So you've picked out the perfect quote and you're ready to letter! But... you haven't yet decided how to arrange the words on the page. In this post, I'm going to go over some of my tricks for arranging short quotes and making sure your piece looks cohesive!
Composition is always one of the trickiest parts because it takes a lot of preparation while not giving you instant results. However, don't underestimate the importance of this step because you will reap the rewards at the very end!
In essence, composition is the way you place the visual elements. Where are your words going? How large or small should they be? Will your piece be centered on the page, or aligned some other way?
Let's take the quote "embrace the moment". We want to start by choosing the main words and filler words. Main words are the focal points of the quote and have the most significance. You can take it as a general rule of thumb that words like "the", "a", "and", etc can be written smaller and more simply than the rest of the piece. These are filler words, and work well for occuping any empty space between the main words. Longer words can also be filler words if you just want to emphasise a single word in the quote.
Applying this method to our quote, a couple possibilities could be "embrace the moment" or "embrace the moment", depending on whether or not you want the sole focus to be the word "moment". I've gone with the latter option.
We'll start with a pencil sketch. I've drawn a baseline with a ruler, and I'm lettering the word "moment" first so that I have a visual when it comes to fitting in the other words above it. Notice that it falls just below the halfway point of the page since I've chosen two main words and am going with a centered format.
From here, I move on to lettering "embrace", again with a horizontal guideline, ensuring that all of the letters stay above the cross of the "t" from "moment".
Notice that I'm going to leave out the word "the" for now, I'll add it in towards the end with a black pen so that it overlaps the main lettering and pops.
The next step is to go over the pencil lettering with a light brush pen, then erase the underlying pencil. My absolute favourite brush pen for this purpose is the Tombow N95 dual brush pen. (P.S. I've included a link to the item on Amazon if you'd like to get one for yourself! This is an affiliate link and I may earn commissions from purchases made through it. All of the supply links in this post will also be affiliate links - it's a really easy way to get yourself some awesome products while supporting my art so I can keep creating for you!)
With the outline ready, it's now time to blend! I'm using Tombow dual brush pens 743, 933, and 055.
I'm blending these colours from light to dark starting at the top of the letters. First, start off by laying down patches of colour as follows on a couple of letters, with small gaps in between to allow room for blending.
Using a waterbrush, blend the colous together starting from the light and going into the dark. Starting from the light areas ensure that the dark pink in this case won't oversaturate and dominate the rest of the coours. Repeat the process for the rest of the word.
For the next word, I'm going to use the same color palette but with the order mirrored. (As you can see, I started blending the orange and yellow in the corner of "m" before remembering to take the picture... oops!)
As before blend the colours together. Here's a little step by step photo grid of the process!
OPTIONAL STEP: If you'd like, you can add details to your lettering. I'll go over that in detail (get it? hehe) in a future post so don't worry about that now.
It's finally the moment you've all been waiting for - inserting "the" into the piece to finish it up! I've eyeballed a rough central location of where I want to fit it in using pencil marks.
Using the Tombow Fudenosuke hard tip brush pen, I've lettered down "H" first in the center. I'll fit the rest of the word around it.
Fill in the rest of the word, then erase the pencil marks.
All done! Enjoy the finished product.
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