Graffiti Lettering Contest - Entry #3

The Graffiti Lettering Contest is run by Hive account@trippymane every other week.
This weeks word is HOME.

I opened up my sketchbook I got earlier this month for my birthday, and I started out lightly blocking in letters with a pencil. I have been using nothing but pens for the last couple of years so getting used to a pencil is a work in progress. It's hard for me to know when enough is enough and when to stop trying to make every line perfect. There was multiple times I had to stop myself from erasing and forced myself to just accept the line I have made. After I had a basic outline down that I liked, I took a 1.4mm rolling ball pen and outlined my letters with it.

I liked the look of it but it was too flat. I wanted to make it pop and tried to add a big block 3D out behind it in an opposite direction I wasn't very comfortable with. It ended up looking like trash so instead I outlined the whole inside of each letter. I did this with a pencil at first to see how it would look and then committed to it with a pen after I liked what I saw. For the inside outline I used a 0.25 mm Pigma Micron. The varying line depths adds a nice look to it imo.

From here, I had no idea what to do with a shadow and fill yet but I knew I wanted to do some sort of fill. I really enjoyed the creativity of Hive account@moon-city and Hive account@digi-me last week and I saw the art from Hive account@ran.koree and Hive account@digi-me entrys this week. That inspired me to jump out of my comfort zone and I tried to do a gradient fill. The problem here is that I am colorblind (deutan) so I have troubles with red and green colors. I saw this pack of watercolored pencils when looking for a pen and I liked a few of the colors I saw placed together. I don't do fills that often because I have more of a scribble style but its something I would like to work on to better myself as an artist. I did a couple of tests trying to blend the colors together before going in on the letters themselves. I'm still not sure if I like it, but it looks better than it did when it was plain!

The last thing I did was add finishing doo-dads to it. This is where I really messed the piece up. I just went a little too crazy with it. Sometimes, less is more. The dots aren't very stylish and they look random. Sort of like my letters have freckles. I did enjoy the 3D I went with though. I just added a dark accent line against the bars that would have the shadow. Simple and effective. Just enough to make it pop. I planned on doing something cool with the "O" and that's why I left it plain. Since it had a key hole in it, I wanted to tie it into the Home theme but I fell short of both time and creativity.

I will update this post with the voting post, please vote for me! I got ZERO votes last week on what I personally thought was the rawest throw up! I get it though, it's all about perspective.

Big thank you to Hive account@trippymane for giving me a reason to draw more.