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Time: 2h00

Lettering with Love
Whether working with a spade and wheelbarrow, or relaxing on a lounger with a lemonade, for many people their garden is a place of refuge and pure relaxation. Sometimes, even a small balcony garden can be enough to make you happy – our studio has a roof terrace that we’ve filled with lots of flowers and plants. This art print is to remind you of your blooming garden or balcony all year round.

For this design, we chose to use rough A4 (8¼ x 11¾in) watercolour paper. A size 10 paint brush is best for the illustration. For the wording, use a fineliner and a fibre/felt-tip pen. As always, use an HB pencil, a ruler and an eraser for the sketch. You will also need a pot of water and small pot or dish for mixing the paint.
For this project, we’ll work in the opposite sequence and start with the lettering. The idea is that the lemons and leaves will later wrap around the wording like a pattern.

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Elin H. favorited My Lovely Garden 04 Jun 07:22
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Step 1
Use the pencil and ruler to draw three horizontal lines. The lines should be positioned in the middle of the paper.
Step 2
Draw three rectangles around these lines in the places where you want the words to go.
Step 3
Carefully draw the words in the rectangles. Leave the flourishes out for now.
Step 4
Once you have sketched the main message, it is time to add those flourishes. Make use of the white spaces in between and around the words, and make the swirls nice and round.
Step 5
When you are happy with your sketch, you can start to draw over your letters with ink. Carefully go over all the lines in fineliner.
Step 6
Double the downward lines of the individual letters using the fineliner. This creates a lovely contrast between the thick and thin lines.
Step 7
To finish, fill in the remaining white spaces. You can do this with the fineliner or your fibre/felt-tip pen. Once dry, carefully rub out the pencil lines from your initial sketch.
Ensure that your lettering is completely dry before you start sketching and painting the lemons.
Step 8
Draw approximately four large oval shapes around the wording. Add a stem to each lemon, with one or two leaves at the end.
Step 9
Fill in the remaining gaps with individual leaves. Make some of the leaves face up and some down, as this creates a more balanced pattern.

Tip: A pattern looks more harmonious and structured if the individual objects in it are roughly equidistant from one another. You can make sure of this in your initial sketch.
Step 10
When you are happy with the positioning of the lemons and leaves in your sketch, you can start selecting the colours. Choose one shade of yellow, one of orange and one of green. In your small mixing pot or dish, thin the yellow well with plenty of water; this will be the base colour for the lemons.
Step 11
Colour the first oval entirely in the pale yellow. Then, take up a little orange with your brush and lightly dot it along the edges. The colour will now run, creating a three-dimensional effect. You can repeat this process until the colour of the lemon is strong enough.
Step 12
When the paint has started to dry, add a few orange dots here and there in the upper and lower sections of the lemon. This imitates the large pores on the fruit, and looks more natural.
Step 13
Paint the other lemons in the same way.

Tip: Watercolour paints lighten as they dry and lose their luminosity. For this reason, don’t be sparing with the paints if you want stronger colours in your illustrations.
Step 14
Let the fruit dry completely, and then finish off your pattern by painting in the stems and leaves with the green colour. We have used a muted shade, but by all means use one that is stronger. Start by painting the line for the stems with a steady hand. The leaves can then be shaped from two crescent-moon shapes, which makes them nicely full and round.

Tip: It is effective to leave a few unpainted areas on the lemons and leaves. It mimics light reflections, which lightens the illustration and brings your work of art to life.
Step 15
This art print always reminds us of summer, which is why we have put it in a particularly lovely spot in our studio.