When I was a kid my mom brought home a huge poster-sized pad of paper from work. I was so excited to get started, yet that paper sat under my bed for years collecting dust. Why? Because there was so much pressure to get it right that I didn’t want top “ruin” it by drawing something shitty. So I never drew on it at all.
When I followed along with my first Illustrator tutorial in 2010 I fell in love. A way to create without any of the risk of smudging or ghost pencil lines? Brilliant! For years designing exclusively digitally has been enough, but in the past few months I have felt dissatisfied. Everything feels so stark and sterile. So in the last few months I have been trying to break out of type-a shell and be adventurous.
This year I took some extra time to hand letter cards and envelopes for the staff at my son’s school. Yeah, I could have bought pre-made paper goods, but I like to think that the extra touch of doing it myself shows them that we care… And it gives me an opportunity to practice!
Using some leftover envelopes from my last big birthday (you can get some from envelopes.com), I used a Copper Sharpie to add names
Using a Bronze/Copper Sharpie I added names and an accent border to some navy envelopes that I had leftover from my last big birthday. My favorite vendor for envelopes is envelopes.com, there is a minimum order, but that means that you end up with extras for mess-up insurance or small projects like this one.
