Transcripts
1. Introduction: Are you ready to discover your own unique lettering style? I my name Micheli heads on the lettering artists and I love fonts. I love creating my own hand letter Fonds. I love typography. And in this class I want to teach you the steps that I took to discover my own lettering styles. I have now created over 10 unique lettering styles and have created three of them into digital fonts. And it continues to grow. It's a lot of fun and can even be addictive when she truly learn some key components of finding your own lettering style. Gonna start off this class with 10 basic tips that we're gonna go into five things you can change in your letters, gonna show you how to use grid paper to practice your lettering styles. And I'm even going to show you a tool online that you can create your own grid and dot paper for ongoing practice. We're then gonna cover 10 different ideas you can do to really make your lettering stand out. This is a lot of fun and I give practical suggestions along the way and by the end of the class you will have a full page filled out with all different styles of one letter. You'll get toe watch as I fill my page with 30 upper case and lower case A's. Not only that, I'm also going to share with you in the final Next steps video, an app that I use to create my own digital fonts. Once I've created and designed my lettering style. So you ready to get started and really find a style that's you. Maybe you'll discover many, many styles that you can start using on a regular basis, whether you use it for your own artwork commissioned, work your digital products or simply use it in your planner and your own journals. This is a lot of fun, and anyone can get started. You don't need any special tools. You just need a pen and paper. So let's get started
2. 10 Tips to Finding Your Style: So in this first video, we're gonna cover 10 tips to finding your lettering style. Now I know that there is no magic pill. There is no magic answer. Easy button. But there are a few things that I've learned as I've created my own lettering styles that I want to share with you. So the first is just to know the basics. I recommend that you have a really good handle on your basic strokes and your letter formations before you really start learning your own style. So if you haven't yet taken my brush lettering for beginners class, I recommend starting there really practicing your basic strokes, practicing a style that I've given you, and then you can really get good at that. And once you feel comfortable with that, then it's time to start branching out and creating your own style. And that's really what I did. I got really, really comfortable with a certain style. I practice my basic strokes over and over, and it wasn't long that I was just yearning defined my own style, and that's when Inc dance was born. Now you'll you can learn 10 different styles that I have created in my class all about 10 different ways. Toe letter, the lower case alphabet. So if you haven't taken that class, it's just a fun class to explore a bunch of different styles and to really jump in. But in dance was my very first style that I created. And it really was born First of knowing those basic strokes and also the letter formations . Okay, so the next tip is to try different tools. As you can see, I have my mark, one of my marker containers here. I have a lot of markers. I have a lot of pain, but here are a lot of different tools that I've tried. And I have even more in this container here. So many different tools, so many different pens to try and to see what really fits for you. So if I wouldn't have tried different tools, I would have never known that. I really enjoy using a pen. Tell water brush with India ink in it. It has Doctor Ph. Martin's India ink in it. This is what I'm using to create this. It has kind of a little bit of a messy look, and it's hard to control this is really hard to learn, but it's what I love. And it's what I currently use a ton off. I lately have really been using this zero pen. Ah lot. It's similar to to the Tom Bo food Natsuki and I really love this between this. This is more for small pieces, lettering, pieces, and this is for more large lettering pieces. But there so many tools that I love so many tools that I use and I don't use the same tools all the time, although I do gravitate towards Thies, too. But give yourself freedom to try some different tools. Sometimes it is helpful to check your local art supply store. We have a local art store here in Colorado Springs, HR Mining ER's and you could just buy one pen at a time, so they have a whole bunch of different options. So if you are able to get to an art store that's helpful, otherwise maybe you have friends or a lettering group that will meet, and you can see if you can try other people's pans, goto a lettering workshop or purchase like I did. I I purchased a lot of different pens until I really found the ones that fit me and that I really, really liked. So don't be afraid and just try a bunch of different tools. So the next step is to research fonts. So I am a little bit obsessed with thought, making with fonds with creating my own lettering styles with typography. And there are tons of different books on typography, lettering, styles, fonts. But one of the best ways and this is what I did in the beginning is I just researched a bunch of different free fonts in my class brush lettering for beginners. I actually created alphabet practice sheets with free fonts, and I also gave you the links of where to download those free fonts for yourself. And so that resource is there for you. And you can just google free fonts or free script fonts or something like that. And Reese, do some research for yourself. There are also really great sites like Creative Market, and you can look through the fonts. Most of the funds will have a little sample thumbnail of the alphabet, and what you want to look for is you want to find fonts or letters that speak to you. so there may be someone on Instagram that you follow like I really love their style. Every time you see their stuff, it's like who I like what they you know. I like that style. I like that one. I really am drawn to that. Find out and maybe make a list for a week of what you see, whether it's books or cards or posters or something posted to Instagram or Facebook. Make a list of what speaks to you. What do you really like? And then maybe do some research for some bonds and just look through some different fonts and say, What is it that you like about each font and what really speaks to you? What's something that you really enjoy about that fonts the heart, thinking about those things. And I guarantee once you start thinking about that, you're going to see scripts and fonts everywhere. You're going to start seeing these things everywhere. You like who I really like that you know that one's not as much my style, but it's cool, you know, and so definitely diving and research some fonts. So the next step is to be creative and free. Don't be afraid to mix and match. So try different things and I like to say Throw some spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. So just get out some blank papers from scratch paper, some paper that you just You could just start trying different things. You can see what you like. What types of letters. Maybe you could do a whole page of Azour beings or whatever it is. But be creative. Don't be afraid to mix and match different letters from different styles and different fonts that you found. Now you want to be careful. You're not completely copying someone else's font or someone else's style if you're calling it your own. So if you're calling it your own, you want to mix a match. You want to create your own style, but allow yourself to break out of the box with hand lettering and brush lettering. You really can create any type of fought so you can mix all different types of things, maybe even script with print and mix up the letters and just drive things and see what you like. So in a later video, I'm gonna really talk about some ways to do that. and some ideas for how to do that. But just allow yourself to be creative and free. The next step is to start with the lower case alphabet. So the upper case alphabet is a little bit trickier when it comes to lettering, and it can just really get you stuck. So start with a lower case. Figure out all the different styles that you want, the different alphabets that you want and then moved to the upper case. So I want to share with you a few styles that I've created. This is the ink dance, and you can see I have the upper in the lower case. But when I first started with it, I started just with the lower case. So start with one thing at a time. Start with a lower case, and then when you come back and you want to decide how you want to form all your upper case letters, you can do that at another time. Here's another style that I created. I call it the freedom style. This was with a dry brush technique, and I have an entire class the dry brush lettering class that you can take this a really easy style toe learn and really fun and quick and easy to add a new lettering style. This was another one that I did, and I ended up calling it Urban Groove. It's more just like a chunky print style, but really fun actually created my own font with this style as well. And I also created this style, which I called the Block party. And the Block Party is focal eager fee with block letters, print letters. And so this was a fun style decree as well. But you can see just with a few ideas. There's so many options, but definitely consider starting with a lower case first, getting that really comfortable for you before you ab the upper case. My next tip is this. Simply practice it over and over until it feels right, and it feels like your own. So as I was creating some of these funds, I would just practice them a, B, C D. And I would just do over and over on pieces of paper. And then I would decide. No, I don't want they to look like that. I wanted to look like this, and I would kind of alter it as I was practicing it, what felt right to me, what looked right for me, for my style, what I liked and it really, really helped me, especially when I would practice in chunks of time. So if I had an hour or two, then I would sit down, and I would just spend that time practicing one single alphabet. There's almost something that happens when you do it for a long period of time, over and over again. It develops muscle memory. Yes, for sure. But then you really get clear on what you like, what you don't like and how to tweak it. And so definitely make sure you're practicing it until it feels right and your own. So this kind of builds on the last one. What feels natural, uncomfortable and not like you're copying someone else. So what feels right to you what feels like it's natural and that it just really it just feels like that comfortable sweatshirt you loved aware? Yes, this feels comfortable. It feels natural. This doesn't feel like I'm copying Shelley or it doesn't feel like I'm copying someone else , But this feels good. It feels like my own and So just keep practicing until you get to that point. And believe me, if you press in and do this, you will get to that point and kind of following up on that exact thing. Tweak as you go. And so don't be afraid to start using this style. Go ahead and start using it. And as you're using it as you're going, you're gonna find that you're just gonna keep tweaking at a little bit until you really get to that point that, you know, Yes, this is my stop. And when you get to that point, I encourage you to create something like this that you can put in front of you. Because when I was first doing this, this was Inc dance. I was sometimes forget what I had chosen for F or what did I use for K again. And so what I did is I just I lettered this out and then it actually still has the tape on it. I would tape on it, and I put it and posted it where I could see it near my lettering. Dusk. I no longer need this because it's I remember. I've memorized it, and I keep tweaking it as I go. I'm not always using the Indians exactly as I created it to be. Sometimes I am. But create something like this once you kind of get those tweaks, and you really feel like you have now what's comfortable to you. So as you're finding your style, I almost think of it. Is finding your voice like I am an author? Coaches while and I'm a speaker and many times will talk about finding your voice in your writing or in your speaking or in your marketing, so as your lettering, you're gonna be almost finding your voice. And if you're simply lettering, things that are part of challenges or that you feel like you have to do it could began to get almost like a weight or cumbersome. And I had hit ah, point like that earlier this year. But when you're lettering, words or phrases that have meaning to you, it really helps you to even come alive in your voice to be heard even more. As you write the descriptions, share a story about why that's meaningful to you and be able to really share even deeper with your lettering, but also as you're doing that, I really find it. Feel like you're gonna find your style to as you're really lettering, things that have meaning. You're finding what really works well for you. You know, you're you've researched, you've tried a bunch of different things. But as you letter those words and phrases that are meaningful to you, I think it's gonna be that extra layer that will really help something click for you. My final tip for you in this video is to be aware of a comparison. So in our age of social media, it's easy to be scrolling on instagram or Facebook and seeing all of these different people , their pieces and their lettering and feel like I'm not as good as them or that they can do that better than me. And we get into what I call stink and thinking and this comparison trap, which it's so easy to fall into. Believe me, I have been there plenty of times. I actually took a seven day break from all social media earlier this year, and it really helped me help me help free me from some of that comparison. But it's an ongoing thing, and there may be certain people you need to Owen follow maybe for a while, maybe forever. Maybe there certain things that you need to do to really guard your heart, your creativity against becoming still and getting stuck because you get stuck in this comparison trap. You know, we all have an inner critic. We all have that inner critic that wants us to stop creating. And one of the biggest ways it can stop us from creating is get us to start to compare and think we're not as good. So I could look at my lettering on this and say, Oh, it's not perfect, It's not smooth. It's not this or is not that. But I kind of have a little bit more of a messy style with what I use. And some people have almost a perfect, perfect look to their letters to their style, and that's just more what their style is what they like. But if I start comparing my lettering to theirs, then I'm going to get stuck, and I'm not gonna continue lettering. So the thing about art is art is unique, not perfect. I teach this in my class, embraced the artist in you so if you have not taken that class is a lot about mindset. And it was the things I learned in the beginning of my art journey that really helped set me free to continue to create. But let's just review these 10 tips that I covered. So the first is to know the basics, your basic strokes and letter formations. Try a bunch of tools and pan. See what you really like. The best research fonts and other lettering styles find the fonts or letters that really speak to you that really jump out to be creative and free. Mix and match tried to for things. Throw some spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. Create an entire lower case alphabet. First, start with a lower case, then add the upper case later. Practice over and over until it really feels right and like it's your own. And then what feels natural uncomfortable to you and it doesn't feel like you're copying someone else. You know, keep practicing until you get to that point and then keep tweaking as you go until you really develop that style that you're comfortable with. And as your lettering letter phrases and words that have meaning to you. And finally, beware of the comparison trap. So in the next video, I'm going to talk about different things. You can change with your letters and specific ideas that you can try right away. So let's move on to the next video.
3. 5 Things You Can Change: in this video, we're gonna be talking about things you can change. So things you can change to really try different styles of letters to find your unique style. And one of the things I'm gonna be covering our thes practice sheets and with the practice sheets there's different lines on here. And I reviewed all of this in my previous classes. You could go back and watch faux calligraphy, which is all about just teaching you the basics of lettering and then brush lettering for beginners. Both of those classes will really give you a great foundation on all of the different names of the different spaces and how it all works by it. I'll be kind of going through these a little bit, Um, with you in this video as well. So one thing you can change is the width of your letters. So let me show you what I mean. And in on your practice sheets, you can actually have vertical lines. That kind of it's almost it almost becomes more like graph paper than to really see what the exact width iss and what with you're getting. Let me just show you a couple examples just by changing the with how it changes the letter film. You just choose the basic lower case. A from ink dance concede there is the basic lower case A. Can you see how, just by changing the with their it changed the letter. You can also make it skinnier so you can make it wider so that its wider and you can make it narrower so that its narrow narrower there. And it really can change the look of the letter. Now the same thing goes for print letters, because you wanna have both a script and a print style that you use a lot choose Upper case A. If we make it really wide, can see how that really changes it or if we make it narrow so again, it's just a simple matter of changing the width, and you can have a completely different style in just that one simple thing. So another thing you can changes the spacing. This is also known as Kern ing K e r N i n g. In the font making world, it would be caught Kern ing, So depending on the spacing between your letters will change your stylus. Well, let's go ahead and look at how that changes it. This was the 1st 1 changing the Web. Now we're on to changing the spacing. So let me just write out the word art. This is a great one to use because that's something we're all into, right? This would be something of like my normal spacing. Now let's say I space it out a little bit more. Can you see how it starts to look different, even with just a little bit more spacing? And let's try to squeeze it together a little bit more and see what happens with that. This will especially be something you want to think about with print letters. So let's do art here. Using my urban groove style, let's space it out a little bit more and then let's tighten it up. So you're starting to see how just some simple variations can really change your style. And what you'll do is you'll just start playing and tweaking each of these different things with the letters that really had jumped out to you from the last video, and it's gonna be really exciting to see the final result. So the next thing you can change is simply the hype and show you an example. Here you just start with my regular art again. Then let me change the height. I don't know if I can make it too much smaller with this particular brush, you get the idea. Uh, alright, let's try the art with the print again. Some of these air more pronounced with the print way. But again, you could just see how you start two very different things. Now if you start to vary several of these things all at once, you're gonna have a completely different style than you started with. So the fourth thing you can change is the angle. So with my ink dance, I chose to have it be more up and down and let's go ahead and choose the word Joy will just choose a different word. I chose for it to be more up and down just seems a little more playful. It was a little bit more me more my style. But let's say I wanted to change the angle. Have it more more at an angle there. See how that immediately changed is the look of that style. It's so much different and I don't know if I can really make it any more angled or not kind of going at a slant, but you get the idea, Um, whether you angle it or not, that's why practice sheets air nice, many practice sheets. You can have the angle printed on them. I chose not to have the England here cause I kept mine mostly up and down in my class. How to create your own practice sheets. I share with you a free online tool. Then I share with you exactly how I created my practice sheets for my large pens as well as my small pens. And in that tool, you can choose to have the slant lines. The typical slant line is around 55 degrees. You can add that on there, or you can try difference. Let's landlines to see how that would change your style. All right, said the last thing you can really play with changing as your ex height. So with your ex height like this one, the excites more in the middle, the dotted dash line and then, like that's where your crossbars air going to come. Your lower case is gonna hit about there with the print you can see that's again where the crossbars come. It's where, like the our star stops things like that in this example the X height this higher. So it raises everything up, and it's a little bit more obvious in the print version here. And then here I have the X height actually lower, so it's actually bringing it down. I did that with this script. Example could have it be lower as well. But this especially is helpful when you're doing print letters to alternate the X hype. So where are the crossbars coming through? Where are like things like are stopping so some something else that would be different is an E. So let's do a lower case E. That's the one there at the The cross bar in the middle of this is with the this X height at the top and then with the X height more at the bottom, and you can see how each one of those ease is very different from each other just by changing the X hype. So in this video we've talked about things you can change. We've talked about changing the width and how even just changing the width of the letters makes it different. Changing the spacing in between the letters which is Kern ing changing the height of the letters, changing the angle of the letters and then changing where the X height is for these letters . So the really cool thing is, with each of these things, you can create your own practice sheets. With all of these things changed, I personally created this practice sheet. This one's for small pens and then this one is for large pens. And I basically just made the heights bigger so that the large print could accommodate pens like this. The small pen is gonna Combinator pens like the zebra brush pan or the Chombo food dasuki. But in my class how to create your own practice sheets? I share a free online tools so you could just go over there right now. Just watch that the videos for that class and then you can create your own practice sheets . By changing the width of of, of any up and down dividers, you could change the height. You can add angles on the here and changed angles. You can change where the X height falls and what you can do that is you can create all of these different practice sheets, and then you can try your letters on each of them and really see which you like the best. That's really when the magics gonna happen when you actually start putting this to practice , and it really is not hard. Like I said, you just there's a free online tool. I walk you step by step, and I share with you the exact dimensions I used to make thes two sheets. Then you can take those dimensions and just play with them and make them different. Change things around ad angles to a change. The X height, change the height and until you get something that you really love.
4. Using Graph Paper: one of the things that can really help as you're developing your own lettering style is to have grid paper or graph paper. However, if you don't have any on hand, there's this free site grid xlii dot com g r I d z z l y dot com and it's really cool. You can create dot pages so like the Rhodia dot paper, and you can make them different sizes. So depending on how big you want your letters, you can change that. You can change how dark the color is so you could make it really light. You could make it a lot darker, and then you can also do the graph paper. And this is what I recommend the grid paper for doing your letters, either this or the dots. But there's all sorts of fun things. There's line paper. I mean, there's different things you can check out if you want and just play around with different sizes, print off some different sizes of the graph paper, and then you can use the graph paper as I'm going to show you next to really start laying out your letters. So let me show you also one little tip when you're printing when you click print mine has more settings and when I come down I can choose to uncheck the headers and the footers. So if you just want a blank sheet without the headers in the footers on there, just go ahead and uncheck that and then you can prime. So I just want to show you this online tool really quick. And now let me show you how you can use the graph paper to really help lay out your letters as your first designing your own style. All right, so now that you know how to make your own dot or grid paper using the website grizzly, I'm going to show you how you can use this in developing your own style. So I created some different ones, but I will put in your class Resource is from grizzly, and then you can play around and make your own. Just want to show you the difference between the lightest color and the darkest color. I'm not sure if you can really see this is the lightest color, and this is the darkest color of how you can have them printed. I'm going to be using the darker colors so you can really see them in this video and so that it can show up. But what I did is I created three different sizes, so I created a really small size. I created a medium size and then I created a large size, and the size is I used. I put in the file name for each of these, but, um, you could just play around with different sizes. But I just want to show you also how using different sizes of grid paper can help you as you're developing your own stylus. Well, another thing I wanted to mention is I have this notebook. It's good paper from white lines. White Lines has no books and paper. Thes grid lines are white, which then when you take a picture to scan it with their free app, the white lines up, it removes all of these grits. So this is also a really great tool you could use when you're first using a new style, and you want to really have it be spaced out correctly. But you don't want the grid lines to show up on your final piece. This is a great option, just called white lines paper, and you can find that online It's available for sale on Amazon. So let me show you how you can use the grid paper. I'm going to start with this really the smallest one. Somebody used my small pen from zebra, the zebra brush pen, and what you can do then is you can start practicing your alphabets. Let's say you want to dio three squares down three squares over and down. So let's say we want each letter to be the re squares down and three squares over. It's basically like a square, and what you can do is then you can kind of I'm doing this quickly, so it's a little bit messy. You can use a rule her if you want, and I'm using a dark pen just so you can see the outlines you don't have to use as dark of a pen. You could even use pencil. So let's say that we want to write the word create C R E a T. Okay. Yep, that's enough. Say we want to do create so we can then make the letters fit inside the box. Now I technically should have went all the way over, say, all the way over to the edge of the box and now that looks like a faux calligraphy. So maybe I'll do that. One thing you can do is you can use faux calligraphy, and that's what I used with my block party font. And so let's just try that with this. So you're gonna fill in the hole? Say, this is like right above that that last box. So about one box up is where the Excite this. So let's say if the X height is down here, so for ee, I'm going to come over and around, so I'm just gonna fill that in. So for Anay, let's try a different A. Let's try the A that comes around like this, and when it's a lower X height, that's gonna be a little bit of a wider angle out there. So this is I wasn't really thinking about the full calligraphy part on that, but we'll just go with it. Let's do a lower case T. Then if I want, I can fill these in to make it look different. I could do patterns in there. There's all sorts of things you can dio when you use block letters or the faux calligraphy . But I'm just gonna go and fill these in and you can see how By counting out the grids in putting each letter integrated it really helped me have a nice even look And it helps me really see what the letters are gonna look like with that particular style. It's 25 down and three over. Okay, so all I did was I changed the hype. Remember, we can change the whip. You can change the spacing, the height, the angle and where the X height ISS. So let's say for this one, the X height is gonna be higher. So I'm just gonna go ahead and say it's gonna be here, and you can go ahead and draw the x height. Then I'm not going to right now just because I want you to be able to see my letters clearly, and then you're gonna fill the hole box in. So because is ah, higher Excite. See how the are is going to be. This part of the are that top round part was bigger on this top one and its smaller here, so e se we do the same kind of e do a different A this time on dual are his tea, but you can see how do in using grid paper really helps you map out all of these different things. The Web's the height, the x height. So especially the wit the height than the X height. You can also do spacing by by spacing out your boxes more. So let's say we make it wider and we have a box in between. So this I made it wider and I increased the space between each letter. Let's see what this looks like. So this is really gonna be And I'm just gonna do a center like the center of this as the X height. Okay, so you can see how that really changed the whole look of the word. We have the one that was more of a square, the one that was more of a rectangle with more height. And this one is more of a rectangle with more with an increased space between each letter. So this is just a really great tool. Use your great paper, especially when you're first starting out to really see where your your words are gonna be now for script. It's going to be a little bit different, but let me just show you with one example with script. Okay, so let's say it's the same three by three and the X height is down below. So I'm gonna do the word fun. I mean, that's like just a little bit higher about in the middle. But it kind of gives you a kind of a place of where to put those letters and how to space them out. And then you can try different things going a little bit higher, going a little bit wider. You, especially with the script trying to increase the slant is really helpful. And that's where having the practice sheets with the slant lines can help. And you know this. The script line is just a really great place to play around and practice with your letters , especially your print letters, your print letters, air gonna do really well with the grids. But your your script letters air gonna be it's gonna really give you some guidelines so that you can know. Okay, this is the baseline right here. This is the X height, So baseline X height. This would be the sender or cat fight. But what this is going to do is it's gonna give you kind of the basis of where to go. Your lettering practice sheets will do that as well. They will not always have vertical lines. A lot of times they will have the slant lines. And but this is just a great way to really practice your spacing and try some of the things that I recommended. Changing the wit, the spacing, the height, the angle and the X height. And seeing what you come up with, I cannot wait to see what you create.
5. 10 More Ideas: this video, we're gonna talk about some other ideas. So the first idea is to do serif or sans serif. So when I talk about serif, I mean putting little caps on the ends, and this could be done in different ways. You can research different fonts times New Roman is a popular Serra font. You can look out, but it basically has little caps, and these can be done in so many different ways. So get creative on how you do that. And then there's CNN Sara, which is the normal without any thing on there. And that's more like Ariel. So mix it up and try different things, especially through print. You can add Sarah funded there, and it makes it really interesting when you do Sarah, you can do all sorts of things, sei with E f, and you put more of like little arrows at the end, you could dio little balls at the end. There's so many different things you can dio to change it up, But just get creative, get creative on how that little end is gonna be. You can do all sorts of things with the syrups. The second thing that you can try is thick or thin lines. I'm gonna show you with a couple different different pens. This is the tumble dual brush, and you can see I can make thick lines with the brush tip, and I can make some lines with the other tip. So just depending what types of pens and markers you have, you can use all sorts of things. Also have these alcohol markers from Bria Reese, and it has a broad tip, so you can dio really thick and that adds kind of anything. And then it has the thin tip at the the other side, which is very similar to this, so it's a little bit thicker than even that. And so one thing to immediately change your letters is just to change the thickness of the tool. Your using. You can also change the thickness by making block letters and filling it in. The third thing you can do is make script with print so you can get really creative with us . You can even mix it in as your doing your letters. So here I switched to the are that I would normally do for a print are and everything else is a script style, so get creative. There are no rules. With hand lettering, you can mix and match to your heart's content. It's one thing you can do is alternate upper and lower case, and I do this with some of my lettering styles. For example, when I wrote out Urban Groove here, I have lower case you uppercase are uppercase. Be lower case, a lower case n uppercase g of her case. Our Theo could be either way. The V could be either way and then the ease definitely lower case. So as you're creating your own styles, realize you can mix and match, see what looks good to you and what you like in alternate between upper and lower case. Another thing you can do is add flourishes. Flourishes are super super fun, so really easy ways with an entrance stroke, bringing it up or doing a little bit of a curve and up, you can see with any of the letters that descend down like I could have done it with the H as well. You can break the word and to send down and come down and around and with the H. The H is a really easy one to just start the H up above and then come around. And with X six strokes, you can always curve it up in around. You can curve it down and around. There's so many different ways to flourish ice to encourage you to start experimenting and see what you like. I've really enjoyed adding flourishes to some of my lettering, and and it provides a completely different look. If you want Morrell examples of flourishes, check out my class 10 Ways Toe letter. The lower case alphabet in my red carpet style. I share a lot of different ways to flourish with each letter, and that might help you just get started with flourishing. Another thing you could do is you can add bounce to your lettering so we have our baseline , and traditionally you'll put all of your letters on that baseline. But you can always take letters that come down and that bounce you can bring them down like even the B. I brought it down below the baseline, so I brought this to the baseline, and then I brought this part down below. Theo was pretty much on the baseline, and then the u I bounced it down, brought it up the end. I bounced. It brought it up, and you can vary how far you go down with each one. The CIA pretty much stayed on the baseline, and then the e kind of came down a little bit. But bounce lettering. It's just bringing some of these letters as they descend down below the baseline again. I have a style in my 10 Ways toe letter, the low case alphabet, where I show some different ways to bounce your letters so you can check out that as well. Something else you can do is embellishments, so you could have, let's say a no upper case. Be and do some swirls on each end so you can add swirls. You could do doodles, so let's say we do a B here and you bring it out. Let's say we do some doodles inside this part of the be first added a couple flowers in there, and it just makes it look interesting. Could also do something where you're actually adding, like lease to your letters coming out and adding them onto the ends. However you want to make it look almost looks like it's on fire right now, so you can also do shading. Let's say we do a lower case. Be kind on Toby's right now. You can also do shading. I have a lower case be here and I have a Tom bow and 45 about the great skill pack for shading. And then you could just take this gray and on one side or the other, you can just add a little bit of shading into it, and I'm just doing it on the right hand side and doing it like that. Now that one was a little bit small. Let's do a bigger one here so you can kind of really see how it might look. I will let that dry so you can also add white effects. I have a gel pen here, jelly roll, and this is a Univ all signal so I can use either of these and I could do like little white accents like, say, I want to do a little accent here, and then two little dots. I could do that on the main like, thicker parts of the letter, and that really just makes it pop a little bit so I could just do that little thing to you Don't have to do the dots. I mean, you could do anything. Let's go back to this and do the shading. So I'm going to do it on the right hand side, come down and just coming over you. Cheerio here, adding in a little bit of shading and the white I should have done last cause the shading kind of went over top of it, but it's all good. And then, once you do the shading, you can also add white by just adding a line in between the letter and the shading to really define it. So this is kind of a cool way just to make your letters stand out and add a little bit extra after you do the shading, so you can see how that looks really different than just the regular Be that I did so you can add all sorts of things like that as well, so you can add borders to your words. So let's say I just want to do a simple border here. A lot of times I'll do the border afterwards, so I make sure I have enough space in there to write the word or the phrase. A lot of times it's a phrase. Let's just say we're gonna do the word red. So I kind of ran out of space. You can do any kind of borders that you want to dio. You could do, say, we're doing the word joy. It's when I tend a do a lot. You could add this little dots as a border and then odd a bracket in there if you wanted. I'm just making this up as I go. Could do another line on the outside. You could do squiggly lines. You can do just about anything, any kind of pattern that you can imagine you can do like that. Something else that's really fun to do is tow ad banners. So a really simple, easy banner. So first to straw a curved line and then draw a curved line similar to it below it. Connect those lines, and then what you're gonna do is decide which side you want the tail to be on. It could be on both sides if you want. Let's make it on the left side here, and you're just gonna bring the corner down and then you're gonna bring it back up like a triangle. I'm gonna go ahead, and I like to typically fill this in. You don't have to fill it in, but it just makes it look like a shadow. Is this what I dio typically? And then you're gonna come in this center and you're gonna bring that tail out and at the bottom of the triangle, bring it out. Then you're gonna bring it into this center, like about basically, it's gonna be right around here where it meets the Enge and then out. And that's a really simple being, a one way to make it look cool. And like old, it's just to do really quick lines on the edges. That makes it look like it's kind of old paper. And it just has this cool look that it looks like a really professional banner. Now, I could add one on the other side here if I wanted the same process. Just making the triangle coming about this centre here, bringing it out, bringing this out and then bringing this down to the center. And back then I could just add a few little things onto here to so That's a really simple way, and then you can put your word inside. The beginner say we want to do a word love. So that's a simple way to add some variations to your letters. So the embellishments, like I said, you could do swirls. Doodles. You can add shading. You can add white extras. You can do borders. You can do banners. Really, the sky's the limit there. So many things that you can do. Teoh. Add to your letters. Just watch and look for different funds around you. Packaging signs, magazines. You're going to start seeing it everywhere, and you'll see different forms of Levitt letters, different ways. They've done letters and just start practicing. It's really, really fun to add these embellishments, so something else you can do is fill in the negative space. So let's say you want to do a circle and let's say you just do the word now and I'm just gonna do this in block lettering. You can do this in any kind of lettering. Block lettering tends to be easier just because it will show up and it will pop a little bit more, so I'm gonna use a different marker to fill it in this because it will be easier to do, and the negative space is all the space around the letter, and then the letter is going to stay white. This is really fun to do with just one or two words in, ah, lettering layout, and you'll see certain people using it more than others. But it's a really fun way toe. Make your letters pop. You can also do this with doodles or with sketches. So if you're doing a botanical line drawing, you could draw on the flowers and then shade in the background as black. And that makes a really cool effect. Could do this in so many different ways. To be honest, I probably don't do it as much because it does take time to fill it in. And I'm a get it done person. So I don't always like the tedious work I know some of you are so good at the tedious work , but then you know you can come back in and straighten up your lines a little bit if you want, and I I didn't really fast so you could do it slower, so you really have a good straight line. You can see how that then fills up the space around it and helps it to pop says next ones about tucking your letters together. This is especially for print letters, and you can also vary the baseline. So that's something else. You can vary as you're doing your your letters. So let's say we're going to do the word enjoy. And I'm just doing this on the fly. But let's say we kind of vary the baseline. So the baseline, let's say the base, Linus, you know, right here. And then you kind of tuck your letters in together. See, I just tucked that J underneath the yen. And you know what? I didn't even mean to do that. I'm just doing this on the fly. But that worked out really good to show you. And then you can bring the wide down around the oh, so you want to look for any opportunities? Say you have a B. Think you can see that space and there you can kind of bring your letter over there a little bit closer. Your let's say you're doing the word book. No, I made all of those look really different but the K is another one. You can see that space in here. So I tucked the eye into the K so you can kind of find spaces you can like tuck letters into and then also think about varying the baseline and as you're tucking them in their varying things up and down, and that will be something fun that you could do a swell. So that's actually number 10 is very the baseline, which we already kind of talked about in the last one. But let's say you're going to do the word awesome. He had the A here. See Duthie w up a little. You kind of bring the e down so you can see how I have varied the baseline and it just looks cool. It makes it look really, really cool. And then, ah, bonus tip is you can also let her in a shape. So let's say we're doing 1/2 circle. You could do awesome along that half circle, and you can let her along that shape. You could do any sort of shape that you want, and that also is a way to vary. The baseline is just a letter along a shape and those air really fun ways to do it as well . So just as a recap, we covered 10 different ideas. Sarah versus San Serif. Thick or thin lines mixing script with print alternating upper case and lower case. Adding flourishes. Bounce lettering, embellishments, which is so fun and endless filling in the negative space, tucking your letters together and finally varying the baseline or lettering along different shapes. So I hope you are now. Just you have so many tools in your toolbox and so many different things that you can do to really develop your own style to make your lettering stand out to make it you. And in this final video, we're gonna go through putting it all together. We're going to take the letter a of the alphabet and really come up with a bunch of different variations.
6. Putting it All Together: So in this video, we're gonna put it all together All the different things that we talked about by taking lower case and upper case A. I'm gonna fill this paper with a bunch of different styles and just see how many we can come up with. It's a lower case. A with a little bit of a bounce upper case, A print. I made the thicker side on there and I raised the X height a little bit. So this is an upper case. A Let left the top a little bit more open. It's an upper case. A with a little bit more of a flourished look on it. So this is a block letter that I added some shading to, And then I'm just going to put lines and the shading area. This is an upper case. A. And I made this little loop at the top. That's just something a little different. So lower case A And I made this part Come out a little bit now I'm gonna go silent, and I'm just gonna keep doing different days filling up this sheet and you could just watch as I go you e way e e you e e way e. Okay, there you have it. 30 ways. Toe letter A both lower case and upper case. I used a bunch of different tools. I use different styles and I could have kept going. As you start practicing as you start experimenting, you'll find so many different things that you can dio. And then you'll identify letters that you really like. You might say, Oh, I really like this one. Or this swirly one is kind of cool. Or like how I did that flourish. You can identify different things that you like, and then that's how you can begin to create your style. So, for your project for this class, I want you to do one page with a letter. You can copy what I did and do these exact same letter A's. But what I would love for you to do is to choose a different letter of the alphabet and fill an entire page with that letter. All different styles, all different types. I'd love to see your creativity. I'd love to see what you come up with and then share with us in the project area of this class. I'm so excited to see all the letters and the variations you come up with
7. Next Steps: there you have it. You've completed the class on discovering your own unique lettering style. I won't lie. Does take time. You need to allow yourself time to experiment, to be creative and to think outside the box. Be aware of your environment. Look at labeling at signs and magazines. Start looking at different fonts and researching different letter shapes and formations and see what really sticks out to you. And then just simply begin practicing for your project. I want you to take a picture of the page of letters you created and share with us in the project area. It will be really exciting to see what you came up with and how different every single one of yours looks. We're all unique. Different personalities and the different lettering styles you come up with are going to be completely different than mine. That's the beauty of it. That's what's so fun. You could let your personality your preferences, your style come through and create your very own hand lettered fun. You can now use your style to create all sorts of things. You can use it on your artwork, your lettering pieces, your commissioned work you can use it on gifts you create. I have a class all about how to create your own custom mugs. You can use your own lettering style on a mug and have a very unique one of a kind gift. You can also use your own started create digital products. You can create your own font. I love this I've used on up on my iPad called I Font Maker, and I currently have already made three fonts and I am addicted. I love it. Love letters. I love creating my own fonds. I love learning about different types of typography. I am hooked and with your own custom fonts, you can then use those funds to create lettering. Practice sheets. You can use them to put into books that you write to use for in person workshops. You can use them on digital products you create. There are so many options once you have your own font. So if you're interested in creating your own fun, I encourage you to check out the I fought maker up. It does have a few limitations, but it's a lot of fun. It's super easy, and it's really the most inexpensive way to get started with fought making. I'll also add a link to an online tool you can use where you simply print out a grid. You write your fun in there, and it will create a fun for you, I will tell you and creating your own font. A print font is much easier to start within script, as you don't have to worry as much about the letters connecting and all of that sort of thing. But just simply have fun. Use your lettering in your planner in your doodles in your sketches. It really is endless what you can do once you create your own unique lettering style. If you enjoy this class, I would really appreciate you simply taking a moment to post your review here on skill share. There should be a pop up at the top of your screen that says, Would you recommend this class to other students? Simply click yes and post a sentence or two about what you learned what you appreciated or what you've gained from this class, and it would mean the world to me. It also helps to reach more people with this training, and so I appreciate you taking a moment to do that again. My name is Shelly Hits and thank you so much for joining me in this class is my joy and my pleasure to teach creativity and art to you. I love lettering and I hope you grow to love it just as much. I post daily inspiration on instagram app color, my world beautiful. And I would love for you to join my free Facebook group You conjoined my free Facebook group at Shelley hits dot com for it slash insiders, The link is also in your class. Resource is I hope that you have fun with your lettering and I'll see you in the next class .
Shelley Hitz, Watercolor and Lettering Artist
