Design Project: Hand-Painted Name Headers & Logonyms

I've been seeing a lot of beautiful hand-painted type lately, and I've also been thinking a lot about my own handwriting, so I thought I would combine those things and see what nice words I could paint. As a preliminary exercise in hand-painted type, I chose to paint my name. Partly because it's a sequence of letters I'm familiar with, partly because I've been musing on making a new blog header (and a painted version of my name might be nice), and partly because of course I'm extremely self-obsessed and must be thinking about myself at all times.

Here are some Lil Ashtons:

I quickly discovered that painting my last name is the tough part. Lil is just three loops. Nice. What's so cool about this, though, is that every time I do it it's so different. There are endless variations. Makes me want to sit and paint my name thousands of times. Call yourself an artist, and you can do whatever you want all the time. That's your perfect excuse to be weird.

I also wanted to try painting a more condensed, yet similar thing: a logonym. This is simply a logo that involves your name. I was thinking about monograms, so I made some cute heart-based logos that each included my initials. I wonder if it might be better to do these including my first name instead though, since 'Lil' feels like it could fit very neatly into a logo.

I do like these though. I think the first one is my favourite, but I'm not sure if the 'l' looks too much like an 'e'.

I also did a couple of things that weren't my name, and I discovered dots:

Since I used watercolours for this, I'd like to see how using acrylic paint affects the process or allows different stylistic options. I'll definitely be trying out some further experimentation with hand-painted type. There's so many fun things you can do, I think, and it doesn't necessarily have to be all slick and perfect and beautiful. Mostly, I just want to use my own handwriting to make a neat-ish but personal blog header.