concept
die Wilderin is a restaurant I frequent that uses regional and seasonal ingredients and focuses on sustainability. Since hand lettering is also a pretty sustainable art form (it takes time and patience!), the owner asked for hand-lettered quotes to help convey their philosophy. These quotes would be hung on the first floor of the restaurant. Of course I gladly agreed!

letters and layout
I got the first quote, which reads “Essen ist ein Bedürfnis, Genießen ist eine Kunst.” (loosely translated to “Eating is a necessity, enjoying is an art.”) and started playing around with how to group the words. Pretty quickly, I decided to group “Essen” and “Genießen” together, and “Bedürfnis” and “Kunst”.

It was a gut choice to have the word “Kunst” (art) written in script lettering, as the style matches the content of the word. I practiced writing the word in calligraphy with a brush pen and finally settled on letter forms I liked. (In case you were wondering, for hand-lettered pieces, I hand-letter over brush script so as to keep the same feel for all the letters.) After choosing the basic form of the letters, I worked on layout issues.

In the next step, I took letter forms from the word “Essen” and used them for the word “Genießen”. Since the first layout is never quite right, I adjusted the spacing of the letters with tracing paper.

Then I worked on getting them just right onto paper.

 

inking, scanning, and digitizing
Next, I inked the whole quote, making sure the letter thickness was about the same for each word group.

I scanned this and started working on digitizing the quote, so that you can buy your own digital version and print it out at home.

After I was happy (yes, I actually was happy!) with the results, I printed out the final version of the quote and used that as a basis to draw it on the hand-made paper that was provided by the restaurant. This was pretty exciting (yes, I’m aware that sounds geeky, but it was), seeing as I wasn’t allowed to make a mistake and the paper itself is quite coarse. Drawing a straight line nearly impossible unless you apply just the right amount of pressure.

 

results
It was such a fun process! Anyways, this is the final result in die Wilderin.

You can see it “live” in die Wilderin and purchase a downloadable version to print out here. Stay tuned for more quotes to come!