I often travel to Oregon in the summer to visit family and friends, and on my latest trip I spent some time on the coast. The weather ran the gamut from cold and foggy and feeling like the edge of the world to beautifully sunny and warm. I did this lettering piece while I was there, and applied it to photos I took on two different days of the trip - on the same beach - to capture the two ends of the weather spectrum I'd experienced. Both were beautiful days on the coast!

I knew that I wanted to put the lettering in the sky above the horizon, so I wanted it to hold together as a cohesive shape; because the words are of similar length, it came together fairly easily, and I used the swashes on the O and T to round out and frame the composition. I applied some transparency and texture to the lettering to integrate it more fully into the photos, and added shadows where the strokes overlapped to give it some dimension.

The final sketch.

The final "ink" - because I was working on an iPad while I was traveling, I didn't bring this to a finish in Illustrator as I would have if I'd been in my studio. But I feel that the slight roughness of the curves works well with the natural setting of the photographs - it keeps the lettering from feeling too polished.

Thanks as always for checking out my project, hope you liked it!