I have a cool special thing that I do at my church. I get to pray for youth leaders and their youth. Someone told me I should draw for them when I pray. So I do. For now, I just draw their name. The mighty creative juices at work, haha.
Does it count as work if you’re not getting paid? Totally. So it qualifies.
I start by looking up the meaning of their name. I think names meaning something is so cool. For example, the name Elainey is a form of Helen which means light. I always really hope that something didn’t get typoed on its way to me. Fingers crossed! Then I draw a few thumbnails to get me thinking. Note the vague sketches and dog hair stuck to the notepad.
The last sketch I drew I liked best (why keep going when you know what you want?). And that’s the one in the top left corner.
So I laid down the lines:
And then I do a rough sketch of the name, erasing and changing as I go:
What a nice blurry picture that I cannot go back in time to fix. Yay for smart phones. I’m not going to ever tell you I’m a perfectionist.
At this point I start inking the name after making some changes:
It’s all right. I don’t like the balance. There’s too much white before the E, but I didn’t want to go too far to the left and make it too small. I wanted the word go up because that seems happy. For the E to be big, it would have to slope down.
Final product:
And I’m done.
-Smudged
The Painted Spreadsheet 