Transcripts
1. Introduction: I'm Erik Marinovich. I'm a lettering designer based in San Francisco California. I'm teaching the Introduction of Lettering. You're visiting me today at my studio based here in the mission. This area has so much hand painted signs all around. It's just great to walk around because inspiration is literally around the corner. So, behind me is the Casa Maria just local bodega here, but I think it's probably one of my favorite signs here located in the mission. What's awesome to see is each one's different, each one has its own lettering style. To me there's just so much personality in each one of these letter forms. This is a perfect example between new and old. What's happening more and more in this neighborhood is that a lot of the old signs are getting replaced with a new signs. One is so inviting where the other one comes off being so cold. So, today's class we're looking at reference material, practicing with repetition. I will be teaching you how to draw a nice condensed Sans Serif. A nice casual script and applying those to a hand addressed envelope. Envelope is a medium that we're all used to, it's kind of a charming antidote to our little digitally dependent society. Who doesn't love receiving mail especially a hand addressed envelope? What makes and lettering such a unique thing is the subtleties. The subtleties are what make a lot of the letter forms have personalities, so the fact that you can make this slight adjustments and get something so much life, I just became obsessed with that idea alone.
2. Seeking Inspiration: You're visiting me today in my studio based here in the Mission. It's just great to walk around because inspiration is literally around the corner, and it's so vibrant with color and letterforms that it just makes it for a great place to be a creative. So, behind me is the Casa Maria, just local bodega here. I think it's probably one of my favorite signs here located in the Mission. I love it, I absolutely love it. What's really cool is that you have a lot of these type of grocery stores in the neighborhood, and what's awesome to see is each one's different, each one has its own lettering style, some are brighter than others, other have been repainted about 100 times. But each time you see it, you know there's a lot of history in it because they've repainted the letters, they've added more color to make it pop even though it's probably getting faded by the sun. To me, there's just so much personality in each one of these letterforms. Each one has it's really unique character to it, but I love how the cap height is really close to the x-height, especially on the Casa Maria a script, and that they're wedging it in there, so it works in that holding shape, that triangle. The fact is that they're throwing in a pretty wide sans serif too, and the crossbar on the A, and the fact that the weight on either one of those A's are different, as well as the x-height. It's so endearing and it's so charming to know that it was sign painted. It just feels totally so charming and so approachable. I don't know, I wouldn't put that type of layout together or those type of numerals with that type of condensed sans serif, but for whatever reason because it's probably painted by hand that all those different styles worked pretty well together. Across the street, we have this Salon y Clinica. Those are all pretty wonky like it's got inverted stress, some numbers or some letters are thicker than others, but it's so charming. The fact that it's weathered and it's out of texture, again, adds so much fun personality to it. What's funny is I passed by all these signs every day to work, so of course the things that I'm seeing here totally are going to influence the letters that I draw for projects, for this envelope project. So, you can do the same thing, it's just observing what's around you. They don't necessarily need to be sign painted to have some personality to it, but just looking around and it's all around you, and again documenting it because it's might not be there tomorrow when you walk past it. This is a perfect example between new and old, and what's happening more and more in this neighborhood is that a lot of the old signs are getting replaced with a new signs. At least these guys managed to keep the old and new together, but I don't think it takes much for you to understand probably which one I have a preference for. One is so inviting where the other one comes off being so cold. It's kind of amazing how quickly this stands out versus says something that's been designed or cut out of vinyl. The fact that there's so many layers upon it, you can be across the street and just notice it. Those are the things that I'm most attracted to, the ones that look slightly off kilter that over the years have evolved into different shapes and letterforms are what attract me the most and always makes me want to get a little bit closer to investigate it a little bit further.
3. Using References: It's overwhelming when you have all this material in front of you especially when you're trying to learn a new skill and all of the times is amassing so much reference material that it almost acts as a roadblock. So you see all this good information and you feel like you're inclined that once you put pen to paper that it's supposed to look immediately incredible. What I find as a helpful technique is get good reference to look at, but then just flip open to a page and just start on a page rather than trying to do every single page in the book. When I'm looking for reference material, if it's depending on the project and depending on the brief, I'll look for a sort of lettering style that fits the project or brief really well. But for the envelopes I find it most useful to just really find a nice clean sans-serif. It can be a gothic sans, it can be condensed, it can be wide. The main thing is that I'm looking for clarity, especially if I'm hand-lettering somebody's address. There is a component of it that I want it to be highly legible and I find that those type of lettering styles like simple set sans-serif or a really nice clean casual script tend to suit the purpose pretty well. Like I mentioned before, there's just so much material out there that it's beneficial to just find one or two in particular that you can just learn from. So, I suggested of just literally opening a page and starting from there. But for this particular project, I want to look at finding some type of sans-serif that's narrow, has some curves to it and a book that I found that's just good overall, is the Speedball textbook which was by Ross George, I think this is on it's 35th edition. I'm not exaggerating, I really do think it is, and what I appreciate about it is that it's just buy it, use, it's relatively inexpensive and it has a plethora of work. So this is really handy for all sorts of lettering styles and then you can actually if you want to dig a little bit deeper and find something that is specific to one style of drawing type, there are numerous amounts of titles that just focus on this is how you draw a script, this is how you draw a serif, this is how you draw a slab serif. One in particular that's pretty vintage at this point is the script letter by Tommy Thompson. If anything it's just an amazing read because the copy and how he writes is pretty hilarious but there are some really great information in here that I haven't found in other books especially about script letter form construction. It goes through the history because I do think one important thing is that if you want to get dedicated to doing this all the time that it's beneficial to know where these letters were developed and how they've progressed over the years. The other book that I quickly reference was the Universal Penman, which were all these engravings by George Bickham, an amazing engraver to the point where I can't even comprehend how he did all this. Because these are all engraving plates and if you know anything about engraving, he was basically using one metal tool to carve into a metal plate, and just the consistency especially all these; the swatches that he's using on, all the different engraving plates are just outstanding. I don't think anyone's done it better as good as him. I'm always looking for reference materials so I make it a point if it's not looking online, make a habit of going to use bookstores, although there aren't as many as there used to be. But there are also situations in which you can go to free markets and it doesn't necessarily mean you have to buy these books, but I'm always cataloging and if I don't buy the book, I'll sift through it and I'll photograph a page within the book. So I'll document it and if I'm really organized, take the photo and actually put it into a folder and kind of categorize or tag it in a way that when a project comes up and I'm looking for something like a black letter reference that'll be able to find it. So, I think it's always helpful to always be searching because you never know what the brief is going to be for any particular lettering project. So it's really beneficial to surround yourself by stuff and eventually I think the more that you practice it, you don't necessarily have to rely on those reference books, but if you haven't done a style in a long time it's always helpful to look back and have some type of material to retrain yourself. For example myself, I would just find a good example for whatever reason that the spirit moved me or that particular serif. There was just something about it that I just needed to learn how to draw and eventually like I would draw it, I will repeat it and repeat it and repeat it because half of it to me is just developing the muscle memory especially if you just want to get into hand drawing or drawling type by hand. What you'll find is that as you practice it more, you'll begin to notice that your own unique personality and how your hand likes to draw, certain things will happen where it will migrate from looking like the reference to something that has a little bit more unique spin that you can call your own. I think what's nice is that you need to be able to stand back sometimes and call out when those opportunities happen and close the book and just rely on what you've taught yourself, to kind of remember what it looked like but then draw from it and when you're relying on memory to draw from it, unique things will happen and I think that also builds the confidence that sometimes you need when you're just began to draw lettering on the fly and you don't have material or any reference materials around you to look at. So, on a recent project that I worked on for Mohawk. It was for paper/envelope sample book and I worked with Katie Barcelona, another designer here in town and she actually came up with the concept of what if we built a story around the idea of how on the envelope met and how they ended up becoming married and became an envelope. It starts off them meeting in grade school and passing notes. So imagine if you're trying to get the attention of a girl and then you slip her a very nice note and again. So reference material that I was looking at this time was, I don't know Lisa Frank trapper keepers to even Google image searches of just what people used to doodle on their own notebooks or notes that were passed that had been caught by teachers and all of that influence the style that you see in this particular one. Then you know everyone's wants to dedicate some music and make a mix tape. So, this is the idea of what if it was a mixed, a fancy mix tape with all the track listings on the back. Totally indicative of this style of bubble letters that you do in elementary school. I know I did them and many people did. Then what if one of the characters moves to Europe then is lonely and wants to write him a letter from a cafe in Paris. So looking for any type of what signage look like on the streets of Paris or even a nice script that you can hand address the letter. Then what if they're away at a cabin for winter missing them, so they do a style and this is all inspired by sweaters like a cosby sweater. Then when things get really serious of like talking about my queen. A lot of this was inspired by the Universal Penman, book engravings by Bickham. Then this is getting into pseudo calligraphic black-letter. Looking at a lot of reference material and then it gets serious and it gets contemporary and then here's the actual like I want to marry you.
4. Materials: I surround myself with a lot of pens, paper types, rulers. I'm always constantly trying out different material. A lot of the times, materials based on the tools that you use, are based on the project that you're working on. So, I hopefully have a tool for every situation. We're at ARCH Drafting Supply here in San Francisco. This is the place that I always go to, to get all my material for this project and many other projects. It's always great to support your local art store. So, when given the chance, I highly recommend coming, prowsing, and a lot of the times, there's always new stuff to try out. So, I don't hesitate. We try out some of this. Again, coming here is always pretty inspiring because you always going to find tools that you haven't tried before. I'm going to run out of room. So, this is like, I'm totally going to get this. But trying out things that maybe aren't necessarily used for their intended purpose, I think always yields always pretty cool results. So, I'm always looking for tools that are a little bit unusual. This is a big graphite stick but I'm going to totally use it because I bet I can get some good letter forms out of it. The hidden ruler drawer, so pretty much, you can't go wrong with any of these. I have a tendency to always get these transparency. Westcott rulers, they're always really, they come in handy. I also suggest getting a relatively long one. So, short, long, medium, wide, you can yield some pretty cool results with exploring these inks as well as all these brushes. Look at how nice and wide these brushes are. You can probably do some really thick letter forms. You can even try these calligraphy brushes that they have. These work great with the Sumi here, they're really fantastic. Also, I'm a huge fan of the Pilot parallel pens. If you're working on a smaller envelope, these work really well especially if you want to get calligraphic. What I found that I like the most is just the Pentel Wet Erase marker, they're a jumbo chiseled tip. You have the broad side right here, and then you can also utilize it for the narrow side here. So, technically you can get several different line widths out of this. So, you can go for the a full width, you can go almost for what the half-width of the broaden that would be, and depending on how you hold it at the angle, you can also achieve a third width. Another thing that I love about this that I experimented with is that they are opaque. So, when you apply it to the envelope that it just gives it this nice strong opaque stroke. Then, you have it smaller but still friendly companion, the medium point. I'm a huge fan and there are many people that use these, and are just really good using them, is the Tombow. It's a dual brush pen. Two different pens, you have the brush end and then you just have almost felt marker, a fine point. What I like most about having these three particular tools is that, as I'm hand-lettering all of these envelopes, they help it feel consistent because I'm only using say several marker widths. All these tools that I'm talking about, I highly suggest that you use them for this particular project. But if you can't and if you have a paintbrush laying around that's kind of a square edge or a pointed tip, all those are totally fine. These are just ones that I've used a lot that work really well for this particular project. Another thing that you have to have for this is a ruler. I suggest getting a bunch of different varying sizes. You'll definitely need tracing paper. If you're super confident and you don't need to sketch out the composition beforehand, then do it. I find it nicer to just have iterations to figure out how you're going to solve the problem because for each address, it's a new set of letter forms that you have to compose a layout with. This expedites the process tremendously. You can try any different type of envelopes for this. But if you want to get into it, I like the number seven which is roughly over, I believe it's like 14 and one force by 20 inches big. I'm a fan of drawing big. By drawing big, I think, especially drawing letters big, you A, learn a new set of muscle memory but also gives you the confidence of drawing slightly larger than what you're used to drawing. By painting it on a format this big, you have tons of room to A, fit a long name and also the address as well, but there's something special when you create something that doesn't fit in everyone's mailbox, and either it's like laying outside waiting for them to pick up that it just is very pronounce. So, the reason I chose this particular color craft paper, is what's nice about the pencil chalk markers is that you're limited into the color palette that they come in. So, they come in a primary color palette. You have your blue, red, orange, white and black. These particular colors react so well and pop so nicely off of this background. Whereas, they probably look fine on a white, but I just love the contrast that you get from this because it's untraditional. Usually, I feel like these are just used to put a book ordering that you bought from Amazon versus something that you would actually want to spend the time to hand letter a nice address on. If you don't have these laying around, you don't have to. You can raid your parents stationary section in their office because we all know that we all have miscellaneous envelopes just laying around the house or stuffed into a drawer. So, if you have those, go ahead and use them. This is just one that I recommend that has worked well. Especially like letting me get more comfortable as me drawing letters bigger and bigger, this is a little bit more forgiving. Whereas, if you work on something small, it just means that you're going to be drawing all your letters at a smaller scale, which is totally fine, but I like seeing something big and proud that you can do on this.
5. Practicing Lettering Strokes: So, make sure you've got your working hat, you got your tracing pad, all of your material ready. If you're just starting to sketch, I recommend going into your tracing pad, and start drawing some baselines, and maybe even a cap height because what we're going to do here is practice, keep practicing, and keep practicing. Because I'm a huge advocate if you want to be proficient at hand-lettering, that repetition is the only way into achieving, A, Building up the muscle memory, getting comfortable with the letterforms that you're going to draw, and ultimately, hopefully, you're going to develop your own style to your own satisfaction through this process. Every morning that I get to the studio, I at least have a 10-to 20-minute session that I'm sketching. It doesn't mean that I'm sketching like this, I'm just sketching something. Either it'll be maybe a new alphabet style, or a new lettering style with the entire alphabet, or just a bunch of words either that I saw on a sign on my walk in to the studio. So, the baseline, all this, doing a baseline and a cap height is important because as you're sketching, I don't necessarily use this as much. In the mornings if I do sketch, it's going to look something like this. It's just kind of down and dirty, I've drawn them a lot. These aren't super perfect, but what's nice about warming up in the morning, it just loosens up, then it gets me ready to draw letters for the day. But by doing it this way, we'll have some sort of consistency, and you also train your hand, and you also train your eye to see relationships better. I'm also a very big fan of pooling into you, I find that you have a little bit more control. I honestly, when I first started doing this, I would just do pages and pages of the same exact stroke, and by stroke, I mean just this vertical stroke, just this line. As you get more confident, try doing a diagonal. In time, you'll find that your hand begins to do a lot of the work. One useful thing about these markers is that, there is this cartridge of paint in here, and since this is a felt tip point, you have to actually, every once in a while, I would say prime the felt with more paint. It's always helpful, even before you start drawing on the envelope, is make sure that the nib is primed and ready to be painted. So, what you can do is actually just draw a couple of strokes. Now, if we get back to it, now that are marker is primed, what about doing just a series of, just maybe even doing some half circles. Doing the same thing over and over, you'll just find yourself getting into this like headspace in which you're not really thinking about anything else. So, it's like if you're taking a walk, slightly freeing. Do the thing over and over and over to the point where you really forget about everything else, and you're just focusing on drawing a line as nice as the one before. So, as you can see, this is super helpful and I recommend doing this before anything, is getting comfortable with your tool, drawing the primary strokes that all letterforms are constructed of, circles, half circles, vertical strokes, horizontal strokes, the diagonals. All these components can be used to make any letterform.
6. Practicing Sans Serif: We're going to look at our reference material here that we spoke about earlier, the Speedball textbook. If you happen to get this, I'm going to sift through and find one. Let's see. I want to find a nice narrow Sans. So if we look here, it looks like cut in-display Gothic is going to be perfect for this. I'm using this as a reference. If you want to trace it, that's super helpful. I've done these before but I'm just going to kind of use it as an example to draw the alphabet from. So, if you just take a good look, I think the reason why I like these in particular is that if we look at the tool that we're using, we're using a really broad nib, and if we look at the contrast of how this typeface is constructed, there's a similar width to what the tool is, and I think that's really important to look out for as well. We can achieve this similar look using a tool, and it was probably done with like a nice flat brush or what was this or just drawn geometrically with a ruler. So, I'd like to just set this up here you know and set this here. So, if we just start, I'm just going to draw a line. We can even just draw the second stem. You can draw these all in one shot. You can start here at point A, go all the way to point B. I find that separating the letter forms gives you more control. So, as you just saw, I drew the left stem and I drew the right stem. This lets me understand that this is going to be the character width. From here, hopefully I can make this look pretty. Stop, right about there. I'll move the pad around and changed the direction get comfortable. Again, if this isn't perfect, don't worry about it. I think the main lesson that I want to teach you is just keep going. The first one you draw it doesn't have to be perfect. The reason that we're going through this repetition is that hopefully by the last one you draw if your hand's not tired, that you'll get it to a place much better than from where you started. That's all about the process and it works to your own advantage just to keep moving. We're breaking the components of the letter form apart and constructing a much like you would construct a house. I find it's a similar process. So, we come here. We can stop there. What I like to do is move the pad around because the tool is relatively big and you might not be comfortable holding it just because the actual diameter of the tool is rather large, so, by having a bigger place to work and also doing it this way, you'll understand how to hold it in the way that best suits your grit to make it more comfortable to draw the letters to begin with. Again, if we're going to build an R, we're going to break those components, right. So, we're going to do the vertical stem, much like the P. Move the pad around. Sometimes I even rotate the pad. It might make it easier on you to do that. So, here we go, and we're going to draw the leg. So, if we look back, so stroke one, again I'm pulling it towards me. I'm deconstructing the letter form and constructing it based on the letter of how the letter form is constructed. So, we have the vertical. We're going into the curves which I'm breaking into actual two strokes, and then again, finally the four stroke that we draw is the diagonal of the leg. Eventually the more confident you get, I think it's a fun exercise too is if we're starting to draw type that you know, if we look at our reference it's pretty narrow and we're getting comfortable at drawing it up this particular cap height that I've set with my baseline and my cap height. I think it's also really fun to draw it really big. If I'm constructing the letter forms as I did when they're at the smaller scale, let's look at that. What if we do these really narrow. Again, we're doing this in four parts. Since we have this kind of baseline that we're using for the others the letter form size, I'm just going to go ahead and use that as a guide for my crossbar here in the A. If that's very intimidating to do that, I guess that big of a vertical stroke, you can also help yourself by drawing out some vertical lines. Again, this is where that see-through ruler comes in handy. If you have one laying around it's great, but I just find it's nice to be able to just see what's actually underneath the ruler while you're drawing. Sometimes if the paint's still wet you actually might smear it, so hopefully by being able to the fact that this is transparent you'll still recognize that the ink hasn't or the paint hasn't dried. So, by drawing these nice vertical guides, we can just, it doesn't mean they have to be perfect but use it as a guide, and by doing this a lot, you won't be overwhelmed with the idea that it has to be a perfect vertical every time. But with repetition, your handle start to understand what it needs to do to achieve a nice straight vertical stroke. It's great to put the reference guide off to the side because eventually I'll get competent you'll understand how the letter forms should be constructed and constructed in a way that's comfortable with how you draw. Once you get comfortable with that, I think it's really great to just start drawing them the way that you see in your hand. In this particular exercise, I'm not going to draw it with a curve anymore. I'm just going to kind of draw it with how I see it. All the letter forms are still going to be narrow, and what I find cool and what I find great in this exercise is that you will end up coming across unique letter forms that you probably want to have drawn when you're paying so much attention to the reference. I think that's great is eventually you do this enough that there are things that you start putting into the letter forms that become your own distinct, like, you give the letter forms a little bit more personality based on how your hand draws them and it's great to start off with a guide but it's also great to put it back on the shelf. Again, if I was really focused on looking at the reference, I probably wouldn't have drawn a B like this. But I'm utilizing things that I learned in the reference to kind of explore and push the letter forms in a slightly different direction. I'm a fan of building a personality into the letter forms and how you draw them, much like probably how certain solo guitars, each guitarist plays the guitar slightly differently. I feel that lettering should be the same way. There are things that each hand-letter should do that is slightly their own signature. I find that really prevalent in sign painters. Certain sign painters all have a slightly different way in which they draw a casual script. If you're towns lucky enough to have sign painting and if there's multiple sign painters who have drawn the signs, if they're using a casual script, you'll begin to see, like, wow it's like this very distinct personality that they put into it. I feel that by giving your letter forms slightly more characters that they stand out more. If we all drew letter forms the same way, that wouldn't be as entertaining to look at. So again, just use the reference as a departure point. Get comfortable with it but eventually segue from not having to rely on it so much, because eventually what happens is that you'll get more distinct looking letter forms because you're relying on your memory of it rather than actually like just mimicking it. So, by the end of this exercise, you should have piles and piles and piles of primary strokes that each letter form is constructed of. You have your verticals, your diagonals, you're half circles, you can draw a whole circles, your horizontals. Get comfortable at that like I said, I want to see a couple of pages of just this. When you get more comfortable, start actually constructing some letter forms. If you have a reference guide of a nice answer if you can draw letter forms based on that sheet. But what I've done again is based of the Speedball textbook, and draw a series of A's, draw a series of B's. If you're really go-getter, you can draw the entire alphabet but at least getting comfortable enough where you draw maybe an R, an N and an O. Those particular letter forms have all the main components, you have vertical, you have the diagonal, you have a horizontal and so on. Eventually, if you get really, really comfortable at drawing it, go a little crazy and draw slightly larger than you started with. Again, that's just getting more comfortable with the letter forms. At this point hopefully you're not looking at the reference anymore. You're kind of drawing the letters based on what you've remembered by memory. Again, it's okay to mess up. It's okay if your vertical strokes aren't straight, just the process of doing it is one step closer to getting to a point that the letter forms are constructed in the way that you envision them to be.
7. Practicing Casual Script: For the next part of the lesson we're going to focus on drawing a casual script. There's a lot of examples you can hopefully walk around your town, see some examples on some nice sign painted signs, but if you don't feel like walking, we can just go to the Internet. So, if we do a quick Google search, let's just do a casual lettering script and see what examples we can find. Again, much like any reference book there's going to be so many examples. So just look through, don't be overwhelmed, look through until you find something that works. The reason it's called casual script is that it's usually done very, very quickly and they would call it much like the paint they use in one shot. So they use a quill brush, but for this example I'm just going to use the Tombow. If we draw it out, it's just really casual. So if you see how I'm drawing this, again we just did with the Sans-Serif, kind of the Gothic Sans nice scenario, we're breaking it into components. So if I'm drawing an A, I'm just drawing the downstroke, lift up the pan and then I'll draw the stem. Another helpful technique that sign painters do that can be applied to even when you're drawing with the Tombow is thick on the downstrokes, thin on the upstroke. So if I use this example, thick on the downstroke. I'm actually going to take some pressure off, thin on the upstroke I'm going to go thick again, so a thick on the downstroke and on the upstroke thin. We can start doing that. Let's just do a bunch of examples of just that. So again thick on the downstroke, thin on the upstroke. So it's pressure-related, right? So I'm applying pressure on the downstroke, relieving pressure on the upstroke. What's nice too is when you see a sign painter do this, they do it very, very fast, so there are moments here where I'm actually taking my time but if you saw them doing it with their quill lettering brush, it will probably be. Back to the idea of repetition, I recommend finding a good reference. I'm going to look for one that's more lowercase. An example. They don't need to be assigned painting example. I've found my reference online. I'm going to go ahead and draw some based on what I'm seeing here. So again, it's nice on this guy, they actually have an additional information to show you how the letter forms constructed, like stroke one down, stroke two down, and then stroke three. Again if we're going to go through, we can do the alphabet. What's interesting about casual strokes is that they're done relatively quick. In order to achieve these casual free-flowing curves is that if I were to draw this slowly you don't see necessarily. It gets a little bit wobbly, right? So if I were to draw it fast, it's much more of a smooth line. In order to achieve that smooth line and be confident to draw the curves, we can do the same thing that we did beforehand with the Sans-Serif in which we are just drawing the basic shapes. I'm drawing rather large, then you need to, for this particular tool, which is a relatively small size brush point. I'm a very big fan of drawing big. The only reason why is that drawing small is that you don't see your mistakes as often. By drawing large, you're able to see the mistakes, acknowledge them, and by working out a big scale, you also build a stronger sense of muscle memory. Drawing small takes muscle memory but by doing this you're also getting the confidence of what your hand needs to be doing in order to achieve those certain strokes. So again, guidelines. Very big fan of drawing guidelines when you're first starting out or just doing them in general all the time. So every time you have a fresh sheet of tracing tab and you're just warming up. If the space, you can try out having a space that's two or three inches baseline, that's two or three inches from the last line that you drew, that's relatively good way to start out. So again, just one-line stokes. Again, it's a casual script so it doesn't need to be perfect. We're just getting warmed up. Also, I tend to lock my hands so I get the tool on position. When you hit the pen to the paper, dedicate it to finishing the line. So I don't start lift up and then start again, just follow through each time. So if we look into doing curves, again that idea of pulling back to you I find that you have a little bit more control, but you can do curves this way. See I'm just flicking it, but each time that I do this I'm getting more comfortable and developing more control. Again, we can do some straight line. Again, see how I'm applying pressure than I'm lifting off. What you see in a casual script is that there's moments where if you're getting to the terminal, say, of the A, but by the time I hit here, I'm actually beginning to lift my pen off the actual paper which gives it this kind of tapered terminal feel. So again, if you're getting comfortable with doing the curves, and by doing this you'll see that there will become a stronger consistency between each form. I'm just doing it. I'm not thinking about it. I'm letting my hand do a lot of the work. So, this is very turbulent letter that we're drawing here. Maybe it will start getting bigger. By getting larger, again, you're working on a different set of muscles because when you work small, you're relying on the wrist, when you work big you're relying more on a hand motion. Maybe putting more of your forearm into it and then when you work even larger, you began to start using your entire hand or your entire arm. When you get comfortable, you can start drawing the actual letter forms. So, if we're focusing on a sign painterly casual script, you'll find that a lot of the examples are in uppercase, but house industries has a really great one. There's Sign Painter which is a nice family of sign painterly typefaces. There's one in particular called House script. I'm just going to use this like we did the Speedball textbook as just a guide. I'm just going to go ahead and start actually constructing the letterforms. Again, construct them in pieces. So, I'm going to do the ball of the A first. This might look boring but trust me it's advantageous to do this because you're just going to get comfortable and so eventually you won't have to look at reference material because you've looked at it long enough, you've practiced long enough, that it'll just come naturally to you. So what's nice about doing a casual lettering script, and I am a huge fan of when you can do a casual script based on the personality of your hand and how it draws it. So if we're doing a casual script S and this one's pretty big and wide. We can take some of those letterforms that we just learned and string them together. So here's a K. You can go back and connect them together if that's the look that you want. It's endless. What I recommend that's really helpful is once you get really comfortable, just keep drawing it. Each time changing the relationship with how each letterform interacts. This one I'm doing share. Maybe you can even do. So, by the end of this lesson, hopefully you have something that amasses to again another pile up. So we've got a bunch of A's. We've got B's. We've got C's. Again, find some reference material that speaks to you. It can be anything. It could be any script but a lot of the times, the tool that you use will dictate the style in which the letterforms are drawn in. So for instance, the Tombow, you can apply pressure and relieve pressure so you can achieve these nice thicks and thins throughout. Once you get letterforms done and again, I recommend starting with just drawing verticals diagonals, half circles and so on. Eventually, you'll feel comfortable enough that you can start putting letters together to spell out words.
8. Laying Out a Composition: Once you have your practice exercise down for your brush grips and you're nice narrow sans serif, and feeling comfortable with doing those two lettering styles, we're going to venture onto applying those styles and talking about composition and putting them onto your envelope for your hand-lettered address. But before we get there, it's good to prep the actual envelope,. So, what I suggest is applying a grid. I just find it as a way to help figure out the way that the composition is going to lay down. It's nice that if things line up, especially the address information. So, it's a little bit of extra effort, but it's actually worth it. So, what I always do is, it's pretty simple. You can take whichever ruler that you have, and what I like to do is literally just go step-by-step. If you don't feel like doing that, by all means, just go ahead and apply your design. But this is just a trick that I've started to do as of recently for my project that I find is really, really helpful, and just keeps everything looking nice, especially the margins and spacing between line breaks as well. So, what we're establishing here too that's really nice is almost a frame, or I guess you can even call it frame margin. I think the ruler that I'm using here is I believe almost an inch in width, which is nice because then I get a nice consistent inch margin around the entire envelope. Then there we go. So, I'm not sure. Hopefully, you can pick this up. But what we're looking at is just having a nice grid. I could have used this ruler, I could've used something even smaller. But I've just found that this one works the best, especially for this large format. But by all means, use whichever tool that you have at your disposal. Once we have that going or once we have that done, I think we should talk about composition, right? So, for an address, you have the senders name, and then you have the address that it's going to be mailed to. A rule of thumb, that's pretty traditional, is that you have the senders name at a bigger scale than you do the address line. So, you can do it untraditional, where it's just all about the address line, and you can get really fancy with the letters or the street name. For this particular project, I think it's always fun to call out the senders name, the most prominent. So, in this example, I'm going to be sending this envelope to a friend of mine up in Portland who runs The Pressure, a design studio. His name is Adam Garcia. He just happens to have a nice short name. So, what I decided to do is spell out Garcia from my bottom margin all the way to my top margin. I thought that this could also be a fun opportunity to do a slightly unconventional way with the address line. So, the hierarchy will be of course his last name really big, and then I'm thinking about actually just drawing the address line on top of the actual letter forms. So, we'll see how that turns out. But before we get going, I think it's always really helpful to know is, a, you got to know where you are sending it to. What I would like to do is take a tracing pad or take a sheet of tracing paper. What's really nice about the margin that I drew is that, this 11 by 14 sheet actually fits almost perfectly inside of the margin that I want to draw on. What's great too is that, for instance, Adam's last name, which has Garcia, which we know is six characters long. With the grid, we can really quickly figure out how much space we need in between each letter form, so I think I'm going to do like 2.5 units between each other. Keep in mind there's an "i" in Garcia, so that's not going to take up much space. Honestly, I consider this drawing the skeleton of the entire layout. So, I'm not going to draw the letter forms as they are going to appear when it's done. So, I'm going to just really quickly. This is a quick way to understand if you're going to even like the whole layout before you commit to using an envelope. What's nice too about having the grid? That way, you can make sure certain things are lined up, the cross bars in the A, and the crossbar here in the G. Let's have the R lower. So, as you can see, I'm going to actually mark this up with a pen. Again, this process is really rough, so don't worry about what it's going to look like when you put the actual marker to the envelope. But in the meantime, this is just to help you understand what it's going to look like. A good opportunity for you to figure out what type of hierarchy you want, either the name being prominent or the address. So, it's 13 units across. So, I'm going to do like 6.5, one, two, three, four, five, and six. So, I'm just going to put a little bit marker, that's the halfway point. That way, I know where certain things should break. So, I'm thinking that I'm going to put this kind of almost banner motif to hold the address line information in. Again, don't be afraid to use a lot of tracing sheets to kind of help you expedite, figuring out what the layout of the design is going to be. I'm a big fan of that, because you can keep building upon it, much like you do, a Photoshop layers work with the sheets of tracing paper to help edit things out or add things in, it is really beneficial. I'm going to see if I like this. I'm not sure yet. So, what's cool about this too is like, I notice that this information is probably going to cut off where my C is, the bottom of my C. So, if legibility is important, maybe it's worth raising this banner up higher. This is where the tracing sheet comes into play, because you can move stuff around. Now, I'm noticing that it's covering my R, and I really want his name to stick out, so maybe I'm going to move the bottom bowl of the R up to accommodate. Then, I can just have this here. So, it's pretty good. So again, what I'll do is take another pass. So, what's nice about this? Is now, we can kind of take that off and see what we're looking at. I'm not super happy with how this is looking, so I'm thinking that I might go a couple steps back. Instead of putting this information in like a banner holding shape, I think I might just keep this clean. Because there's something nice about keeping it relatively simple. I'm going to quickly look at putting this information maybe on a diagonal that actually is on top of all this information. Because how I'm thinking about this now, I'm probably going to use the really broad tip marker, broadening marker to do his name. Then, remember, I talked about having a variety of tools and having their thicknesses be varied as well, is use the kind of medium chisel point to do all the secondary address line information on. So, let's go a step back. I'm probably going to resurrect this sheet. I'm going to lay a new one on. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect. I'm just kind of making sure it's somewhere in the center. I'm going to sketch out, I'm thinking like- so what if it's just nice and big on the top of this? Maybe the letter forms are also following this diagonal baseline that I've drawn as well. So, we're going big for this one. Maybe if there's a place, we can add more Mr. Garcia here. So again, I'm going to take another sheet, lay all this on. If you feel bad about using so much paper, you can plant a tree, donate to plant a tree. I'm always double-checking that I've got all the information correct. So, I'm kind of a fan of this just additional information lying over his name. I haven't done this yet, this type of layout. So, what'll be interesting is to see how well this layer of paint sits on top of the base layer, which will be comprised of his last name. So, I'm thinking that this isn't a good spot, and that we should start drawing on the actual paper.
9. Transferring the Composition: Sometimes it's intimidating, especially if you're working on a large surface like, "Wait, how, where do I begin? There's so much space and how do I make sure that what I drew here translates accordingly to this?" There's a couple of techniques to help you in that situation. When I was first starting out, this is just one of them that is a good technique to use. So this is what we want his last name to be. There's a fun technique you can use. Basically, we're going to use this as a carbon, like a carbon paper idea. So we're going to flip it upside down, the name, and we're going to basically draw on top of it and use it to mirror, draw it, and then apply it back to the envelope by drawing back on top of the actual sketch. So this is really, really helpful and this is something that's beneficial when you're scared to actually draw, not scared, but intimidated by the size of the envelope. So what I like to do too is get a pencil that's really, really soft and that'll make a good impression. You can even dull it down so that the line is a little bit thicker. You don't need a real fine point. Again, it's a sketch, so I'm doing everything rough, and we use this as just a guide. Awesome. So we've, remember, flipped over the original sketch and now we've done it backwards. So basically, the pencil markings are on the back side, so when I get the envelope and flip the tracing paper back over, my pencil marks will be in contact with the actual envelope. What's great about this is, this allows us to line up anything we want, make sure everything's in the right margins. The pencil that I just used, you can use, which I probably will just get a little sharpened since I dulled it out. Again, it's like just a carbon paper, so I'm redrawing over the marks that I just made. If you are scared about the paper moving, you can tape it down to keep it in place, which is not a bad idea, and again, make sure that you draw it over the line that you drew on the underside, because if you don't, you're not going to leave a mark because basically, the pressure from the top side that we're drawing, the pencil mark is going to transfer back onto the envelope itself. Again, don't worry about your lines. It's okay. So here we go. It's faint but you can see now we actually have a layout of the name. So from there, once it's in good standing, if you want to just to fix certain things, you can go back and use the ruler, especially if you're not used to drawing at bigger sizes and actually need a distinct guide, a straight edge, for you to use as your marking the stroke with the marker pen. So you could go back and draw a straight line, that's okay. Let's just go ahead and do that really quick. It's not a bad idea. Then now, you can go back, and I'm going to use that as a guide for the horizontal stroke. What's nice about the grid is that you can line, you can either use a see through ruler which I like that has units on it that you can use as a guide. Eventually, you won't necessarily have to do this every time. You'll just have a better understanding of where things need to go that drawing these will be a lot faster. But for the meantime, I think it's really helpful to do this process and it's not a bad way to lay it out. That looks good. This will have to get wider, but we can do that when we get there.
10. Using a Broad Nib: So, for the time being, I think we should start. Again, a helpful practice to always do especially with these marker pens is you can get a sheet of paper. You can use a sheet of tracing paper, is that you want to make sure that, I call it prime and what I mean by prime is just making sure that the marker, you're pulling a nice consistent opaque line. If you're worried about it, you can always prime the marker by letting some additional paint get absorbed into the actual felt nib. Then that way, a lot of this is going to be done hopefully in one stride. So it's beneficial to as you're drawing the entire line that it remains opaque as you complete the stroke. There's nothing worse than, unless you're going for a style that has a little bit more texture then you can just keep drawing these lines until the marker gets a little bit dry. What I mean by dry is that instead of pulling a really opaque line, you'll begin to see some transparency through the stroke. So, for the time being, this looks good and then let the fun begin. So, again, how we did in a couple of steps prior to this is that I'm going to construct the letter form in a series of components since these are rather large scale, I mean you can see my hand for scale that I'm probably going to break apart the construction of this a little bit more than I would if they were set at a smaller size. So, I'm going to begin my vertical kind of curve here in the middle just to make it easier on me and then break. Make it easy on yourself. Again, so I decided that I'm going to make this, on the grid, I'm going to use this as my horizontal guide and it will be nice if all these cross bars are consistent, especially with the G and the A or the two As. So, I'm just going to go ahead and draw there. There's a G and again when these things happen, it's totally okay like if there is a little bit of an overshoot from when you matched up the marker to the line that you just previously drew its okay. This format, it's a hand lettered envelope and I think it's nice that if it's too perfect, it feels like it was all designed on the computer. So, to show a little bit of the human hand and like little areas that might have messed up that aren't a super straight edge, I think that just adds a little bit more charm to the overall composition. One letter done. Couple more to go. We have a limited palette especially if you decide to go ahead and use these wet erase markers. They're pretty much in the primary color spectrum. So, it limits the amount of combinations you can do which I'm a fan of less is more so, to speak, for this particular example, I am just going to do everything, or I could change it up. But if I'm going to lay over the address line on top of this, I think it's wise to just kind of pick one color to do the last name with. So, I've decided to do a red. I might also be inclined as once we get to the end, I might actually do a double thickness around all of this but we'll cross that bridge once we finish all the letters. So, all the colors look really good on this craft colored substrate as you can see these markers, it applies very opaque, you get a nice relatively clean outside and inside stroke. Again, that's achieved when you've prime the marker and that there's a lot of paint in the felt nib. Also, one thing that you're going to have to keep in mind, is that if you decided to purchase the same envelope that I'm using here today, inside is a bubble wrap. So, imagine trying to draw on top of a jacket. If a person is wearing a jacket and you're drawing on top of it but underneath it they're wearing a couple layers of clothing. That's the same thing that's happening here. Right? So, there's going to be some resistance caused by the inner lining which is consistent of bubble wrap. So, if you get really close, you'll see these areas in which like the line starts to wave, that's primarily caused by the fact that I'm drawing over these tiny little plastic bubbles but I think that's totally fine. Again, back to color. I think it's important to figure out what type of colors you want to use before starting. If you're hesitant about one color over another, I'm a big fan of you can even lay out a piece of tracing paper. Also, I suggest when you're opening the cap of this, sometimes I have all my markers resting down that way. Gravity is taking effect and is letting the ink travel through the actual nib. So, sometimes when you open this, there can be a build-up of paint around it and sometimes you'll find that paint will drip on the paper or the envelope. So, I always suggest opening the cap off to the side. So, again I haven't prime this, so, maybe you'll see what happens. Yeah, this is a great example. So, when you don't prime the marker, you'll begin to see streaking. If that's what you're into, that's totally cool effect as well. So, but back to the idea of like specking out color before applying it, so even though that we're looking through an opaque sheet, you can still kind of get an idea of the relationship or what the contrast will be like based on the background of the envelope. So, you can test that out. I think that's a good practice. That's fun to see. Then you do stencil version for his next one. So, I'm going to stick with red. So, we are on A now. Let's do the R. So, we can go. Today I'm going to have the bow of the R. Again, see how I'm constructing the letter forms. I did this about quarter or halfway and then maybe rotate this around. I'm going to use this as my inside guide. If it helps you, sometimes it just helps to have a point of reference when you apply the marker to the paper that your eye can use as a guide while you're drawing the stroke. So, I'm going to rotate the paper on so it's a little bit easier on my hand to achieve. There they are, sweet.
11. Using a Broad Nib (Part 2): So now, we're going to actually move. We're going to just do a quick helpful guide here, and move in. So right now, the guide that I drew, if I go on the outside of the line, it's going to fall a little bit too far outside of where I want it to be, so I might draw another rule like another diagonal line as a guide to just help bring this in, because if I do it here, I feel like it's just a little too much on the inside. See what happened here? This is a perfect example. So, sometimes your marker will leak and you'll just get this extra residue. A lot of times, I'll pick this up. Let's soak up, we'll do that a couple of times. It's okay for this to happen, right? That's you know that it was actually drawn by hand. I'll actually just sweep it up. But I'll show you there's a cool technique that we can use to cover this up that we can use elements. Yes, I just licked it. We're just going to let it dry. So, for this guy, since I'm drawing on the inside of this guideline, I'm actually going to rotate it around so that way the left side of my nib is visible as I'm drawing the stroke. Sweet. So, you can also see what happened here. So, since I over primed it and this is what happens when you over primed it, a lot of that extra paint that's in the cartridge will just show itself. So, make sure you catch them and just clean this up. This is the same stuff that would have happened if you're using a brush. What I like to do is just pretty much a dab it up so there isn't a large pool of this hanging out which will just take itself longer to actually dry. So, that's good we got that. Time for the C. I noticed that when I drew the sketch, the back side of the C is bowing out but not in a uniform way. So again, like I was just going to draw myself a quick guideline. Again, using the guide and I'm just going to give myself another guide. So again, this is a perfect example of being able to always retrofit as you're going along, because we did a relatively loose sketch and as we're going along, we'll notice things in our sketch that we didn't know beforehand, so always pay attention. What's nice is you have this grid behind you that you can use as a foundation, so when things get a little bit out of order, that you can just go back to relying on it to either fix up a line or redraw the outline with your pencil to make sure that everything looks consistent. So, again, I'm constructing it and breaking apart the construction of the letterforms. Another helpful technique that sign painters like to do if they have a lettering quill is if you get really comfortable with the marker, while you're approaching a curve much like the C is that you can actually rotate it between your fingertips, sometimes that helps. That's something I think that comes within time and lots of practice. If not, you can actually just rotate the paper underneath you while you're drawing the actual letterform, sometimes that helps as well. Especially if you're not comfortable with this, because like I mentioned, it's a rather large thickness and it's not like your typical pencil that's thin that you're used to holding. Sometimes I just go one, two, three. So, again, remember that we've got bubbles underneath so there's going to be those moments where it weaves in and out. But, we can fix that if that is really troubling, we can take the smaller point and go in and fill in some of those areas that got a little bit out of line. Now, when you get close to the end it's like, oh, I don't want to mess up, oh no. You can't really mess it up, you know what I mean? So, that's what I'm going to turn around so I can use the inside the line. Use that guide to your horizontal line. So this is a great example too. So now, with the medium point, we can actually go back and just tidy up those areas that might have gotten a little out of control. I'm a fan of showing the personality of everyone's hand, so there are moments where there are mistakes, don't worry about it. The more you do this, the better you'll get. So, again, I'm going back in here to finish this line. All right. So, I think we should move on to the next step here where we're going to lay out more the address line. The dangerous thing about cleaning up certain areas is that you end up wanting to do that to everything. So, we have a couple areas that we're going to patch up later on which is totally fine here, and then we had a little bit here. But mainly that stuff happens also because of the substrate like I mentioned we're drawing on top of a bubble wrap. Some of you will probably have envelopes where that's not an issue, but what's nice is that it's just another little obstacle to challenge your hand when drawing your letters. Let's keep it like in here. Okay. So, good. We have his name really big and done. Now let's focus on getting the address line on there.
12. Types of Shading: So now, what's really good is I notice that the design itself shifted to the right outside of our grid margin that we established. What's really nice about lettering is that you can also add even more character to it. One of the ways in which you can add a little bit more personality is adding a drop shade. What's really cool is if I get a pad here, sign painters have a couple of different terms that they use depending on the way, let me do it this way, the way a drop shade works. So, sign painters have a couple of different techniques that they use when sign painting. The first one I can demonstrate is a relief shade. So, relief shade just means that there's a visible gap between the main letter form and the actual shade. I'm going to demonstrate it. This is just a click, quick little demo. So, you have your relief shade which again there's just a nice visible gap between where the letter form is and actual shade begins. You can also do the closed shade, in which there is no visible gap, making sure just comes in contact with the side. Isn't doing relatively quick and overlap. In these tighter areas I'll just actually use the edge of the actual broadening marker here to make sure we get it groovy. So, as we consider a close shade. Again, I'm doing these quickly and when we actually do this to the paper, we'll make sure that our lines are straight. Then, you have a printer shade which means that the drop shade is actually just happening to the right. Honestly, you can do whichever one he wants you. So, this would be considered a printer shade. So, the drop shade is actually happening to the right versus relief shade where there's a visible gap between the shade and the letter form, and then a close shade where the shade is actually in contact with the edge of the letter font.
13. Applying Shading and Touching Up: So, now we're going to go ahead and do a closed shade on this. What that's going to help is A, we're going to use it to cover up our little paint drop that happened. Also, if we notice, we went over the margin here on the last A. So, in theory by adding a closed shade here to the left of the G, that's actually going to make this margin consistent with what's happening here on the A. So, let's go ahead. Another thing to keep in mind is, when I do the closed shade, I will actually keep the marker at maybe a 45 degree angle. So, when I'm drawing this shade especially, on an area that's curved and where I will be exiting out of that it'll stay consistent with where the actual curve begins or ends on the letter form. I'll show that now. Let's do this or I might do it upside down, I might do it this way. So, for this one so I can show you guys, I added some extra weight too. But when we're finished, we can go back and make sure that we've got clean edges on everything. So, let's go in here and now do the rest. I might do it this way just so I can see where I'm drawing. Let's carry that theme throughout the rest of this. Again, in these situations since we're drawing such big letters, I'm not dragging my palm of my hand while I draw these letters. Just again, I do that as a way to keep everything clean, my art board clean. My art board meaning my envelope. So, again, sometimes you're naturally going to move the angle around. So, what I do, if I want to keep it consistent, I'll actually just go and visually just look at the angle and keep that position steady in my fingertips and apply it there. So, I'm going to do this one also as well. Sometimes your letterforms are going to but up close to each other and because we have such a wide marker, what I'm going to do in this situation is that if I can draw over this G with the white or sorry, since it's wide I know that if I started from the base, that there's going to be an area of the G that I'm going to cover up with the red. You can go ahead and do that and then just go back in with the red marker to do a cover up, or you can just, I will show both examples but maybe I'll do one where I know I'm away from overlapping the G and I'll just start in an area where I know I won't have any other letterforms to get in the way. I'm going to come back to that when we finish up. So, we're just going to move along. There's going to be areas that I will use a different size marker to fill in. So, we're just going to get back to it but I just want to make sure that to finish the rest of the letters, I'm just going to use this one marker. Then when we finish, I will go back and we'll do any clean up or fill ins that are necessary. So, if you run in the area where you actually smear, I wouldn't worry about it too much because you can always go back after it's dried to make it opaque. I just did this as an example of say, you happen to, as you're drawing a dropped shade and run over an existing letter of the letterform behind it or to the side of it, that you can always go back in and actually just redraw the red, for instance, to just clean up that line. So, it's not the end of the world. Sometimes, you'll get the color of the other letterform on the white or whichever color you're using. That's really just simple to get out. You just rub it on another sheet until it's gone. So, again, I'm always making sure that my angle is at relatively the same by optically matching it up to the line I just drew before. This one, I'll come in here as far as I can and then stop. So, cool. We've got this to a good place. Now, I think it's time where we go and clean this up. So, I'm looking for either areas in which my lines aren't necessarily too straight that I can come back in, and with the medium size marker come in and just clean these or fill in these lines. So, since this area is a little bit thicker, I'm actually going to just use the side of the the really broad nib here and go into correct. I'm going to just guesstimate where it should fall. I'm just going to go around and see if I need to use the white again. I might have to just for a little bit for a little touch up. Now, I'm going to go back with the red and just clean up some of these inside areas that we didn't get a clean line with the red. Basically, what I'm doing is I'm investigating what areas might need a little bit of help. So, you could even go back and fix a curve. There's areas where I might have overshot my whites. So, I can go back in, clean those up. You can be as exact as you want to be or you can be as loose as you want to be. I don't necessarily think there's a wrong way to do this. So, remember that time where I actually went over the R because I was just committed to drawing the full stroke of this white? So, if it's a larger area that was wiped over, we can go back and get the broad nib and just draw your line back. Now, it's even cleaner than it probably would have been in the first place. So, it's not bad. We have a couple little areas that we can fix. There is a couple of areas where I didn't have my marker necessarily primed. So, you can see a little bit of transparency to opaque. Let this dry and we can move on to the second part, of adding the address line.
14. Applying the Address: So, now we want to look at how we're going to lay out the address line. Again, we're going to do the same method that we began to lay out the name. So, I've already pre-sketch just a really rough of how we're going to do this. Again, I want to make sure that we're going to use letter forms that we've been practicing on like a sans serif. Probably the first address line will be a mono-weight. Then, we'll look at putting a casual script for the city, which is going to be Portland, and then again, a nice mono-weight sans serif for the state in zip code. So again, I'm going to go over these. I'll draw all up the letter forms. It can be rough. I draw out some guides, baseline and cap-height just to help me keep the information relatively organized. So, like we did for the last name, we're flipping over the sheet of tracing paper. It's also a cool opportunity that if in your original sketch, something was a little bit off, it's a good opportunity to go back. If you need something to be centered or adjust the baseline, this would be a good time to do that. So, like this, I'm adjusting actually, making sure that this secondary line is lined up with this first address line here. If we turn it over, nice. Let me add just a detail here. It looks good. Now, let's sketch it out. I might do that. It's cool too. I'm constantly revising, and it's okay to revise. Because I notice that there's this area up here and since everything is condensed and very justified, it's organized in a very justified manner that I'm just going to go ahead and extend the crossbar of the T. I'm going to put it slightly higher than I usually do, just so that it doesn't cross through the L and make it look like there's two T's in Portland. I might just go back really quick and had this in. Sweet! What's nice about doing it this way is that now I can position where I want this to be. Sometimes it's helpful to just even stand. Make sure everything gets centered. It looks good to me. I might bring it down a little bit. Okay, cool. So, which is totally using that carbon paper idea to lay down this sketch. So, it's really, really helpful, especially when you're starting out. What's nice about sending a letter is that, honestly, you make somebody's day. On top of it, you're getting the practice. It's not like you're practicing on paper that you're going to throw away, at least you have something to show for it. So now if we look, I have an outline of what I'm going to draw. If it's not enough, sometimes you can fill in the areas that didn't get transferred enough and make a little bit of the heavier mark, and that's fine. If you need an additional guide after you've drawn that, go ahead and draw another one, sometimes it's helpful to. I'm not going to draw my guide over some of the pre-existing letters just to save time if you want to erase all your guidelines. Sometimes I think it's cool to show off the underlying grid. It's not a bad idea. So now that we've laid down, we've transferred the sketch, I'm going to just go ahead and start inking this up. So you'll notice too, it's like when you're drawing over the base letter forms, is that it'll stop you in your tracks a little bit just because since it's matte paint, it has a little bit of a grip to it. So, as you're especially drawing over the letter forms, which some of you might not do, but just be wary that there's going to be a little bit of resistance when you draw on top of it. As I'm drawing some of these, I'm actually just going back and quickly cleaning it as I finish them. So that's looking good. It's not a bad stone. Spacing is a little bit off, but that's okay. Now is a fun one. So, now we're going to do the casual. I call it a casual scripts. You can name it whatever you want. I'm going to just get my tembo. If you've been drawing sans serif with these markers for a little bit longer than you expected it to, sometimes it's good just to do just a trial run to see how it's gonna work out. It's always helpful to practice, especially this big swash here. Okay, cool. The moment of truth. So, you can construct this top bowl of the P in a couple of different ways. In that last sketch, you might have just see me do a quick flick of the wrist, which is totally fine. But we can do it in two different parts. Remember I told you, when you draw stroke, make sure you draw it towards yourself. We can do that here. Start here from up top. I'm going to do it this way. In this one, I can bring it towards me, which I might do, but I think the fact that I wanted to do and the reason that I'm going to draw away from me is that I want to start thick here but have the stroke get thin here, like that. Thick on the downstroke, thin on the upstroke. Sweet. So, for the crossbar of the T, I'm going to do it in two points since it's such a long span. Yeah, since it's such a long span, I want to break it into parts. So, I'm going to start here and probably end at the actual T itself and then rotate the envelope around to actually do this side. The reason I'm doing it this way is because I want a nice finish to this swash terminals. Do you like that? I hit a little bubble in the pad, so let me just clean that out. Now, I rotate it around and I'm going to do it this way. There we go. That's just a helpful trick if you're not comfortable with doing that in one motion is break it into sections and then rotate it around, so it's comfortable and a little bit easier on your hand to do that entire stroke. So, we got Portland done.
15. Applying the Address (Part 2): So, if you can see I'm actually drawing the S in a little bit more in a calligraphic way where these other, especially these numerals where I've actually held the marker in place and kind of rotated my fingertips around to achieve this curve. When I get to the smaller sizes, it's a little bit harder and tricky for most of you probably even myself sometimes to roll this in your fingertips. So, what I end up doing is, I'll end up drawing some of the letter forms. So, for instance, the S, I'm going to make it out of three parts. So, you know I did that. If you want to, you can go back in and fill in those areas where the thin part is. In that way, you give yourself a little bit of a guide. Moves a little bit sharper, the curve in there, but you get the idea. So, I'm just going to kind of continue drawing in that style. There we go and just going to write organ and the zip code and we're almost done. So, I'm finding that when you draw on top of the other paint that it tends to absorb the ink pretty fast or the paint really fast. So, I'm having to just palette or prime my marker a little bit more than I usually do. Sweet and now we can just go back and fix some of those letterforms, but for the most part I'm pretty happy with how it's looking. If you want to after a while since it's a felt tip, is that these are going to get worn out. So, if you want to do like really square off these terminals nicely, you can take the opposite edge of the tumble pen and use the fine point. Just go back in and clean up some of those lines. I actually like that there's a little bit of texture and you can see where I lifted it up and re-prime the marker and drew again that, I don't mind how that looks. Just kind of go quickly in, clean this area. Alright folks. It depends on what you want, you can leave the grid, you can leave your sketch marks behind. If you can't stand them just go ahead and erase them. I wouldn't suggest erasing over the letter forms themselves, just because most of the time you need to let your paint dry and you don't want smudging to happen and honestly it'll just be more work to try and go around and make it look too perfect. Again, you know this is hand lettered, so we want to make sure that it feeling that it was made by hand is really apparent. Looks good to me. Next thing that comes in handy, if you have a brush that you haven't used in awhile, that's dry and doesn't have any other ink on it, I just dust off all the eraser degree. Again, there's gosing to be some pencil marks that I am a fan of just leaving, because I think it adds to the overall composition. So, if you're really concerned about an area that's bothering you in which like you drip some paint on, you can always go back and cut off the excess slip and what's nice about it already has double stick tape on it so, you can just cut yourself a little piece and make sure, let's cut to the size you want. You know what? There we go. There's a couple of areas and if you feel like it, you can patch them up, but for the most part I think it adds a lot of character to it. There we have it. Once you finish your envelope, it would be great if you can document it and share it with all the other students participating in the class and one thing that, you know, everyone should keep in mind is that a lot of practice goes into this and I've put a lot of time and effort to develop these letter forms to how you see them now, but one thing that's always great is develop letters to your own satisfaction. That also represent a style that's completely your own.
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Erik Marinovich, Co-founder of Friends of Type
