A few years ago, I started jotting down bits of advice I wish someone would have given me when I started working on creative projects professionally. When I started to work as a freelancer last year, I decided to turn these notes into 10 cohesive tips and use it as a jumping off point for a personal project to work on my hand lettering and animating skills.

Initially, I imaged the final piece as a 2 minute video that I would break up into 10 GIFS. I hoped to work on lettering, 3d animations, illustration techniques, video editing and sound production in the process. It quickly became very clear that I had bitten off way more than I could chew so I eventually scaled down my goal to 10 GIFS of hand lettered designs & simple animations. 

Initially, the "Sweat" was a 3d animation done in Cinema 4d and I hoped to create a bead of water that would drip off of it. After about 3 days of struggling to create a water droplet, I decided to switch over to After Effects to create a simpler version of the idea (above).

This was one of my favorite ideas and while going through and creating the motion of the dots was a bit time-consuming, I really enjoy the marquee effect. 

By the time I rolled around to tip #9, I had been working on this project for about 2 and a half months. My comfort level with each step of the process had significantly improved but a good "S" eluded me. 

Even scaled down, this turned out to be a very challenging personal project but I was happy with the project as a whole. Additionally, I no longer work to avoid the Illustrator pen tool! To see the completed project with all my thoughts on each tip visit my medium post here: https://medium.com/@sandyenoto/10-tips-for-artists-b805e677c6c#.bp6jjb4am.