Analog Hand Lettering - Sans iPhone

Before I ditched my smartphone, four or five years back, I used to make hand-lettering composites with it. I would ink out a design in my sketchbook, snap an iPhone pic, invert it, and mash it together with Photoshop Mix. I could eat a sandwich and pump out a little piece of art before my lunch break was over. But life got busy and I followed the creative muse into other pursuits. My friend Reuben got me back into film photography. So, I took a hiatus from hand-lettering and learned to guess exposure on my dad's old Nikonos III. That was three years and three cameras ago.

A couple weeks ago I was reclining on the couch after a hard day of pushing around pixels and that's when the idea hit me: maybe I could still do my hand lettering thing, but instead of using a bunch of iPhone apps, I could just take double exposures on my film camera. I paid Jeff Bezos for some black construction paper and I paid my local art store for some acrylic paint pens (don't ask me why I didn't get it all at the local art store). The afternoon the paper arrived I dragged my 8 year old to the park and we both drew white ink on black paper. He drew a 3D truck. I lettered the word "create" and I took a picture of it. And then I double exposed it with a picture of my son's hand next to a rose.

Over the next few days I tried a handful of other experiments and sent the roll off to The Find Lab in Orem, UT 84058. I waited. The email hit my inbox -- a welcomed reprieve from teaching pixels to behave -- and guess what? It worked. Like really well.

These are the first experiments from that roll. I'm excited to try more layers and textures. Also very open to tips and tricks you might have to make the white pop more (besides a light table).