I’ve got a lot on right now, and this is my excuse for not blogging recently. I’d like to upload work from the previous academic year as there is plenty to share but I really don’t have the time.

Instead, I’ll share a job I recently began, and finished yesterday; the kind of job we could consider as bread and butter, but this particular case was more like the icing on the cake.

The brief was delivered by a friend, for a friend, whose passion is cake-making and whose recent aim is to set up a site devoted to the sharing of the recipes she formulates.

I had to get on board, if not for a chance to pretend I have a feminine sensitivity, but at least an opportunity to display some versatility that I’m sure I’ve been lacking up ’til now.

A lot of the fun to be had was using the dip pen and behaving like a calligrapher, and wishing I wasn’t such an amateur or insult to genuine calligraphers.

Took me a while to get a feel for the pen, and then to balance the letters, and then the words. It was a difficult set, but the exploration eventually led me to something that mirrored quite nicely. Scan, print, trace, and repeat, eventually led to the border and the flourish of the ‘T’.

After this adventure, while I wanted to see if I could get away with a hand-drawn logo, I realised it really needed vectoring. The brush tool in Illustrator has a neat set of options to make this very easy, creating consistent strokes that remain editable. Excellent.

After putting everything together, with a few polishing tweaks, the space beneath the words was just calling out for a thing, like, an embellishment. Cupcakes are cute, right?

Well, I like it.