couldn’t find one. So I made one! Note: this is done in Photoshop CS4; things might be in slightly different places in different versions. Here are the elements I. . . Read More!

More Photoshop Text Tutorials!

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So I’ve really started poking around the internet, and it’s amazing the kind of things you can do with Photoshop effects. Why have I only spend all of this time using it to graft people’s heads onto other people’s bodies, and other boring uses? Previously, I showed my results from following a few tutorials online. Well, I’ve discovered a few more tutorials that I found do-able, and here are the results! (Side note: I’m using Photoshop CS4. There are a number of tutorials out there for the far newer CS6,. . . Read More!

Playing with Photoshop Text Effects

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I’ve had Photoshop on my computer for years, but I’ve mostly used it for, y’know photos. And doodle-related stuff. If I was using it to put text on something, I might put an outline around the text. Or a drop shadow. That was about the limit of my Photoshop text experience. Recently, I’ve had my eyes opened that you can do some really cool text effects in Photoshop. We bought a package of vintage and retro text effects (they were on a hella good sale, which sadly ended a couple. . . Read More!

Weird Holidays = Holiday Doodles

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A few months back, I posted about the daily doodles I was doing at work. And more than one person said that I should be putting them online somewhere, or make a daily calendar, or something. The calendar thing would be a challenge, only because at this point, I’d have to start researching and drawing 2015. Because that’s how the calendar business rolls. But I did finally build a site where these will be online! The daily doodles are now at holidaydoodles.com, and I’ve even bumped from 5 days a. . . Read More!