I've been trying to post on my blog a lot more, and I've been loving it, It's like my online sketchbook, however I've noticed that most of my work fits in the illustration category - which isn't a bad thing, but since I'm trying to decide between illustration and graphic design, I should give graphics more of a chance!
When I think of type, I think of the Letterpress, which is an area in typography which intrigues me. Sure I used to enjoy hand lettering or creating my own typefaces, but I think the process you go through in Letterpress is more hands-on, which I really enjoy. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with going back to admiring the typeface as we were taught in the first year of GMD at Uni, looking at the actual character and story the form of a letter tells.
After leaving a restaurant with a food comma the other day, it was dark outside and as we were driving past I saw this bright and bold typography on a billboard? Not completely sure what the poster was on, but the work was familiar and though my blury quick picture doesn't depict much, thanks to Pintrest I figured out it was Ben Eine's work. I've seen his type graffiti before and have always wanted to respond to his work, but have never had time.
My internship at Apple is coming to an end and I'm at that point when I have stuff to do, but I also don't - so as I was still inspired by the today at apple session with Yukai last week and decided to make use of one of a fancy type I drew around Christmas time for the 70 days of hand lettering challenge, which I didn't complete....
Anywho - I drew the type out using a textured brush, and once that was done I used the grid to help position the numbers equally. I was going to start by choosing a few numbers and experiment with, but I honestly love all of them and couldn't choose so I just used all of them.
I began with the first piece of art below, which I don't actually think is by Ben Eine, but I still liked the variety of colour and the way the colours are combined.
Below is the typeface I drew a couple months ago of of some curly numbers, and using Procreate I redrew the numbers.
I added some drop shadows and got to colouring! I used a rough edged brush to make it feel more hand drawn and the really interesting thing with using layers is that you avoid making unwanted decisions because if you don't like it, you delete the layer, and it's also cool to take away certain layers and see what they look like on their own. Below are a bunch of the experiments I did.
More inspo, more experiments!
Enjoy.
Overall I really enjoyed it, the combinations of gradients, colours, and patterns were so fun to explore, and hopefully I can do more experiments like this, and maybe even take it to printmaking...
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