Another lettering project with a phrase captured in the sketchbook from an unknown source. I'm sure this phrase was born from some podcast or book or blog post dealing with time management or procrastination and I felt the need to capture it, because it's so spot-on. Making excuses just takes away from time you could be doing. There is no try, only do. I sketched the letters quickly with a loose set of characters, then took a photo of the sketch. This saves tons of time when your're tracing the sketch in Illustrator and not cleaning up lines in Photoshop.

I shot the sketch at my drawing table with my iPhone, and since I had Photo Stream turned on, the sketch was already in iPhoto when I was ready to start tracing. I simply pulled the photo from iPhoto into Photoshop, cropped and resized (to make the file smaller) and then dropped the photo into Illustrator. I locked the photo onto it's own layer, set up a new layer for lines and begin tracing.

Since I used a very loose (and not very detailed) style of lettering, the tracing went very quickly. I only made a few modifications from the original sketch, capitalizing the letter 'A' throughout and the 'E' in 'Money'. I colored the letters in Illustrator until I got just the right color combo. This color selection was pretty much arbitrary, but I liked it. Obvious choices of shades of green just weren't working for me.

I then dragged the grouped letters into Photoshop as a Smart Object. This way I can compose a high resolution file and backgorund in Photoshop and then export to whatever size I need. I also still have the separate file of the the traced letters to repurpose or use on another size document.