Today is Friday the 13th, and while I’m not a victim of Paraskevidekatriaphobia or Triskaidekaphobia, the date really puts Friday on my mind and if there’s an excuse for a craft, I’m in.
Over the last several years I’ve been working on my hand lettering, and at first I was concentrating on brush lettering. In fact, I kind of thought Brush Letter was the ONLY form of hand lettering, but boy was I wrong.
I’ve branched out quite a bit, and lately I’ve been fascinated by Graffiti style lettering. I don’t know if it was because a co-worker asked me if I wanted to work on a logo that required it, or the trains covered in it on my daily commute, but all of a sudden this year I’ve been doodling a mix of balloon/cartoon/graffiti letters.
Also, this morning, I received a notification of a purchase in my Etsy store. Three years in, I still get pretty excited by every purchase, and I like to see what was chosen. It was one of my Fri-yay designs, so that meant I wasn’t the only one with Friday on my mind today!
So during some downtime today at work, I doodled up a Fri-Yay lettering idea on a scrap of paper. This evening, I took a photo of it and brought it into Vectornator on my iPad (here’s the link – it’s free!). After redrawing it with the Pen tool, I began to experiment with path offsets, combining sections and inverting colors until I came up with a design I really liked.
Because I have jut the basic version of Silhouette Studio (still haven’t upgraded!) I had to jump a couple of hoops to get this design into the cutting software. I saved it as a SVG, then used my desktop computer to export that as a DXF. There’s probably an easier way, but this works for me and it gave me a good stopping point to enjoy dinner and some Stanley Cup Playoff Hockey Action.
I really just use the Silhouette Studio software to position my artwork and then cut it – it has a ton of features and if I didn’t have 30+ years of Adobe Illustrator experience, I’d probably work just in it. After sizing the art and sending it to cut, I waited to see if my design would work.
Spoiler alert. It didn’t. The fine lines were way too difficult to cut and weed. Nobody wants that, so I went back and thickened them up, and tried again.
Big success! I cut this test file from matte vinyl and added it to a notebook cover, but I have big plans for next week’s Friday outfit!
