Victory

This hand-lettering piece was a personal project that had been in the works for about 5 years, in which I created the initial sketches back in 2019, then gradually chipped away at developing the vectorised version in my spare time over the subsequent years.

I liked the flow of this particular quote and felt confident that I could work it into a neat lettering composition that was well-balanced in its structure. I envisioned being able to make the larger words in a fancy cursive style of lettering, and stacking those words in a way that allowed space for the smaller words to connect the entire piece together.

I began crafting the larger words in a monoline cursive style to get a feel for the letterforms and potential swashes and flourishes, then developed the lettering further by adding a contrasting stroke weight. I also used custom guidelines to ensure all of the lettering slanted consistently throughout the design.

Once I scanned in the developed sketch, I was then able to adjust the kerning, tracking, leading and Bézier curves digitally in Adobe Illustrator. Again, using custom guidelines to achieve more accuracy and attention to detail for overall consistency.

By having four ‘The’ words in the quote, I was able to create a singular sans serif-styled ‘The’ encompassed by a flourish above and below it, then duplicate it three times to save myself some time. Once they were all positioned near each of the capital cursive letters, I then tweaked the flourishes to link up with the cursive letters.

To finalise the lettering piece, I decided to give the design some extra flair by adding subtle shadow effects and grunge textures in Adobe Photoshop.