I'm excited to announce that I am now taking on new lettering and illustration projects! For more info and to get in touch with me, you can visit zacharysmithh.com

Take a peak into the process of creating my first mosaic lettering piece. It's messy and imperfect, but that's what process is.

To begin, I decided on the dimensions I wanted to create the artwork in.  I created guides based on the dimensions in Adobe Illustrator, and printed them out (9 per page) to start my sketching. My main focus during this phases was layout.

Once I found a layout that would work, I used Illustrator to create guidelines for my lettering. I print out the guidelines to make the sketching process easier. I left the sketch pretty rough because this was all I needed to move into Illustrator to begin the vectoring process.

Using the sketch as reference, I refined the letters and layout in Illustrator. 

I decided that I wanted the tiles to look relatively the same size. To achieve this, I made sure that the lettering, the outline of the lettering, and the rows were all the same width. I outlined all of the layers with a 3px stroke as a base for the grout.

I printed out the guidelines and drew on top of them to get a rough look. When I finished the inking, the final ink drawing was scanned in using Adobe Photoshop. I made a few minor adjustments and touch ups and then inverted the artwork.

After inverting the image in Photoshop, I brought the artwork into Illustrator and used the live trace tool to vector it. 

The final step was to separate the artwork into 3 layers (background tiles, lettering & border, and grout.) To give the final artwork a more realistic feel, I used 3 different whites and blacks to color the tiles. I used a random swatches fill script for Illustrator to randomly fill the tiles with the varying white and black colors.

Thank you for reading the process behind my first mosaic lettering piece. If you enjoyed the process and want to see more, please thumbs up and leave a comment below!