Smile, breathe, and go slowly

I was taking a year-long class with Carol DuBosch, and one of the assignments was to write out this quote:

Smile, breathe, and go slowly. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I started out with a few quick sketches. These are not exactly thumbnails, but I needed to present them in class, so I started rather big with that in mind.

There was something that appealed to me in the one that says "SLOWLY" in all caps. I think it might have been the fact that those would need to be written quite slowly to get them good.

I did a couple quick iterations, and ended up with this version.

Italic didn't make me happy, so I decided to get rid of it.

I could stop here and just write it out more neatly, but I felt this strange calling to make it big... really big. Of course, my Roman caps aren't great (and making them bigger didn't make them better), but it was still a fun challenge.

Since I didn't have a pen large enough, I decided to go with a brush. I had one from a sign-painting workshop I took a couple years back.

The letters weren't coming along as well as I had hoped, so I cheated:

And then I did the final version in one shot.

That W is so painfully narrow. It is forever going to bother me, but the project is done, and I'm not coming back to redo it.