Personalized Layered Letter

 It's hard coming up with gifts for my niece. Now 14. she is blessed with not needing anything. We used to give her a lot of Canadian themed items, but now that's she's living up here for school, that's not quite as cool. I had tried to make a layered N for her in the summer, but for some reason, the N file in the Zengo font didn't work the same as the other letters I've done. 

That swirl in the upper left wouldn't offset like the other swirls. 

So I went to my fonts in Inkscape, and found a pretty bold one (it might have been Baskerville, as you can see, the outline is very similar to the Zengo outline). I wanted as much space to play with as possible. Then I found the Jokerman font and used that to spell Nya. I liked this font because it had little cut outs in the letters that would create cool outsets in Inkscape. I placed each letter individually in the mid section of the N.

You could use another font and create your own cutouts within the letters, or use a thinner, swirlier, font and have the layers show on the edges only

The top layer is lime green, then orange, then black. Something I didn't pay attention to was how thick the lime green was on the legs of the N. I liked how it, and the orange, created parallel lines, but the lime green was a smidge too small for the micro adhesive foam dots, so it had to be glued on. 

And it was not the easiest thing to line up, with those long skinny wobbly legs. I would consider adding horizontal pieces to brace the two legs together, or making it a smidge thicker.

The bubble layers were fun to do. I was designing this without looking at my cardstock selection. I knew I had a fair selection of colours, but when it comes down to actually putting them together, that's another story!

I made the little easel from Special Heart Studio. It's great to include, in case the receiver doesn't want to hang the letter on a wall, or in a frame. 

I wish I had gotten better pictures, but it was a very overcast day, I was in a bit of a rush, and I was on crutches, with no weight bearing on my foot. So, not the easiest scenarios for getting pictures! I look forward to making more designs like this. I haven't seen anything available like this out there, as it would be impractical to do it unless on a custom basis. And if you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know I like custom work! Got an unusual name and want a personalized gift? Not every letter and name combo would be practical for something like this, but it's fun to try new things!