Module 4, Chapter 2: Lettering designs

To start this chapter I first experimented with hand writing my chosen word 'cruise' (inspired by my holiday!) in a variety of different ways. I tried different pens, paintbrushes, and even created my own writing tools out of card scraps. I additionally wrote onto some alternative backgrounds taken from my media research such as envelopes. Although I was trying out all these variations I found it interesting that I could still detect my own handwriting style in them as a collection. The experiments that did not work for me was writing in wax with an ink resist and the writing in bleach. I think with hindsight both of these were down to the materials being old. They had been festering in my paintbox since the late 90s. I have since invested in some new ink!

Module 4 Chapter 2 image 1: Hand written lettering

Following on from hand written lettering I created ideas using CAD, in this instance Illustrator. Although I am an old hand with Photoshop I have rarely had need to use Illustrator so it took a while to become familiar enough with the tools to get started. Once I had though I found it was a very quick process to churn out possible ideas. I decided to keep with a very 'hand written' feel using my mouse to write the words. Illustrator then allowed me to repeat, mirror and distort the words in a number of ways in order to create new patterns from the word. One distortion I was drawn to was to make the letters appear as if they had been stitched by converting them into dashed lines. Below are examples of what I created however as this technique had endless possibilities they are by no means the only results of what I produced overall.

Module 4 Chapter 2 image 2: Patterns using the word cruise created using CAD

Module 4 Chapter 2 image 3: Patterns with word distorted into dashes to represent stitches