In the January issue of Vanity Fair, these beautiful watercolor paintings of Michelle Dockery were featured. I love their minimalism, I love their composition, but most of all I love that they are watercolor renditions of photos. The more I looked at them in my copy of VF, the more I wanted to try and re-create the technique used in Photoshop. So, I hooked up my old, yet not often used, Wacom tablet, found a few photos I liked, and got to work.
In the end, since I’m not much of a painter, I liked a mixture of “painting” and real image. I use only 3-4 colors for the entire piece and use my eraser tool just about as much as I use my paintbrush. Below is my two-part tutorial on how to achieve the effect. (With a different photo from the above.) Part 1 highlights how to prep your image. Part 2 shows you the process of painting.
If you don’t have a tablet, don’t despair! The effect can be replicated with your mouse as well, just play play play with the opacity and flow of your brush as you work.
Well, explains a little. The last month has been an unimaginable time of sorrow and kindness and change for myself and my family, and it comes after four months of more of the same. All I can say is the outpouring of love and kindness from those who know us and those who don’t really has been humbling and I am dearly thankful.
Tonight I’m posting a 2 part youtube tutorial drafted almost 5 months ago. I hope its still useful and interesting to watch. And I hope that we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled program shortly.
A few days back I found this fantastic article on grouping fonts for your designs. I love finding articles like this. Tell me, when was the last time you only wanted to use 1 font on anything? That’s right – NEVER!
Even on our blogs, we have multiple font choices to make and more often than not, we go with what we’ve always used (inherited from a previous theme or blogger) or just go with one font to be safe. H&FJ gives us the bolstered confidence to not be scared about mixing fonts; and gives us some direction on how to do so too. They even made beautiful and lovely mock ups to show us just what the font combinations would look like in action. I was inspired! Excited! Let’s start using these methods to group our own fonts!
Enter – Heather’s tiny problem. I thought all the fonts they were featuring where accessible. In other words – free. I totally somehow missed the purchase font now button on the bottom.
Do you know how many times lately I’ve looked for a new font, and then am told I’d have to pay for it? A LOT. This does not make me happy. This is not something I can afford. But wait! Don’t despair! Luckily, I’m a little more creative than I thought I was.
There are free fonts that can help us achieve these same font groupings. And I’m going to share my knock-off font picks with you. Just so we can do a page-to-page comparison, I’m going to use the same colors featured on H&JF’s font examples. Let’s see how this maps out.
Disclaimer: Buying fonts is like buying artwork – you’re helping an at times impoverished medium and artist and helping foster creatively for things we use everyday. If you adore a font – buy it. That being said, there are thousands of free fonts that are beautiful, inspired, and um…cheep. I’m not saying don’t buy a font. I’m saying don’t feel like you have to buy a font. With enough looking, you’ll find something very close to what you were going to pay $100 for.
For a design with Wit, it would cost $427. Here I’ve replicated the mock-up example using a variation of Bebas (my favs!), Dunkins Sans and Chaparral. Other fonts that could be used to create almost the same look are Headlines One, Antipasto, and Big Mouth. To get this exact look, I did have to play with the character settings in photoshop (this occurs with all the other mock-ups as well.) “Lady Earl Gray” is the font Bebas New set with a gray gradient layer effect on 20% opacity. “Lovely / On the House” is the font Dunkins Sans (based on the Dunkin Donuts font) bolded, with a letter spacing of 200%, and a character height of 120%. “20 individually…” is Chaparral at no change.
For a design with Energy it would cost $467. This was the first font group I tried replicating and love what I get when you mix Chunk 5, Bebas Original and Fanwood text. Here, I wanted to give you a few secondary options that look just as fantastic. “Breakfast/Mornings/and the food titles” are set in Chuck 5 with no changes. “Cafe de la..” is in Headline One with no changes. Numbers and “Tiffany’s/Gwen…” are in Fanwood text with no changes other than regular or italic settings. And “1224…”/food descriptions are in Antipasto no changes. “Reservations/Owner…” are also in Antipasto, but the line height was adjusted to 80%.
A font group with Poise presented the greatest challenge for me. And priced at $697 it should. I’m still not totally happy with the smallest font Ostrich Sans as a subsitution for Verlag, but it does the job well. “Lion Roars” is in the font Black Oak set at a 200% line height and adjusted to have a 18pt space in between each letter. Justus has no changes other than it is set to Italic (a drop down option, not the italic button) for “Just the…”, and Ostrich Sans is set to Bold Black and then Medium for “New prosperity…”.
A design with Dignity? Well that will put you back $567. What’s surprising about this font set, is you could replicate it with Times New Roman, Garamond, and Verdana…if you wanted. (Those all come free on your computer…fyi). Here, I’ve used Adobe Garamond (a thinner lined font tweaked by Adobe) with no changes for “Lizt Remembered/Suite for Chopin”; Circle New with a character spacing of 50% for the “CML info”; and Fanwood text, all caps and not, for the “The history of” and the paragraph of Lorem ipsum.
Originally posted at Rusty Sarcasm, this is one of my favorite design posts. I thought we’d let it join us here.
Beautiful Darkness
Book 2 of 4
Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Released: 2010
Film to be Released: n/a
Heather Read it On: December 27-28, 2012
SPOILERS!!… not really…but a little
Apparently, the second book in almost every series is the breakup book. Am I just discovering this now? Help me friends – am I going crazy? Did I just fall off the cabbage truck and hit my head? Maybe I should just skip second books all together.
Beautiful Darkness is the second installment in Garcia and Stohl’s series about a mortal boy who falls in love with a magical, caster girl who…can’t make a choice to save her life…or everyone else’s. I hesitate to cover the story plot for serious spoilers, but I think I can give you a general overview of the good points without giving too much away.
Again we see the events of the novel through Ethan Wate, our very mortal teenage boy who is in love and determined to save his caster girlfriend, Lena, at all costs. We venture further into the caster world and learn a great deal more about Ethan himself, his family and friends, and how they all are connected to the world hidden just behind the seams. These are the moments of brilliance. Garcia and Stohl (one of them at least) has a true knack for dialogue and the banter between the ensemble characters is wonderfully entertaining to read. I can’t tell you how many times the sisters make me laugh out loud, literally.
The intertwined love stories are also hidden gems I was so delighted to find included. Throughout the novel we learn more about Ethan’s mother Leila and her connection, not only to the caster world, but also Lena Duchannes’ family and Macon Ravenwood’s.
As someone certainly older than the series’ target audience, I appreciate the depth given to the adult characters and that we are allowed to see the impact of their choices. Lelia’s story is particularly powerful and achingly beautiful – even though we never interact directly with her, we understand her strength of will and character to make the choices she has. It’s the subtleties in her story that make you want to learn more, make you want to keep reading and put the puzzle pieces together.
As in most second books, the main love interest is MIA for a good section of the story, but that gives us time to meet a few new characters and understand better some old ones. And here in lies my largest struggle with book two – do I like Lena? Is it too hard to empathize with her when she is so closed off and far away? Especially since we meet other characters who are just as compelling and just as interesting, if not better conceptualized.
I won’t go into how much I adore Olivia, or how much I enjoyed the merry band of misfits traveling the caster tunnels like the Wizard of Oz. But trust me, there were more than a few times I was rooting for Liv and the sisters and Link and even Lucille over anyone else.
Of course, it’s not a young adult novel without a twist, and the twist that Garcia and Stohl throw at us towards the end is a book-saver. And not just because I was happy for Lena; actually, she was one of the last characters I was thinking about. I was glorying in a storyline that had come full-circle, at the sacrifices that were made on behalf of love, at finally being able to look at a character and know someone’s got their s*^t together. While I will admit I thought about this exact twist earlier on, I didn’t think it possible until I was actually there; working it out just as Ethan was. Looking back, there were soft ball signs it was coming…where was my head when those came up?
Overall, the strengths of the first novel are the strengths in the second. Garcia and Stohl know how to flesh out a body of characters you will come to love, they know how to write witty dialogue, and boy do they know how to unfold an multi-layered storyline. Now if only they knew how to get Lena to open up enough for me to connect with her, I’d be set.
Vocation: Girl with Ghosts
Sometimes we hide in the most public of places - in a book, on the sidewalk, by the sea. It's in those places that we feel the most invisible...and the most connected to those just as alone. In those places we're hiding with the ghosts.
