Brush Lettering 2: Alphabet Basics

1. Introduction: Hi guys. My name is Peggy. You may know me online as the Pigeon Letters. In this class, we will be going over how to draw alphabet with a brush pen. I have a class on the four easy steps to modern calligraphy, which breaks down exactly what you need to know as far as letter formation. Then I have a class on an intro to brush lettering, which actually breaks down exactly what you need to know with strokes on applying pressure and then releasing pressure on of strokes using brush pens. This class, I'm going to combine the two. It's going to be a very simple overview of a couple different ways to do every letter using brush heads so that you can see where those brush pen basic strokes will play a part in. As we all know, the options are endless in brush lettering. Let's get started. 2. Brush Pens and Practice Guides: When you begin brush lettering you will notice that there are a lot of brush pens as options. These are my go-to pens that I enjoy using. You can also use regular paint brushes that are round brushes for brush lettering. If you want to use India ink or watercolor. For this class, I'm going to primarily be using these pens here so I'm going to remove these and we will go over these guys real fast before we get into how to letter the alphabet. If you haven't already taken my class on the intro to brush lettering for beginners, I do recommend doing so before jumping into creating letters. It will introduce the basic strokes that you do need to know that are incorporated into each and every letter and it will help you on your way as you're being guided through how to create letters. If you haven't already taken that, I do recommend stopping now, going back and taking that at least the segment on basic strokes and then returning to do your alphabet. I'll go over these tools with you quickly. First, I want to mention that I have five practice guides that are available in the class resources under the project tab. Go ahead and download and print those off. You don't need all of them. I'll show you on each one how they're helpful. The two that I recommend mostly are the dotted grid, and then this one here that has the multiple lines. I don't know if you can see that, but there are some fainter lines in here that included the ascender height, x-height, baseline, and descender height. Those are some really good references to use as you're learning your letters and where you want it to lie. For brush pens you, will start with the Kuretake pocket. They call it the Kuretake disposable pocket brush pen. This is a really fine tip. It's one of the harder tips. For me I find that to be easier with control. Your downstroke is nice and bold and then upstroke is nice and thin. It's not very weak. It's not wavering from that because the flexibility is much stiffer so your strokes are much easier to control. Moving over to the next we have the Tombow Fudenosuke hard tip, and it also has a soft tip. You can find these in a duo on Amazon for pretty inexpensive. The hard tip is very similar to the Kuretake. It's a little bit thicker, a little more flexibility. Your downstroke and upstroke are going to be really similar. Lots of nice thin hairline strokes and lots of control. The Tombow soft tip is even more flexible. Your downstrokes a bit bolder, your upstroke is still nice and thin. Lastly, we have the Pentel touch sign pen. There are differences with the pentels so you do want to make sure that it's the touch and the pen on the outside is a little bit shimmery. If it doesn't have that, then it's not going to be this flexible brush tip, it's just going to be the hard felt tip. If you get the pentel you want to make sure that it is the touch sign pen. Your downstroke is nice and bold. Upstroke is thinner. It's not quite as then as the harder tips over here, but you still have a good amount of control. Those are the four that I recommend getting started with and I do have these listed in the project resources as well. 3. A-D: In our first exercise, I want to use the dotted grid practice guide, so take that out, and the reason that I want to use this is because it's talking about shape. If you haven't already taken my four easy steps to modern calligraphy class, it goes over the shapes of letters. So I'm going to incorporate those shapes with brush pens. To begin, I'm going to use my soft tip Tombow for dual spooky, and the reason why is because it will be good for small to medium lettering, and although you see all of these dots, you don't need to stay inside of the small box, you can actually create your own guide to make the letters a bit bigger, and this will be really helpful, as you're learning how to shape, and then you can get smaller. But for now we really want to focus on exactly where our transitions are going to go. I'm not going to go over too much shaping, I will briefly go over it. This is the same type of guide that I use in class for learning how to format your letters and get them to have that nice consistent shape, and the counter or the oval or circle. For a, I start just underneath within my right-hand corner, and I never fully go around in this whole circle to meet all the corners. I actually create the base sheet that I want, and once I get down to one corner, it's almost a straight shot backup, and that creates that nice, clean based guide for the rest of my letters so that it does look a bit more like a designed for that. On that note, you do want to make sure that when you do come up from one corner, that it always stays consistent and parallel throughout the rest of your letters, and that line will be called your axis line. We'll start with the letter a, and we're going to lightly bring your pen up and then start applying pressure as soon as your pens starts to hit the curve downward, and then start to lift up as soon as it comes back up. I do a horrible drawing and talking at the same time, so let's pretend that's nice, and then from here, I lift my pen up, and then I come back in, and do a nice bold pressure down, and then lift up. Something that will help you as well with learning how to use brush pens, a lot of times on your line backup, what can happen is your hand will start to shake. If you really get used to how to hold your pen and how to use not just your hand, but your wrist motion, and even arm motion, it will help you with those easy glides. For example, here's an a that I'm going to do using only my hand, so there's a little bit of inconsistency and shakiness. If I were to use my wrist, I want you to notice as I come back up, my wrist is actually going to move out, so I'm going to come over, and around down, and then my wrist is moving out. Notice that my line is a lot cleaner. If you can get used to those motions with the way that your hand moves, it will make this a lot easier for you to get a little bit fancier. Notice I'm using the same four corners here, what I did was I used four of these dots as a guide. I can come up with my entry stroke, and then come up and around, follow that back down, and then nice light stroke backup, and back around. Then no matter how fancy, I decide to make these, notice that my axis is staying the same the whole way through. For b, we want to leave room for the ascender stamp. I'm using those four corners still, I'm just going to drop it a bit so that I'm able to come in with the stem of my b, which come straight down, and notice how I used mainly these three corners to guide my shape with my b. I'm going to use these three. My axis line is going to shoot up in the middle here. There's a b. When I do my lettering, I typically don't stay straight up and down with my ascending stem. I actually end up carving them just a bit, and you can do these at a slant like this, you can do them at the angle that I do, which is more of a curve in, and it just creates a little more character, and where you can go from there, here are my four guides here, is you can go in and create a little more personality. The main thing that I want you guys to focus on is just really getting used to those downward strokes, and upward strokes, and really lifting your pen and allowing it to glide on your upstrokes, and then push down all the way for that full pressure on your downstrokes. So down that nice firm stroke, and then up is that nice glide, use your wrist as it comes back around that's when you push down, as it's starting to come up and I'm going to lift the pressure and follow through. I'm going to switch pens, I'm going to show you the pen, towel touch, the sign pen using those basic guides here. My c is going to start in the same place as my a, that's going to come up real lightly, scoop around nice bold downstroke and come back up. I'm not using that entire space and you don't have to either. Just make sure that even though it is rounding the full way and I'm not connecting these two corners necessarily, this axis line is still parallel, and that's what we want to watch in our shapes. So these axis line here is the same here, and the same here, to create that consistency through my whole alphabet. You can come in and do something a little bit fancier. But mostly, just keep in mind, I want you to really focus on that light upstroke, curve around, heavy downstroke as it's curving around, lift, backup and glide. You can do that really basic, simple c, and then come back in, and add a little loop at the frat, which makes it a little bit more fancy, but you don't have to worry about coming in and keeping that shape from the very get-go, you can actually do something real simple and then added on after. Moving into d, we've got this area right here that I'm going to leave for my ascending stem, and then this is going to be like my b, only I'm going to utilize these three corners the same way as my a. So it's real similar, it's just adding that stem. I'm going to start here, come up real light, start to put my pressure down as it curves around, as it curves back up, lift up. So I'm not creating that full circle I'm coming back up for a shape, and then down and back up again. This is another one that you don't have to have exactly up and down, you can add a curve if you want, like so, you can add one of these openings, but just make sure that you are lifting your pen after each stroke. I come back up and I don't have to keep going, I can lift up and then start again, go up, down and my tail. Then from here, because you're lifting up, you can get used to adding these fine details, and they're simple, but there's a lot you can do with flourishing. 4. E-J: As we move into the rest of our letters, I'm going to create those a little bit smaller so that you can see how to utilize this guide with a smaller scale. It's the same shape, my e is going to start right about here, and my axis line is right here, so I'm going to use that for both my curve up and for where my e presents it's exit stroke. Go up and around, press down and lift back up. That is in those same four corners. Up and around lift up back down, and then if you want to do more of cursive e, you can come from the bottom corner same on the axis line, come back up. Notice my axis line is staying the same here, and here, and then you can come in with a little more of that soft entry and exit stroke. It's nice and smooth. Like hairline use your wrist as it's curving around, pressure down, lift up again on that hairline stroke is going into f, you want to make sure that you have that extra space, so I'm actually only going to use three of these because I don't want to descend that low. With f come up reliably start to apply pressure as you get through this under stroke, and then nice thick line down and off, and then for any crosses, just that nice light hairline. If you have any problems doing that because it throws you off because you're not used to doing sideways hairline, you can turn your paper, and do your upstroke like that. Well for example, can come up, press down, turn my paper, and do my light hairline stroke there. Then for a cursive f, I can come up, so these are my four corners here and then I have my descender. I'm going to come up from this corner, come around thick down and back up real light, and then I can actually do loop and out if I want to. Once you get these base forms with your letters, you can really play with breaking the rules and making it a bit more bouncy, which is what we'll use another practice guide for. We'll do a couple f's living into g. We want to leave that room for the descending stands. Using our guide here, it's going to be the same as that a and d where it comes up real ally and start to apply pressure on the curve down, lift pressure, and come up on that axis, and then straight down and then as you start to bend, that's where you lift the pressure and glide the rest of the way through. If you don't want that straight up and down, that's totally fine. You can do more of that curve in a lot of the lettering g's that you will find, the descending stem loop ends up coming a lot further down, and then not quiet coming up on its cross, but actually staying down pretty low. That's just stylistic choices, you can do something closer. It just really depends on where you want to take that. Then you don't even have to do a loop but all, you can stay just straight up and down, and just have that nice bold g. For h you want to leave that room and then come down. My h I'm going to come straight down, and then I'm going to go from this corner to this corner, up and down in my tail. What you can do as well at this line is do that ascending loop straight down, and then up lightly curve bold line down and little tail, you can make it fancier. I just having that softer intro, down and then the light release. You can also have that curve that I was mentioning that I like to do or come in from the other side, and then moving into i this one you can take a couple of different places. If these are my four corners, you can start just off center and come up. You can start in the very middle, stylistic choice just make sure your axis is the same throughout. Really when you're using that as a guide, you're just looking at those diagonal corners, you can have an entry stroke, come down into an exit stroke. Your entry stroke can be more of a dip down, you can add a little loop but notice that my axis is staying the same here, and then my j I'm going to shot straight down and back around. This is where you can create more of a curve, come up a bit higher, create more of a curve, stay a little bit lower. You don't have to cross at all that you would want ideally to be much thinner, have a hairline like so. To guide through that, it's common to want to press very hard if you're noticing that that's happening, slow, way down and just guide lightly. If you start to shake, keep here in mind that you want to use your wrist. Then it's totally fine if you need to come back over it. 5. K-Q: Moving over into K, you want to create that guide here but leave some room for your ascending stem. Straight down, and there are several ways that you can do K's. You can bring it up and have your loop, and then come down enough. You can have more of a bend, curve. Have your loop, come up. You can have more of a fancy intro. Notice that after each stroke, I'm lifting my pen. Coming down lifting light hairline curving around heavy pressure, light connection there, and then I lift my pen and then come back and with that deep pressure and light hairline up. Each one of those strokes I lift up. Then you can also do K's coming down, up, and back down. You don't want to bring the top part of your K, in hard. It just doesn't formulate very well, so don't do this. You want to bring it from the middle out and then come back in and have your light hairline match. Then this is one way you can be fancy with, coming from the other side. There's a lot of different ways to do your K. Remember that in each stroke, you want to lift your pen off. Then for these K's that are not your loop, start from the middle and work out, and then left and then come back in. For L, you can come straight down. You can do a curve. You can start here, come around, heavy pressure, lift up on that curve, come up. You can go straight up, back down and up, and remember that my axis is here always keep that in mind. You can start up high, come down, loop up, start over here. Just get used to light hairlines down, lots of pressure, and then back up. If you don't want to do a tail, you can just do a quick little axis right here, like this. Then with your M, this one is a lot of fun because as we move into bounce lettering, there's a lot of different variations we can do. But for now, we're just going to focus on placement. If you come straight down in those four corners, the axis is going to shoot out here, come back down, axis line, light hairline, and then down bold. You can do it at a curve, come up, back down, light hairline down, and then your axis stroke you can begin with a loop, up, back down. Please don't conflict or cross because you may not access nice and clean, but it doesn't look like it's interfering or in the way. You can come up in a loop, down, nice clean axis line. This is a really good letter to practice your brushstrokes too because it's that consistent up and down, where you do have to lift off each time. Then N, same exact thing you're going to come down. That's a little bit of my curve that I like to do. Come up and around. This one, make sure that you're, really, minding your axis. You're using these four corners as a guide where this shoot straight up. You can do your soft and entry stroke, come back up. Anytime that looks a little bit shaky, you can always come back down. A little tip is, not only using your wrist to guide, anytime that you're doing a curve, it is the easiest to actually come towards yourself. Then if you're doing a straight line, away from yourself. Naturally, when you come in, it just wants to curve towards you whereas upwards, it's a lot easier to do that upstroke. You can learn these rules and then break them, whichever is easier for you when you get used to these letter formations and how to use your brush pen, you can then go in and make your tweaks like for my O, rather than going around and coming back up. Typically, I stop here, and then I connect to the rest here. Either that or I stop here, come in, and do my cross. The reason for that is because I get very shaky right here even using my wrist. My theory is, it's because it's coming back towards the left, towards my wrist, wants to naturally come up and out. The main things that you want to look for In your O is that this is your prime shape that creates the base of all of your letters because that is your oval shape which is covered in basic stroke. My intro to brush lettering class. Starting here, come up and around, and then shoot straight up. Once you have that guide, it's more of one of these. That's where you are going to round it right about here, and then you can go in and start creating your connection. That can be something that you drop a little bit lower and then come up higher. Make sure your downstroke is nice and bold. This is open to your own stylistic choices as well. There's a lot of different variations you can do here. With P, we're going to go straight down, come up, and around. My axis line is right here, so it's the same as my B. It's just that my descender stem is low rather than high. You can begin here. It's okay that we're not coming right back up, on this line, and you can if that's something that you want to do. I do recommend releasing right about at the middle so that you do have some form on your axis. You can do a little flourish squashes off of the bottom. Then for Q, it's the same idea as your D or your A, where your shape is starting down here, going around, nice heavy down stroke, light hairline up. Then your A would usually stop here, but your Q is going to keep going. You can do a little tail. You can do something more along those lines. Note that I lifted my pen before I went into my tail, left, come back in, up, and out. Different variations there, play with that. Really get used to your pressure. 6. R-Z: Moving into R, you can do your regular printed R. So when you come down on your light hairline, you can stop or come down light hairline, loop around, and apply a little bit of pressure toward the end. Then moving into cursive, you can come up, circle around. So light pressure, right around the curve, apply your full pressure, and then lift throughout this sideways angle and then come down and your exit stroke. You can also come up, start here again, down, where you don't have to use your loop at all. You can do a smaller version. You can come up above guideline. So different variations here. Same with S's, lots of variations you can do. I typically stay with the actual normal printed S. I keep my width here much wider than down here. This is style choice of mine. You can come in and do the opposite. You can create exit stroke. You can come up and around and then back up and through. You can make this a little bit more fancy. You can use your cursive S. Notice, I start to apply more pressure, but it's not full pressure and then I start lifting right away. You can stop if you want to. You can do a slight stroke here. These different types of connections will come into play when you're connecting your letter. So if this was the end of a word that would work just fine. You can also really elaborate on your swatches and flourishes and get those to go even further, something like this. So different ways to play with those. Then T, that's your straight down and up. These you can start toward the side. You can also start them in the middle. Whatever is most convenient for the way that your word is set up. Then for crosses is the same thing as your F. If you don't like the way that feels you can always do your upstroke sideways and then come back. Like for my T's, I actually choose to curve in and come back up and then I cross really high. I like the way that that looks a lot more. So I encourage you to play around with these. You can do a lower cross. You can do a softer, more rounded beginning, where it's not so bold. Or something like this where I start a little bit quicker. You can do a smaller cross. I don't have to do something so straight or something with so much of a understroke, I can do up and out. Then U is another one just like the N, it's really good to practice with. You're going to come straight down, come up on that axis line, that nice hairline there, and then come back down and out. This axis line is parallel to this one. What that would look like on practicing as you lift up after each stroke. I notice that my U's aren't connecting all the way up and it doesn't matter because I'm actually going to come back into that same area. So that's a really good one to practice. With U, you can also create more of a fancy look by having that softer intro. If you stop here, come back in, create another loop. So lots of places to go with that. V is a fun one. V, you can come down at a curvature and come back up with that same curve. You can come down and then come out. Then you can swap this and actually come here, where it's that thick inverted curve toward the center and then come out and backup. This one's one of my favorites. I also like to do that one with a little bit of a loop and exit. So lots of things to do with your V. It's one of the easier ones, I think because the strokes are separate. Then W is similar. W, you can incorporate that softer understroke and then come back up. You can do something a little more sharp. Then you can play with thickness. You can play with how far up the middle wants to go, so you don't have to come all the way up. Or the spacing right here. So you can have some spacing, you don't have to have any, something like that. But notice, throughout, my axis line is always present. Then X. So with your X, you're going to come straight down, you're going to come at that diagonal and then that little tail here with lighter pressure and then rather than crossing on the top, you're going to cross from the bottom. So if you're looking at your four corners, come straight down and then up, and then just cross. You can also have an entry stroke here on that axis. Then Y, similar to the U, only you're going to have your descending stem loop. So we're going to have them straight down, come back up, down. Then same with the G, you can choose how you want to end that, so I can have that longer loop down here. I can have one that comes up quite a bit higher. Remember to go slow through those hairlines and come up, down. I can come broader If I want to or I come and past my beginning here. So it's mostly just forming structure and then depending on how it feels to you, that's where you develop your own style. Then for Z, I usually do a softer top line. You can go straight if you want to. Then a nice thick diagonal line coming down and then a nice soft exit as well. Then you can also do a cross if you want to. Same thing, you can turn your paper, you can go up higher, you can come down lower, just depending on how you want the style to go. There's different places you can put that. Then another Z you can do is your typical cursive coming down and back up. So it's basically your under stroke on the axis slant, where it's extended at the bottom. 7. Creating Words: Creating words can be a bit scary when you first get started, but when you have those letter formations, it's a lot easier than you might think. For this, I'm going to use the Tombow Fudenosuke Hard Tip. I'm going to go into just doing the word, antelope, It's long enough to where I think that it'll show you the consistency with what we just learned, and how we can incorporate that into creating a whole word. I'm going to do an entry stroke on my a, then I'm going to come up, press down, come back up lightly, and then lift my pen, come back down, exit stroke. If you look, these are those four corners, this is my exit sign here, another exit sign, this is my exit stroke. Then we're going to treat the beginning of the n as this entry stroke connected to the exit stroke here. I actually don't have to bring this up, and connect it. I can actually just begin my n, and it doesn't have to make any sense with connection, or where it is going up there, doing my n. My exit stroke, so I'm not going to bring this up, I'm actually just going to bring my t straight down into my exit stroke. I did that a little bit long. In theory, I would stop right here, come around to my e, and then with l, this can be tricky. It doesn't have to match up exactly where you're going to start. It will look like it flows throughout as you go along. I am going to bring a loop up, come back down, although that does match. But as you can see, it doesn't create that straight line, but it's not going to matter with my overall composition. Then off the exit stroke, I'm just going to do my o, and treat it as its own letter, and you want to do that with each and every letter, treat it as its own letter. It's starting on its own. Then p, and then my e. So I'm going to start down here, because that's where I would normally start, I'm just going to make sure that I do touch point with that excellent stroke. I'm going to show you a different way. You can go about doing this and with this here too. You can create more of a lengthy exit stroke to match the beginning here, with a we can create a loop with n. You can actually start here, create a loop, come down, my touch points are there. Then with t, you can bring this up if you want to, and come back down to create this space right here, like so. Since we're on the topic of animals, let's go into our draft, and double letters can get tricky. They're really fun with bounce lettering, which we'll go into in the next segment. But for now, we'll just do basic guideline. This one confuses a lot of people. From here, you can do either of those letters, or you can start here, come up and around. Notice that there's a separation. It's not going to matter because my cross covers it completely. Then with f. That's what it all looks like. Another way to do that r, you can, on your exit stroke, just come down. It's like that. Heavy pressure into light, and then heavy again, into light my exit stroke. Then I'm just going to show you an example of what that would look like with the bounce lettering so you can see the different ways that the f's can be incorporated. little bit of bounce here so that can make it a little more fun. Let's do this a little fancier. If we have that entry stroke, come a little bit further down. Really all I'm doing that's different here is creating more of a slant, and then you can exit too. Another really important main point to connecting letters to create words is to make sure that you really watch the length of your connection, for example, you don't want to start off with this nice long wispy exit stroke, injury stroke, and then go into something that's really close together because then what is this? Then you also don't want to start off with something nice and consistent, and then have this long like what is this? Nobody knows. If you want it to be this long, just make sure that you really concentrate on keeping each exit stroke the same length. When you get ahead of yourself, it's easy to forget that part. If I'm going in, I'm going to lift my pen, and then go back in, and do that longer exit stroke. This style once it's done, can look really nice. It's wispy and hairy. Start my r the same, come down, long exit stroke. My exit stroke, and then my g. It looks really pretty. But you want to make sure that it's consistent. The distance here, here, here, all consistent. You can even make that more of a slant, or it's longer like that. You can see the different styles that are created like this if you are to go more upright, and wanted to keep them close together, you can see that that's possible here. There's lots of different places that you can take that just make sure that they are consistent. For another example, we will say, Let's go check p. I'm going to keep my exit strokes a little longer on this one, lift my pen, and then I'm going to go into my h, and I'm going to start right here. Move up and around down, lift my pen, light hair, hairline stroke, come down, little bit longer exit stroke, into my a. I don't know how you guys, but somehow I started writing chair, which was what we were doing, but this is how you would write chair, with the longer in-between. I'm keeping that. I'm not even editing this out. It's funny. This is a very typical way that a lot of people want to see. They always want to write it, love, and hello go and they're interchangeable with how often you see them. We'll do it with normal spacing, and then we'll do it with wider spacing. You can see how slow I am going. I'm not doing that quick release, I'm actually dragging it there, gliding with my wrist. There's hello, and then we'll do love. Then I'm going to start my v. Basically, you would write the letter the same exact way that you would by themselves. You just make sure that they do cross, or overlap at some point, the previous letter's exit stroke. You can see clearly that those are not the connections. But if you come up, and look at the whole picture, it looks like this nice hand lettered love. Then when we get into bounce lettering, you'll see how you would be able to incorporate even more of that whimsical, playful style. 8. Bounce!: Now, what we're going to do is move into bounce lettering. There's lots of different ways that you can do capital letters, lowercase letters. I'm not going to go over too much with capitals. I have practice sheets available on my etsy that go over 10 different ways to capitalize each letter of the alphabet and both lowercase and uppercase. If you want to explore different ways to do that, that are a little more simplistic, a little different style, more fancy and bubbly, just depends and you're just experimenting, those are really good resources. But for now we're going to go into bounce lettering and you will see that we have several guidelines here. What I'm going to do is use this as my x-height and my baseline, and then two different descending lines. For A, I'm going to come up and then because my A is going down here, anytime that I'm going down, I can extend it to the descender. You want to be careful with these because you don't want it to look too much like a Q, you don't want it to look like a G. I'm just going to dip a little bit below the baseline, my B, because it's coming up to begin with, I can go quite a bit higher than my ascender line. With connecting, I'm just going to leave that open and when I come up and around and come back down, mean at my baseline, and then form, and to C. My C, I can dip below. I can start it a little bit lower. Then with D, I can stay in my baseline, and then I can stop a little bit higher, and then dip really low on that because it's coming down and back up. My E, you can keep it in baseline you can bounce it. My F it's going to come up and around. I can leave it lower if I want to. Then G I'm going to start a little bit lower. Then I can dip this below that descender line. My H, I can bring up much higher here. I'm going to come back to baseline right here, but then dip below on my exit. My I, I can do the same thing that I am going to connect to baseline and I want to do that occasionally, just so I can keep some consistency. You can see that although I'm bouncing, for the most part, I'm keeping it pretty consistent. Moving on, I'm going to show you a different variation of bounce lettering that's a little more dramatic. My A, I'm starting off baseline. Here's baseline so I'm starting off of that. I'm going to dip really low, going into B, much higher, still dipping my C higher. My D is going dip way low, is on baseline a little bit off but I'm using that as a guide. My G higher, and then I'm actually going to bring my connecting line up way higher. My H comes down. Little more dramatic there. If I'm going to write the word lovely, normally, if I was maintaining inside my guidelines, this is what it would look like. But to break that, because my L comes down, I'm going to dip below here at the descender line. Go into my O, my V is going to dip and it's not going to quite match all the way back up because I don't want it to look too long, but I am doing that dip. My E, my L is going to dip low again, because this is coming back up, I'm going to bring my Y a bit higher. That's a variation of the bounce lettering that you can do. Another that's more dramatic. Moving on, you can do. So here. This is going to dip because it comes a bit lower, because it is already on its way down. Then coming back up, I could make this a lot higher if I wanted to. Then since it's coming down, I can do that dip and then this comes back up. Because it's coming back up, I don't have to keep it at baseline. I can actually start my A much higher. Then because this is coming up, I could bring not even higher as well, similar to how I did with my G here. Then come back down, this can dip because it's coming back down. This I could bring higher, but because I already brought this one, I'm going to come and balance it a bit. But then I will bring this up even higher here and then come down and I could dip way lower if I wanted to here. Then my F, I can bring this lower. I could bring this higher, different variations there. Then coming back down, I want to maintain that balance. Notice that my A and my U are aligned. Then I'm going to shoot this back down for some bounce and come back up and extend just a bit over the ascender line and then back down to the normal descender. Another is where I keep my P at the descender rather than the baseline. L shoots way up. Different ways to do that, but notice that again, I'm keeping some consistency here. I encourage you guys to play with the bounce lettering, practice your name, practice some basic common words and see where that takes you because there are different variations. It's like learning the rules to break the rules. You're staying in your four corners the whole time, but you are breaking those guidelines. Use this one as a guide. It's helpful. They're a little bit late in here, but you can see where the guide basically is, and when you're practicing, I do encourage you to write it within the guidelines and then break them just so that you can see where they normally would sit, how that would look, and then play with composition. Pencil is a really good option to use with these. If you didn't know already, pencil will actually create the same effect with pressure. As you press down, it will create those bolder lines and then lifting up creates the lighter hairline. It'll give you a good idea. 9. Project Time! : All right you guys that's all I have for you. I hope you enjoyed. I'm excited to see the way that you guys have reproduced these letters. For your project what I'd love for you guys to do is compare your normal lettering that you would do whether you are brand new or you're seasoned, and place it next to some lettering that you have pulled out of this class. It may not be the exact same, but it's something that may have inspired you to shift your styles slightly just to play with different stylistic choices. It could be just a word, it could be a name, but I'd love to see that. It's a really simple project, and that's it. I look forward to seeing you guys next time.