In the past few weeks, I've been on my own little adventure cooking up a new texture series. My family and I live in the farmland of Wayne County, Ohio, so I felt it was time to take a little country tour and make some rustic textures. Armed with my camera, tripod, scanner, laptop, and extension cord/surge protector, I started the tour around our house. Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder, and while not many people might find much to look at in old wood with peeling paint, or might wrinkle their nose at a deck that needs a coat of paint, a designer knows full well that these rustic surfaces are super useful for design projects, especially when translated from 3D to digital. So begins our little country tour.

I'm also pretty excited to be able to publish my first hand-lettering project, in conjunction with A Country Tour, namely the Country Tour logo! Hand-lettering is so inspiring to me, and for the past year or so, I've been wanting to add it to my skill set. Here's a bit of the process behind this little sub-project.

 

I started out with a few rough sketches, the last of which is below. When I settled on a layout I liked, I redid the sketch and finalized how I wanted the lettering to look.

The "A" in "A Country Tour" seemed to be the problem child in this case. I tried a few different treatments before I settled on the one I felt matched and worked the best.

When the design "hit the spot" and the light bulb flickered on, I took another picture of the design and brought it into Illustrator.

Tracing took probably 1:30 or so. Here's the rough tracing in Illustrator.

Here's the tracing filled in, with adjusted strokes as well. My illustrator files are usually a mess by the time I'm through with a tracing project. I usually have a couple progressive copies of the initial rough tracing (like above), another layer with the tracing filled in, and another with the paths joined and cleaned up, and the final one with strokes expanded, but first things first:

Here it is colored in and readjusted, with a few more elements added to the layout for my first texture pack:

With the help of Sign Painter's Studio from Ian Barnard, a project on which I collaborated, I was able to create a painted on effect on one of the wood textures from this Country Tour collection. 

The final display image took a bit of tweaking. Again, I used Sign Painter's Studio on one of my textures and, after a lot of trial and error, finally ended up with this:

Thanks for following along! Check out my blog for another introduction to the Country Tour series and a set of free textures to get you started.