Big bouncy strokes

Though it turns out that this piece of lettering had me repeating the lyrics to TLC’s No Scrubs the whole time I was making it, those lyrics were not the inspiration for this lettering.

At the time I created this, I had just begun, what would turn out to be, an eight month process to gaining full-time employment. I had sent out so many applications that I had never heard back from, understandably I wasn’t feeling the love.

Way back in 2018, six years before we all danced to the ‘Album of the summer',’ I was listening to Pop 2 on repeat, an earlier release of Charli XCX. I wish I was using Spotify back then so I could have seen the data on this song in my Wrapped at the end of the year. I would put money on Unlock it being my most listened to song that year.

This was my first foray into making a background so busy it was hard to know where to look. I was proud enough of what I made that this featured as the cover page of my professional portfolio for a time.

This is some of the process I went through before finalising my stickers.

I was making these just after Adobe released their freeform gradient option in Illustrator. I often utilize gradients in my illustrations, it was such an innovation to no longer be stuck with the limited options of linear and radial.

This lettering was the outcome of a moment of rage I felt against Instagram. Not one to shy away from a play on words, it’s fascinating to me that switching these words actually makes them nonsensical; fake real. But thanks to ‘real’ doing double duty as an adverb and an adjective, putting it first creates an informal dig at the edited highlight reels that people post on Instagram and try to pass off as their real life.