Hand-lettered Quotes

One of the things I enjoy doing most is typography/ hand-lettering. It is something that I'm doing very often, and most of the time, I'm doing it instinctively. Luckily, I don't even need any fancy materials for it. Most of the time; I simply use these black pointers by a local company but once I also got a Staedtlar Triplus Fineliner (and hey, these are not affiliate links! ;D) and that lasted longer.

Anyhow, here are some quotes I read somewhere and really liked, so I typograph-ed them. (I know typography is a noun but because I do it so much, I really think it should be a verb as well as a noun. :D).

This quote by Cyril Connolly is one of my all-time favorites. It currently hangs in our study space, to remind us something very important. :)

"Better to write for ourselves and have no public, than to write for the public
and have no self." -Cyril Connolly
(click on this for a closer look)

I made this one with brown and white acrylic paints on canvas, back in 2017. For this piece I made up a somewhat simple typeface and added a leaf impression on the top right corner because earlier there was a lot of unjustified empty space there.

This quote by Mark Twain is awesome. I really like his sense of humour. :) For this I used my black fineliner (the one I earlier mentioned).

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed,
if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."
-Mark Twain

I read this quote somewhere and I really loved it, because, as a matter of fact, that's exactly the way I work. 8D Also, one implicit message that this quote carries with it is that you don't have to know how to do something in order to do it. I did this one with fineliners too (they're my all-time favorite drawing tool, followed by highlighter markers).

"I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in
order to learn how to do it."
-Vincent Van Gogh

Another awesome quote. Hilarious, but with deep meaning. This quote frame currently stands on someone's messy desk. ;) I made this one with acrylic paint and fineliner on wood (the back of this photo frame was wooden, so I simply painted over it because I wanted a solid base for the paint). 

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered
mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a
sign?" -Albert Einstein

Unlike the previous two pieces, in this one I concentrated more on meaningful use of typography, not just the prettiness of typefaces. Visual communication is more about what message a piece of art is conveying and less about making pretty pictures. When I now look at the Mark Twain quote I illustrated (pictured above) the typography doesn't appeal much to me. Typography should be used to make text easier to read and understand, not to confuse readers about the meaning of the text. In this one, I tried to use simpler typography, and used fancy typefaces only for words I wanted to emphasize on. Next time, I should make letters more simple. Beautiful typography doesn't always have to be complicated, I guess. Anyhow, like Van Gogh, 'I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.'