Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a really great holiday!

My last post talked about the beginning of my process.  After I sketch out a design, I usually bring it into Illustrator to fine tune the layout and design.  It’s hard to beat the flexibility of digital design.  I am in awe of design before computers.  Here’s what it looks like at this point.

This is what my logo looked like after I vectorized it in Illustrator

As you can see, at this point, the design will still go through some changes before I get to the finished product that you are looking at above.  When I vectorize a sketch, I like to use the brush tool to give more depth to my strokes, so it still retains some of the original hand drawn feeling.  After this step is complete, I’ll move over to photoshop for the final colorization.  I love coloring in photoshop, and this part of the process is my favorite.

Phew. The site is finally up. What a process!!! I can’t even tell you how many changes I made to the artwork, because I don’t even know. But I’m really happy with the final version. I really do owe a lot to my wonderful husband, Ron. He spent hours programming the site and getting it to look just right, and then I would change something. Maybe not the best way to work, but we both learned a lot in the process, so it was a valuable exercise.

The layout all started with a sketch in my little sketch book. I was just doodling letters that I liked, trying to come up with something that would guide me in the look and feel of my site.  As you can see, the basic shapes of the letters didn’t change that much.

Next, I traced the letters into my bigger sketch book to work on the next level of ornamentation.  After a quick inking of the main shapes, I started doodling scallops, frills, ruffles, and doilies all around the letters, making each character unique.  The final step before I digitized the header artwork was to create a border.  The border ended up being very lacy and fun!

inked version of colorclash header