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.

It's Not Yours, It's Theirs

'Make Excuses or Make Money' Lettering Study