Ornate Rose Ampersand

This is the floral ampersand I created.



This ampersand was inspired by Louis John Pouchée’s “lost” alphabets. The letterforms are fat faces and slab serifs that were created from woodcuts in the early 1820’s. The alphabets were thought to have burned in a fire at Monotype’s London office in 1940. Luckily, that’s not the case. These alphabets are beautiful and highly ornamented, and I just fell in love the first time I saw them. You can read about them at typeroom.eu and at eyemagazine.com

While the style and overall feel of the ampersand was inspired by Pouchée, my take on the floral elements was influenced by neo traditional tattoo styles (though without the bold, bright colors).

Below you can see a couple of the sketches I made in the early phases of designing this.

This is a sketch of the floral ampersand I created.
This is another sketch of the floral ampersand I created.



While playing around with the finished piece is Illustrator, I discovered that it looks really cool as a silhouette too with just the flowers and vines:

This is the floral elements of the rose ampersand in silhouette.



This was a super fun personal project and I plan on making more pieces like this one!