I knew vaguely what embossing was when I started this year, but actually I have found a lot of fun in creating samples of it. This looked a lot like foiling on flat images and I ordered some bright gold powder to use for this to add these extra bits to my designs. Like the foiling, it was something I wanted to experiment with on my designs once they were complete and I put this into my self-set brief.
I printed out some of my designs onto paper to try out the embossing, the first sample was created on a lined piece of paper just to see the powder, although this did not turn out as bold as I wanted, so after that I used the harder end of the embossing pen and went for a few layers of it. I also found that once I had initially tapped the powder off, covering it again in another layer could sometimes work to add more bulk to the line of the design.
I thought creatively about my designs and how the embossing could best be used on them. Starting simple with adding it to some dots in the red squirrel hero and some squiggles in the dormouse hero, then trying out some outlines on the hare placement and adding to the dormouse placement with more leaves. I think my favourite one has to be the red squirrel placement, firstly using it to add the notes word at the bottom is nice because it helps me to visualise the design on a notebook, and then by using the gold to highlight parts of the squirrel I think worked well to achieve quite an interesting effect. I think this would also be lovely in some flower designs or something like that, as it would add a perfect bit of detail to it beyond what I can do with a pencil or a paintbrush.
I think my lettering does need work, the pressure of getting it right in one go is hard but I think I could work smart with this by using a lightbox to trace some more fancy lettering which I think could make it look better and more modern too in keeping with trendy fonts, I would love to try this out actually tomorrow and do an updated post.
Here I tried out a red squirrel with the embossing placement design on a mockup of a notebook, I think the idea works but I think the lettering that I just freehanded quickly just does not have the effect that I wanted. I need a font thats more modern and loopy in line with trends.
I was going to wait until tomorrow to try out the embossing lettering since its quite late now, but I still have a full cup of tea and time to do it, so I just went ahead and found a font I liked on Pinterest, then using it as my reference, sketched out a design in fineliner on a piece of paper, then embossing over this so I got the embossing pen fairly close to the design.
The notes one turned out good but I could still see some of the pen, so on the to-do one I really tried to cover more of it and I think they have both turned out much better than my freehand lettering I tried, I wanted to now try this out on mockups to see what this looked like, as I did not have any more print outs of my work so I thought a way around this was to do it digitally.
It is quite difficult to photograph embossing, I have been using little video clips on my Instagram to show the effects properly, but I think this was quite a successful attempt and showing it with the rest of the notebooks and coordinating patterns shows that the design would work, and I think it would be flexible on other designs as well. I really enjoyed embossing and I look forward to using it more in the future as well whether its on my products or for fun.
Tahlia Paige 