Runaway Baby

When I practice my hand-lettering skills, I usually like to sketch out numerous concepts whilst listening to music - it helps me to stay focused and there's always something I can pick out from the songs I'm listening to, whether it's the lyrics, the title of a certain song or the name of the artist/band.

As you could probably guess from the artwork title, this particular lettering piece came about from listening to some of Bruno Mars' older music. I started off by sketching out a bunch of rough ideas with pencil on paper, then I picked out a composition that I liked and proceeded to develop the concept further.

The next stage of the process was to get out a ruler and begin drawing up some guides to create a neater, more refined version. Once I was satisfied with the pencil drawing, I then traced over the sketch with black fineliners to see how well it would translate as a vector with a black fill.

As you can see in the second image, despite me being happy with how the 'w' looked in the pencil sketch, I felt that it just didn't quite look right once the design was inked up, so I made a quick revision and sought out some feedback from my Instagram followers. In the end, the alternative 'w' won the majority of votes so I scanned the drawing and began to work on the vector version.

Towards the end of the vector stage, I decided to modify the capital 'B' as I didn't particularly like the flourish overlapping the stem - it made the design feel slightly unbalanced with too many flourishes on the left side, so I joined it up with the tail of the 'y' instead.

Finally, it was just a matter of overlaying the vectorised lettering on top of the artwork of the album that 'Runaway Baby' was featured on, 'Doo-Wops & Hooligans'. After resizing and positioning the lettering where I wanted it, I applied an outer stroke and some subtle grunge textures to the type for the finishing touches.