Lyric Quest
A prelude of scrap paper sketches, digital noodlings on the ipad by hand, illustrator attempts with premade fonts, and one chunky notebook from Typo that had been filled with lyrics from a high school music collection all easily date back to 2015-2016. To say this was a new skillset and a new interest, would be foolish.
So in the wake of Lettering Sketchbook*, the Typism Creative Summit, and particularly the hiatus of Words By Bangtan* in September 2024, everything came together to embark on this project. Properly. Once and for all.
Lyric Quest.
The objective was, essentially, simple.
- Find lyrics that appealed
- Applying lettering to the phrase.
- Sketch, finalise, polish.
With the best of intentions I started 2024 buying 4 Midori dot-grid notebooks, having completed the Lettering Sketchbook course, intending to continue working on my lettering by gradually filling one book per quarter. Nice idea, terrible execution. December rolled around to my horror to realise I had barely finished one of the notebooks, let alone all four.
SKETCHBOOK SIDEQUEST
Three books, and 25 days (or so) to the end of the year. Each book had 28 pages, counting both sides of a paper sheet, for a total of 84 pages / 48 leaves. Eventually I split each page into quarters, queued up my library of liked songs, clicked shuffle, and hit play.
Some days were slow, some days were fast. Flipping through the books later is an experience of its own; between the subject matter that stuck out and the evolution of confidence in setting up pieces. In the end I was managing somewhere in the realms of 4 to 12 sketches a day (1 to 4 full pages), managing to finish 332 sketches by the 22nd of December.
Yeah, I’m still not sure how I did it either.
LYRIC QUEST – IT BEGINS
Sketchbook Sidequest fulfilled its purpose in establishing quite the future backlog of pieces to work through.
The project is ongoing – there are no guarantees that all 332 will be completed.
