Tigerprint christmas type competition

I was excited when reading the brief for this months Tigerprint competition because I have been needing an excuse to work on my hand drawn type and this seemed like the perfect project! I spent a lot of time working on different phrases in different styles and played around with different drawing implements. The photos below show some of my sketchbook work using brush pen, graphite pencil, italic markers and rotring fineliners to create different lines and textures. 

I played around with 5 different phrases for final designs, two I just couldn't get to look right so I scrapped them, these 3 are the ones I will be submitting for the competition:

This was my first design, I like the type, still not entirely sure the colour palette is quite right - I think I work better with a smaller selection of colours!

I loved drawing the frame for this image, I wanted it to be quite decorative with simple colours.

This one is my favourite - I love burgundy and I think the type fitted the shape really well.