Here’s a fun piece of artwork using the lyrics to Springsteen’s American Land and an American Flag image I created in InDesign and Illustrator.
Have you heard the song? It’s pretty catchy.
You could make this with any song about America, patriotic or not (American Land isn’t the most positive of songs, but I love it anyway). It would be a neat way to display our National Anthem!
I showed you guys some lyric art I designed a few months ago and have wanted to do something similar with the lyrics from mine and Brian’s wedding song. We did a choreographed dance to Train’s Marry Me — nothing tacky, just a planned out ballroom dance with a few twirls here and there.
I was so proud of us when it came to our first dance. We took lessons at Stars Studio for all three of our dances: our first dance, the father-daughter dance and the mother-son dance. My neighbor Jolene owns the studio and her daughter Hannah is an amazing dancer and instructor. Hannah was awesome and choreographed a dance for us (pretty much on the spot while she was teaching it to us!). We had to practice so much, and the hubby was a bit nervous (I should add that doing a choreographed dance was his idea! I was totally shocked that he’d want to do something like that). Hannah also taught our parents and us how to do simple box steps so we didn’t look silly just swaying back and forth.
At our wedding the music for our first dance started a little early, so we were thrown off a bit at the beginning. After we got ourselves back on track we rocked it and were totally adorbs.
Mushy, mushy, mushy… I know :p
Anywho, I want to hang the lyrics to Marry Me in our new house with a few photos from our first dance. I’m thinking of matting it in a big silver frame. Totally cute? I think so!
Here’s my frist crack at making art out of the words.
I think it’s a fun reminder of our special dance that we worked so hard to perfect. I want to play around with the fonts a bit. I used Zapfino (the scrolly/swooshy font), Cambria and Chaparral Pro. The numbers at the bottom are Baskerville, which has really classy looking numbers (or so i think).
Here’s another version with a few different fonts. I wasn’t loving how much Cambria I used in the frist version, so I added in a few more fonts: Noteworthy, Spongy and Lesser Concerns.
Which version do you like better? I can’t decide!
Did you do something creative to remember your wedding song (or any other aspects of the wedding, for that matter)?
I recently got a computer upgrade at work and am now the proud user of a MacBook Pro. It’s been fun getting to learn my way around a Mac (I am a PC user at home). Like I mentioned in my Love Prints post, I’ve been fiddling around with InDesign. I learned InDesign in a “Graphic Design for Newspapers” class I took as part of my journalism degree, but we used Quark for page design at The Diamondback. At the business school, I do a fair bit of design work, but it’s mostly fliers, programs and the like, so the creativity quotient isn’t always at its highest. So I decided to bring my Mac home every so often to familiarize myself more with the program. It’s amazing what you can do! I’ve made a bunch of word art, which is exactly what it sounds like — art made of words. Here are some of my favorites:
No. 1: Born This Way word art
I am a big fan of Lady Gaga, but I am terrible with lyrics. I can botch up the lyrics to any song like it’s my job. And, let’s face it, Lady Gaga isn’t the easiest singer to understand all of the time. However, the Glee cast did a cover of Gaga’s “Born the way,” and I finally was able to understand all of her lyrics — and they are wonderful. With all of the bullying of gay teenagers, this song is truly a breath of fresh air and couldn’t have come at a better time. I find them truly inspiring and I believe wholeheartedly that whether you are gay, straight, transgender, bi, or any other label out there, you were born the way you are and should therefore be proud and own it. So, I played around with the chorus of the song to make this lyric art.
And here it is all printed, framed and beautiful:
I’m making a list of other inspirational/uplifting songs I want to turn into art. I think it could make a cool sort of gallery to have an entire wall dedicated to lyric art!
No. 2: Ocean Scene word art
This piece of art is truly experimental. I stumbled upon a text tool in InDesign that allows you to have your text follow an edge of a frame, so you are able to wrap words around in a square or around a circle… or, as I discovered, along a free-drawn line. I created a sea scape using the line tool, then I replaced all of the lines with text. I used different fonts, colors and sizes, and slowly but surely created a mini sea scape out of words and lines. I used tongue twisters, song lyrics, and poems for the individual shapes (i.e. “She sells sea shells” for the water; “Like a bird” for the flock of gulls; “Mr. Sun” for the sun; etc.). I think it would look cute in a kid’s room or in a beach-themed room. What do you think? It was a fun little experiment!
No. 3: Words for friends
My co-worker Millicent celebrated a big birthday in 2010 so we threw her a hot-pink-and-Michael-Jackson-themed surprise party to celebrate. My eloquent boss Rebecca wrote Mill the sweetest, funniest poem that Mill later asked me to play around with so she could use it as art in her office.
She printed it on a textured, neutral paper and it turned out fabulous:
I’m brainstorming other fun uses for the program. If you have any ideas, feel free to share! I pretty much jump at any chance to take my Mac home and play around with the Adobe Suite.
A Smith of All Trades 