Remember The Dash

For a long time now one of my dearest older friends has been asking me to create a sign for her as a reminder of "the dash" that is between the dates on a tomb stone. I remember that poem written by Linda Ellis and created a little piece of visual artwork for her. Thought I would share the design process.

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My first step was to work with pencil to sketch how I wanted the words to look. After much erasing AND reworking I went over it with my favorite Pigma Graphic pen.

I Scanned in the doodle and removed the left over eraser marks in Photoshop. I then used Adobe Illustrator's live trace tool to turn it into vector art. This allows me to scale it at any size I want without losing quality and to make further edits in the placement.

Of course my favorite part was creating the watercolor background. The hard part was waiting to let it dry before scanning it in. Now with all the elements placed in Illustrator, I could make the main type white and add some text I made up for the bottom.

OK so that was a quick little tutorial. Feel free to connect with me if you have questions.