Today’s The Daily is form the creative universe of Amy Burvall who does, among many amazing things, iconic sketch style drawings, making great use of lines and metaphors (plus I like teasing her about her pink, white, and black color scheme).
She started a practice of drawing “one word that frames her day” — and this is an ideal daily practice I have hopes the You Show folks might try. Find one word that describes or resembles your day, and draw that word (no using type tools). And why not put a frame around it.
Amy does hers (I am fairly sure) in Paper53 on an iPad, which I could have done. But I wanted to try it in my copy of PhotoShop, so I imported as a base, one of her drawings:
I blacked out the interior of the frame (selected and filled with black). Then, I am looking at that blank space wondering what the word is. As I feel like my brain today has switched from one task thought, worry, forgotten email, to another, I first thought of “distracted“, but it feels more like fast channel switching on a TV. So I opted for “flipping”.
Now my dexterity at drawing text is pretty bad. I usually end up with letters not proportionately shaped, or I do not use the space evenly. So I sort of cheated. I placed the letters on a layer below my first drawing layer:
I wanted to explore some of the brush tools I never use in the paint tool, so in a layer above I painted in some basic strokes for the letters:
To add accent, I made another layer atop this one, and in white, used more of a chalk type brush:
I then went wild (heh) and free form painted in a remote control (using that same chalk brush), putting it behind all of the painted text layers. Dropping the opacity on the layer to about 70 made it fade into the background.
Last to add the date, and give credit to amy, I painted in some smaller text:
This was even more challenging. I had to do over some of the letters a few times (the history panel helps). And I cheated a bit and resized the words a bit. The thing I learned was if I went much slower and more deliberately, I was able to control the strokes a bit better.
I have a long way to go to get good at hand lettering, but practicing like this helps.
