You're hand lettered, Harry.

Despite having graduated from school only last month, I’m apparently already craving learning in my life. Or perhaps it’s the fact that as I look toward the next phase of my career, I see places where I want to grow and strengths I want to add to my toolbox. Regardless, lettering and illustration have both been uncomfortable places for me so I decided to take on Jessica Hische’s new Skillshare last weekend.

The class was titled, Illustrated Lettering: Designing a Book Cover in Procreate, and challenged students to go through the process of brainstorming, defining an audience, color selection, lettering, etc. Maybe because I’m excited to go to Florida and to Harry Potter World in two weeks, or maybe just because I’ll forever be obsessed with Harry Potter, I chose Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as my book and got to work.

Hoping to clear my head of some design cobwebs and force myself to explore uncomfortable things, I spent an inordinate amount of time designing this book cover. I mean my hand was cramping up and my pencil had to be recharged multiple times. But again, it’s not my natural habitat to design in an “analogue” way (read: without Illustrator or InDesign and instead with a “pencil”). That said, I feel like I got to explore a lot more of my own ideas while working exclusively on paper or in Procreate, because nothing was ever particularly precious—it never looked good enough to be precious right away.

So here’s my book. I’m actually really pleased with how it turned out and pretty damn proud of myself. Here’s to doing more weird and uncomfortable things in 2019.