Hand Lettered Script

1. Hand Lettered Script Class Trailer: Hi, everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist, designer, and teacher. In this class, I want to show you how to improve your script lettering and start integrating new script styles into your work. When you watch this class, you'll get a workbook where I break down the four Ss of script, which I use to check my letters for errors. The workbook also includes ideas for quotes you can use in your script and three example styles that you can use as inspiration. First, we'll go through the four Ss of improving your script. You have a system for checking your letters rather than wondering why some words just don't look right. We'll finish off the piece using a simple loop-de-lai letter style so you can turn your improved letters into a finished composition. Next, we'll letter using one of my favorite styles that I call the oh, so silky script. l show you how to use this letter style to create sleek lettering compositions and how to turn them into a funky animation that stands out online. Last, we'll try out a complex script style that uses drastic weight and variation to create a bold statement on the canvas. We'll use this project to look at how you can incorporate any lettering style into your toolbox once you know the basic steps of sketching letters. Then we'll cover two different ways of animating your letters so you can add some eye-catching movement to your compositions. You could use the script you create with the techniques in this class to create quotes for sharing online, designs for art licensing, or print on-demand projects, or marketing for your art like these Instagram stories stickers I made. I created this class because I know there are so many artists and designers out there who want to integrate script into their compositions, but feel like their letters just don't look right. I develop this process to check my own letters and I want to share that with you so you can turn some wonky, unreadable letters into beautiful graceful script. I'll be demonstrating all of these techniques on my iPad and Procreate. But of course, you could do the same process on paper or any other digital drawing app that you like. Let's get started. 2. Planning and Sketching: For this first project, we're going to dive right in and create a script composition and then use that composition to talk about how to fix your personal errors. Everyone makes mistakes when they first start creating scripts. The key here is to just identify what your errors are so that you can start working towards fixing those in each composition. I'm going to use a quote that I like, and I recommend that you follow along with that quote if you're new to scripts, so you can just copy me and learn as we go. But if you feel comfortable with creating a script, feel free to jump in here and just do your own thing. First, I want to show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that we'll be using throughout this class. There is a procreated brush set and the class workbook, which I'll be mentioning throughout the class. You'll find a link to get to this page on the about section and the project section on Skillshare. Just click on that link, and then you can get to this page where you enter your email and I will send you an email with all of the resources. Once you get that email, you can just click on each of the downloads. I'll do the procreated brush set here, and it will open in a browser. You can download, press "Open In" and then choose Procreate as the app. If you take a look at the class workbook, you'll see there are several different file types. I'm going to be using the PDF file type with the Adobe Reader app. If you want to do exactly as I'm doing, you can do that. I also have the workbook in Procreate and a smaller version of Procreate for all the iPads. Choose the one here that's going to be best for your devices and the way you like to work. For me, that's going to be PDF, download, Open in, and then I use the free app, Adobe Reader. Here it's called Acrobat. Once you have all of those things installed, we can jump in and create our first composition. I'm going to tap the plus symbol here. Create a new Canvas in inches at 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. Of course, work at any size here, but that's the size that works well for me. I'm going to start on this first layer and in the hand lettered script brush set that you just downloaded, you can grab the writing pencil. The writing pencil is more like a natural pencil, whereas the sketching pencil is a little bit sticky. I tend to do all of my writing with this one and sketching with the second one. I'm going to pick a quote here that I think works well to demonstrate fixing your script errors. But of course, if you'd rather just go with your own quote, that is fine as well. I know I'm going to have about three lines, so I'd like to just mark that out to keep things simple. Then I'm just going to just loosely sketch in my quote. I've laid this out somewhat how I think it should go, but I may end up changing things as we work. I'm going to think about the number of letters here and how this is going to lay out in the final quote. I actually think this word is going to work better up here so that it's not so small, large, small. Although that would work as well. Of course, go with your personal style here. But for me, I think that is going up here. It says finished is then better than perfect. This is how I always start. I just do a really rough sketch, and I also do this as I think of new quotes. I just want to show you some examples. Sometimes I'll just think of a new quote and I just open a Canvas and pop that quote in there so that when I'm ready to letter next time, I just have something ready to letter. I find that's a lot easier than trying to think of something when you sit down to work. I'm going to click on that layer and reduce the opacity by tapping the N symbol and reducing it. Then I need to start coming up with some guides to keep everything in line. I'll grab the sketching pencil. You can go with any slant here. You could even do perfectly horizontal if you wanted to. I'm going to go with a slight slant. Then I'm going to swipe left on that layer and duplicate it, tap the Move tool and then decide how tall my letters are going to be. I think that'll work well, we can always adjust as we go. Repeating the same process. I don't redraw my guide each time. Instead, I just duplicate the original. That way, you know you've got the exact same angle every single time. I'm going to merge those three by pinching them, duplicate, move this down, duplicate again. What I like to do to make sure that all of my guides are equally spaced is merge these first two sets, duplicate them. Now I have actually four sets. But I'm just going to do that second one here as an overlap. Now I know I have three perfectly spaced guides. Merge all those guides, so they're all on one layer. Now I can get a more refined sketch. I'll tap "Create a New Layer". I like to work in different colors here, so I recommend you give that a try too. First thing I'm going to do is just sketch this in. I'm not going to try to make this perfect. I'm just going to do a really loose version, sketching one letter at a time rather than trying to do it calligraphy style because I know I need to leave a lot of space for each letter. I'll take just a minute to just write this out, one letter at a time. Now that I have it written out, I'm going to make my original sketch invisible, so I'm working with a slightly more clean sketch. This looks a little big on the Canvas. I'm going to swipe both of those, tap the Move tool, and just bring it in a little bit. This is also the time when I start thinking about do I want to do capitals? Do I want to do all lowercase? If you pull up the workbook that we downloaded at the beginning of this lesson, you can see if you swipe through, let's go to the Loop-De-Li section here. I've created all of these letters for you, so if you need a guide as you're working through this, feel free to copy any of my letters. For example, here I'm going to copy that F. I'm just sketching right over this current letter that I've already created, and you can even just erase an existing letter and re-sketch it. Just like we would sketch any object that you want to draw, I will just sketch in these letters and make sure that they all fit with each other. Of course, if you don't like how one of these letters is laid out, just change it. I didn't like how the P was working with this composition, so I just changed it. This is really just a guide to get you started, not necessarily the rule for how this letter should always look. You can see, I keep it super messy at this stage. I know it's not spaced perfectly. I know words are running into each other. I'm just trying to get all the big shapes on the Canvas. Again, I think I need to make this a little bit smaller, and I'm also going to duplicate my guide layer and shift that duplicate over so that I have a little bit more guides space. I'm going to tap the layer with my sketch on it, tap the selection tool. Let's redo that here. Tap on that layer, tap the selection tool, and select that word to just give it a little bit more space. That's why I keep it super rough at this stage because things are going to move around a lot. You're not going to know exactly where things go. There's no reason to get super invested in any one layer at this point. I'm also keeping an eye on this overall shape here. I want to keep things within the circle rather than having an unusual shape. Just shifting those words around, so we keep that nice shape available. Now that I have that basic layer done, I'm going to reduce the opacity of that sketch, create a new layer, and do one more sketch over this one. While I do this, I want to be sure that I'm keeping all of these letters on the same slant. I'm going to tap the tool symbol, turn on the drawing guide, tap "Edit Drawing Guide", and then move this little green dot to be sure I've got this right at the slant I want. I'm just going with a slight slant, but go as extreme as you want, of course. Now I know as I draw these letters exactly how slanted these things need to be. This bar, for example, needs to go down. This guide doesn't have to be perfectly touching at the whole time, but it needs to be pretty close. Same thing with this eye. You'll see as you start doing this process, probably some of your original sketch layers we're not even close to being aligned with the slant. This is just your time to fix all those issues. You can see how I'm really making each letter its own shape. I'm not trying to write this like a calligrapher would, all with one stroke. I'm going through, and each letter is like a circle, or a line, or a swirl. I'm really taking time with each letter. Sometimes I'll take a letter like this one, select it and just shift it over a little bit so that I have some more space for the next letter. I like to do these really big loops for my R's but of course, if that's too extreme free, you keep it simple with the R. 3. Improving Your Parent Shapes: Now, I can make that previous layer invisible. Again, I'm taking up a whole lot of space on the canvas. I'm just going to tap that Move tool, and reduce it a little bit. I'm going to turn off these guides so that you can see a little bit better. But, of course, I would keep those on to make sure I'm keeping everything in line. At this point I need to, before I get any deeper into this project, start checking my script. Your script may look way better than this, it may look a lot worst, that's fine. This is the point when we're going to start checking it. I'm going to go to the beginning of the workbook, and go to the four 4SS page. These are the four things I check before I start moving forward with a script project. The first one we've already checked and that is the slant. If you look at these two examples here on the slant, this one, the direction of these bars are all going in different directions, whereas this one, they're all going in the same direction along with the guides. We've already checked that. But, of course, if you feel like you need to do another check, go through with your guides on and just make sure all of these little guides that are slants are mostly in line with those guides. The next thing is shapes. As you probably know, letters are made of shapes, so there are only a few shapes. If you swipe to the next page, you can see what all of them are. The circle, the line, the J shape, this squiggle, and the squiggle, I don't know what those are called. But I've color-coded those here and created a whole alphabet so you can see exactly what those shapes are. When you're drawing your script, you really only need to have these five shapes. If there are a lot more shapes than that, you may be getting some inconsistencies going on. Let's do an example here starting with the circle shape because that's going to be your most common shape. I'm going to grab a new color here that's easy for you to see. Let's go with this black color. I'm going to make my brush a little thicker so you can really see. This d here has a really nice circle shape. What I would do is look around your composition, Find the circle shape that you like best, I like this d, and then just circle it. If you want to make it perfect, just hold and procreate. Then you've got that circle shape. That will be your set circle shape for your whole composition. Let me make that pink so it's a little bit less intense. I'm going to duplicate that shape and stick it on all of my other shapes that contain the circle. If you're just starting out, you can just refer to this the whole time. Go to all your circle shapes, the h, so you can see here already, my h is way too thin. Compared to that d, that h is just not going to work. I'm going to have to bump that up so it fits here. You can see how this process can really help you get everything organized. I'm doing all my es. Some of these I did a really good job. The d and the a look pretty consistent, but that h was really bad. Let's see the other h. The second h was actually not that bad. It's not perfect, but it still is going to need a little bit of help. I just want to make sure I've got all my circles in place. That one is going to need some real help later on. Once you've got all your circles in place, I think you can guess what the next step is. We're just going to go to the next shape. Depending on your composition, you may not have to do all the shapes here. For example, I think that this h is going to have that loop. Then the t is just going to be straight so you don't have to have perfectly lined pieces like this for every single script. But in general, if you do a squiggle line here like this, then you probably want to do a squiggle line somewhere else in your composition. This is just a general rule to get you going. Let's just do this shape because this is a really common shape. There's my n. I really like that just subtle shape here. I might duplicate that and bring it over to my other n. Make sure those are working well together. Once you feel good about all of these shapes, you can merge all of these guide marks that you've made and then just make a new sketch. I've just made all those guide layers semi-transparent with all of those little fixes built-in, create a new layer, go back to my sketch color, and start re-sketching this composition. As you can see, I just sketch over and over until I feel like everything looks good. This can take you five minutes. It can take you an hour. It really just depends on where you are in your lettering process. Don't worry so much if you do end up spending a ton of time on this part of the project. Honestly, I think this is the most fun part of the project. Take your time, try to enjoy it, and try to just learn so that next time you do a script composition, you're keeping all of these things in mind as you draw. I want to show you one more thing that I like to do, and that is just copying letters. I'm going to create a new layer before I draw this is. Because I know I have an is over here, I'm going to actually, let's draw it over here because we've got this circle guide I created. I'm going to probably draw this a few times just to play around with a few versions. I like that chunkier version there, so let's do that. I'm going to duplicate it and then just bring it over to the word finished. Now, those are really cohesive. That's just one trick for when you're having some trouble with letters that are similar, you can just copy. I'm just shifting this word finished over a little bit so I have space to work on that h that needed some help. Let's go back to the loop d that I sketched page and see what h we could do. I like that h, so I'm going to use that as an example. I'm going to make my guides a little more transparent so it's easier for you to see. You can see I've beefed up that h so that it really fits within that circle shape. We may also just want to go ahead and duplicate that h and pop it down there on the word then. I'll grab my selection tool, select that h, drag three fingers down and duplicate, and let's put it down here. Now, we have two nice hs that work well together. We can play around with them later and give them their individuality on their own time. But for now, I'm just going to stick with that. I do end up shifting my letters a lot as I work. You'll see I often get that Freehand Selection tool, shift everything over, and then come in and start drawing the next letter. I think that's just a natural part of the lettering process. You don't know exactly where things are going to go as you're working. You just got to eyeball it and play around with each sketch layer. I'm happy with how that word finished looks, just going through and making sure all my parent shapes are the same. Now, I can move on to the next word. I'm running into a little bit of a problem here where I either need to overlap these two lines, or make this be smaller, or I can just space everything out a little bit more. I think I'm going to end up just spacing everything out. I'm going to put the second line on its own layer now because I know that I'm going to need to separate these later. I'm cutting this h onto its own layer by just tapping the Selection tool, circling it. Drag three fingers down and cut and paste. That cuts it off that layer and pastes it onto a new layer. Now, I can draw this b however I want without worrying about whether or not it's going to fit with that other word. I'll just move it later. Trying to get that nice, round shape because that's the shape that we've been using so far. Just like the parent shapes in each individual letter, these curves that you do should mimic each other. If we have a nice, big, rounded shape here, you want that nice, big, rounded shape here rather than doing oval loop. If you're going with round, stick with round. If you're going with oval, stick with oval just a consistency issue to help your piece look nice and cohesive. Using those guides from the parent shapes just to make sure everything is about the same size, and it's just the word parent shape it makes you think about a family. This concept is like creating a letter family. If they don't seem to fit together, it's like something is a little odd about that family. Not that you can't have families that are a little different, but when it comes to the letters, it just looks a little bit confusing. I did that t on a new layer because I could see that my h and my t were running into each other. Honestly, I'm having a little bit of a problem with those two running into each other, so we're going to have to resolve that issue. I think I'm going to need to make my t much taller like that so that it doesn't run into my h. We're definitely going to have to split these lines up. That's why you can see it's a good idea as you're doing these projects to keep different words on their own layer even as you're sketching because you want to preserve that flexibility to just come in and totally rework your composition if you need to. Now, that I'm going to the word perfect, I'm going to a new layer, putting perfect on its own layer. In a minute when I go in and shift it down the page, it's really easy to do. I don't have to slice through a bunch of sketch layers. 4. Spacing and Slices: I'm happy with how these final letters look, but of course I need to make my old sketch invisible. Let's hide this for the moment so you can really see. I need to just make sure my letters are all on the right layer. So that h needs to go on the layer with the word than. We've got finished on its own layer, we've got better on its own layer, and than. What I'm going to do is move my guides. I'll go to my guide layer, get the selection tool, select that top guide, and shift it up, select that bottom guide and shift it down, and I'm just keeping an eye on that space. You could measure it perfectly if you wanted to, but I'm just going to stick it in there. Now I can grab each word and put it back in place, and that just gives me so much more space. I can really play a little bit more with all of the swashes and make these a little bit more whimsical. Again, I can see that everything's getting a little bit big, so I'm going to tap the "Move tool", shift it in a little. I always like to have just a little bit of a border around everything so that the whole piece has some breathing room. We can see too that better and than are too close to each other, so I'm going to bump those over and align those. As you know, I'm looking for that circular shape, so it looks pretty good within that circular shape. Now I'm going to go back to my workbook and go back to the 4 S's page. We've done the slants, we've done the shapes, now we need to take a look at slices. What are slices? Basically, when one letter slices into another, it doesn't get completed. An example here would be, if I'm drawing a P and rather than having the P circle meet that line, I have it like this. I've just sliced a piece of that parent shape away. Hopefully, as you were checking your parents shapes, all of these issues got resolved. But if not, it's just a good time to go through and see, did I slice any letters accidentally? It might be a matter of just drawing yourself a little reminder like this, going through and making sure each letter has enough space, and if it doesn't, tap that "Selection tool", select the letter, move it over a little bit, and then you may need to redraw it. I think this composition doesn't have any slices, so I think it looks good, but of course, take your time here and make sure you don't have any in your composition. The last thing is spacing. The tricky thing about spacing is that it isn't just a matter of space being like a width, like this this. It's not really a width issue, it's more of a volume issue. For example, if I go through here, between the n and i and I draw some blue, let's pretend that's a cup of water, I want to be able to pour that same cup of water in to here, and here and in-between every single letter. The goal here is to go through and see do any letters have inconsistent spacing? I'm seeing a big one right here. See how much fits in here compared to here and here? That's telling me that this e is just way too close to that f. I'm going to go to the word perfect, swipe those letters. We've got some letters on different layers. Let's merge all of our red sketch. It's all on the same layer. Get that freehand selection tool, shift that over just a little bit, so we have that consistent spacing here. Let's go back to a different color here. Now we've got more consistent spacing between these. That may have been a little much. Let me bring it in just to here. I'm looking at all of these letters here, and making sure that spacing looks good. Keep in mind, this doesn't have to be absolutely perfect, so don't obsess over those, or not finish your composition because it feels like it's not perfect. This is hand-lettering. There's going to be some human element in it that makes it playful and whimsical. But it's a good idea just to keep the readability, to make sure that you're at least making an effort to space evenly and not crowd any letter. That especially messes with the readability of the composition. If anything, it's a little bit crowded. People might say, what letter is that? Is that two letters or one letter? Just keep your spacing in mind. I feel pretty good about this sketch. Of course, take your time with these 4 S's, take your time with the parent shapes. Once you feel really good about that, it's time to start finishing off this composition. 5. Thickening and Inking: I'm going to create a new layer, make my sketch layer semi-transparent so I can just see it barely. I'll grab a new color here. I'll just get a green color, and I'm going to grab the dual pencil and the hand lettered script workbook. That's just going to give you a nice thick bar for your letters. What I like to do first is go to the smallest loop in the composition to decide what size to use. If I go to this e and that size looks a little bit tight, I can reduce it a little bit. That looks better. Let's look for some other small loops. This r might be a good one. Mostly the e in this composition is going to tell us what size we can use. I'm happy with that size. You can just check your e's or any other tight spaces you have in your composition before you start using the dual pencil. I'm making sure I'm on a new layer. Of course, this is our final sketch layer so I'm going to try to really make this super sleek and graceful. You may need to take two or three turns on each letter. Even now, I'm seeing tiny little spacing issues that I want to fix. Don't feel like you can't go back and adjust something. You'll probably even find as you're inking that, "I forgot one little thing or this just doesn't look quite right." This is the time to do that. You can always go back in time and fix these. One trick to help make these nice and smooth is to take a few tries and go pretty fast. If you're going super slow, it can be hard to make a smooth line so I do try to go pretty quickly when it comes to that. I also want to note here that you could get a little more playful with this. If you wanted to come in here with this d like that, you may want do something similar on the bottom though to balance that out. Because I haven't built that into my composition, I'm not going to do it right now, but just know that that option is always available to you. I'm happy with this final sketch so I'm going to make my original sketch invisible. Reduce the opacity of all of this stuff and I'll remove the guide so it's really easy for you-all to see what I'm doing. But, of course, feel free to use those guides to keep an eye on what you're doing. I'm going to grab a black or super dark color and the fluid ink brush and the hand lettered set, and I'm just going to start inking these on this new layer. I like to use this fluid ink brush because it creates a nice handmade fluid feel. But if you would rather just do something a little more textured or, of course, go with whatever works for your style here. I like to do it this way rather than using a monoline pen because it keeps that handmade wobbly feel into the letter. But that may obviously not be your style. Go with whatever works for your style here. Once I fill a shape, I'm going to fill it completely and then just drag and drop to get that color in there. Take your time here. Ink all of these letters, I do that in little small pieces like this really up-close to try to get nice smooth lines. Then we'll pick back up after this is all inked. I want to note here as you're working on this project, you can upload your different layers as a project on Skillshare. If you want to just share your sketch and maybe the before and after for fixing your script, I think everyone would love to see your process and just see how you took your script from having some errors in it to fixing it and making it look great. I always love seeing the process. Please upload those projects so that I can see if this process is helping you or maybe you're having some trouble with your script and something just doesn't look quite right and you want to get some advice. Upload that to the project section. Remember the project section isn't available on the app, so you just have to log into Skillshare on a web browser and then you can upload your project. You can see that I like to square off my ends. Rather than making the ends of each line match the guides or go with the top of the page or anything like that, what I do is just square them off so we've got like a bar. It almost looks like you took one of those felt markers and just drag it across the letter. I like that look, but, of course, go with whatever is working for your style here. I also want to note here, of course, you can feel free to copy some of these letters. For example, if I get the Freehand Selection tool and I copy this er, swipe and duplicate, I can stick that down on this er. That way if you want to have that exact look here and here, you can do that. I tend to do it just drawing each and every letter. I think it gives it more of a handmade feel. But sometimes you're in a crunch or you just really love a letter that you just created and want to repeat it. There is nothing wrong with just going through and duplicating your letters, as long as you do them by hand and they're your letters, then you can do whatever you want with them. One trick here with creating smooth lines, is that it's always easier to pull towards you than it is to push away. Any time you can set up your strokes so that you're pulling the stylers or the brush or the pencil towards you, it's going to be so much easier to create the smooth line that you want. 6. Color and Decoration: Once you're happy with how all of your inking looks, you can make that dual pencil and guides layer invisible. I like to drag my ink layer all the way to the top. Then I like to swipe on all of my previous layers and press "Group". That way I clean that up, but I always have those sketch layers available in case I ever need them. If everything looks good, you can create a new layer. Tap on it, tap "Fill" to add in a color. I'm going with two bold colors, a red and a white here. Of course, also, you may need at this point to make some little adjustments. I'm going to get that freehand selection tool. I feel like those are a little bit too close to each other, so I'm grabbing better than. Shift it down a little. Even though it changes the spacing, it makes that fit a lot better. I'll create a new layer. I'm going to get the fluid ink and if you want to add some decorative element, you can do that. Of course, if you go to the workbook and swipe through the loop de-li section, you can see a few different ideas for how you can decorate this, but of course, feel free to make this your own. I'm going to go through and do a really simple line like this, then anywhere that the line breaks, I'm going to show where a new letter started like that. That's how I like to do it but of course, go with your style here. I'm happy with how this turned out. Of course, you could add some decorative element or some illustration element. But I do that in a lot of my classes, so I'm not going to do that in this class today. But I do like to take one moment at the end to make sure everything's perfectly centered and that it's all in the middle of the page and we have plenty of space all the way around it. You may also want to play around with some color versions. The way that I like to do that is by tapping the selection tool and making sure that color fill is on. Then tap on that layer, tap "Select" and then you can go through and try out a bunch of different color versions with whatever palette you're working with. I like this really simple color version. I'm in the mood for that today. Play around with your colors and please post your project or tell us if you're having some trouble with some script or maybe show your transformation from your first sketch to your finish so that we can see how much your piece grew throughout the process. 7. More Examples and a Lettering Challenge: I also want to show you that you can do this with one simple word and just go wild with the flourishes. In this piece, I really just took a lot of time to make some interesting flourishes and then just did one short simple word. This doesn't have to be such a huge project. You can really just do one or two words and then play around a lot with the looping. Another thing I like to do with these is just go really wild with the loops and overlap them. I want to show you an example of this piece because I actually did this piece twice. The first time I did it, I really just didn't like how it turned out, so I redid the entire thing. I wanted to show you that because I want you to know in lettering this happens all the time. You get all the way through the sketching process and then you just realize, you know what? This whole composition is not working. I'm trying here to put lipstick on a pig and make this work and it's just not working. At that point what I do is just start from scratch. For some reason, just starting over always refreshes me and makes me feel like I'm getting a clean start and really helps me focus on how to improve the composition. I do encourage you if you're feeling really down on a composition or if it just isn't working out, just feel free to start from scratch and just play around with a totally new composition idea. You're not stuck in any one composition at any time. You can see the final version of this ended up quite different from how I started at the beginning. I want to tell you about a lettering challenge that I created to go along with this class, where you can share your lettering with me and everyone else in the challenge. You can create as many lettering pieces as you'd like but I recommend trying at least the three styles that we cover in the class. You can use the hashtag iPad script challenge to share your lettering with me and everyone else in the challenge. I can't wait to see your lettering. 8. Planning the Composition: Next we're going to build on the skills that we learned in the previous lessons to do a slightly more complex script style. We're using the same basic process that we used in the previous style, we're just adding a little bit of complexity by adding some weights and swashes that give the composition just a little bit more movement and fluidity. I call this style the OS silky script. It's one of my favorite styles, and it's actually so much easier to create than it looks. Let's dive right in. Just like we did with the last piece, I'm going to start out with just writing out my quote, and that's going to be creativity is a superpower. I'm going to grab that writing pencil instead of the sketching pencil. There's my quote. I can already see that I'm going to want to get crazy with the capital letters and some of these dipping down letters. I think I'm going to take is a, and try to fit it up here with creativity. That's just going to give me so much more vertical space to work with. Otherwise, I'm just running out of room with all of these nice swashes that I want to do. Let's make that semi-transparent and then get going with the guides. Again, going into the sketching pencil, duplicating that layer and then I'm going to give a lot of space to that top guide, almost double the space that you're seeing here. Merge those together, duplicate, and move this down. When I have a lot of space on the top and bottom, I can really play around with these letters. Grabbing a different color here, and just like we did last time, just sketching this in one letter at a time. I'm already running out of room for the word a. I need to select everything, tap the move tool, figure out a way to fit that in, duplicate those guides, and move them over here. That way we have a little bit more space for that last little very important word. If you did the last project along with me, you probably are already thinking about your parent shapes, and all of those issues as you are sketching this in, which is perfect. The point you want to get to is that when you're sketching, you're already thinking about your parent shapes, so that you have less and less work to do each time you fix your letters. Of course, in the beginning, you're going to be taking a lot of time to fix your letters. That is totally fine. I'm going to go ahead and make this all a little bit smaller. I can just tell, I'm going to want to go crazy with the swashes and I just don't have that space right now. Now, that looks a little bit better. I can duplicate those guides. Shift this one down here, and this one down here. Now, I can really feel like I have enough space with my letters. It's just hard when you first start a composition to know exactly how far you're going to want to go with all of these swashes. You really just have to dig in and start sketching. Then you may need to make changes as you go. That's just the part of the lettering process. 9. Refining Your Sketch: I want to show you a few things I'm doing here just to play around with this layout. For example, we have an interesting opportunity here, where we have two different Ts' that are really close to each other. I can take this line, hold a ligature where we combine two letters with some line, then I've got this big nice swirl that mimics these other swirls throughout the composition. I'm always looking for opportunities to just really push that concept of the movement and the swirling feel. That's something that you may want to think about as you do this process. I also have an issue that ligature is going to want to interact with these dots here, so I'm going to have to figure out how to make that work. I think because I have these three dots beside each other, it's going to work out all right, but for now, I'm just making myself a know that I want to take a look at how to do that. One thing I'm fixing here as I've, right now got this hook, versus all these big wide open circles that I have in these other places. I'm going to make this more of a big, wide-open circle, just to mimic the shapes throughout the canvas. That's just another way to create that cohesive feel throughout the composition. Again, I'm just playing around with spacing, I'm constantly just shifting my letters around and making sure I have enough space for everything. One thing I want to point out here is that I'm trying to create a similar thing on the top from what I have going on on the bottom. If I've got some big swirl up here, I'm going to try to also do something similar down here. It doesn't have to be exactly obviously, but we want to mimic those shapes so that they reference each other. I'm trying to decide if this R should loop into that, or the Y should loop into that R, or if the Y should be its own thing over here. The nice thing about over here is it spreads out all of the swashes. I think what I'll do is create a new layer, make that first layer semi-transparent, and just play around with some options, just on that Y. That's something I do often, is create a new layer that's just for swashes, so that you're really giving yourself a chance to think about those swashes in a critical way. Also, I'm going to turn on my guides here, of course, to make sure all of my letters are along my guides, and my swashes should be your long my guides too. Let's fix that little guy. Another good thing about doing your swashes on a separate layer is that you can start judging if they are nicely spaced in the composition so you don't have one huge area with a lot of circles in it and then the rest just doesn't have anything. Just helps you get that little bit of balance in there that every composition needs. I love this R with this big loop. I want to emphasize it a little bit. I take a lot of time with this part of the process, just really tweaking all of these little issues that are going to come up when I start inking. Things being too close to each other, things being uneven or not spaced correctly, then of course, just like we did with the last composition, we need to go through our four S's and make sure we're not missing any important points there. Basically, my process is do as much as I can like this by eye, just seeing how close can I get this to, not perfect, but pretty good, just using my eye as a guide, then I start going through that four S's document and figuring out what could I tweak here, what guides could I draw, and to help myself just to be a little bit more consistent. This C just not working, so I'm going to select it, drag three fingers down, cut and paste, and make it semi-transparent, so that way I can just draw right over that space. Already that feels better. It's more wide-open and circular rather than being an oval. 10. Checking the 4 Ss: I'm happy with all of this. I'm ready to go to my 4S's. Let's reduce the opacity of that layer and pull up that doc. Again, you can swipe through this book and get the oh so silky script and see all of the steps that we're going to take here. If you want to get a little preview in advance, or if you just want to use these pages to inspire your sketches. These are actually pages from my new book letter styles library, so if you want to get all 30 of the styles, you can check that out on my website. Here is the 4S's page. I have gone through already and checked my slants, but it's not a bad idea to check those again. I've got some that are curved and so they're curved along these slants. Some okay with that, as long as they're going along the slant, rather than fighting against it. One thing I always do with this style is I try not to do any straight lines. Everything has a curve or a wobble, just gives it that little bit more of a fluid feel. Next, we're going to look at shapes. I'll grab a color and find the O-shape that I like, it's going to be this one. Let's duplicate it and put that on all of our O-shapes around the canvas. I actually did a better job with this one because I was really focusing on trying to make these similar as I drew them. Sometimes you'll get a little closer, sometimes you'll need a lot of help, so don't be too hard on yourself if you have to take a lot of time to fix these errors because that's just part of the lettering process. I merge all of these new little edits that I am doing, and I'm also going to just give myself a little bit more space in here. I can just see this word is just cramped, so I'm just going to open this up a tiny bit by grabbing little chunks of letters and just shifting them like that. Just little bits at a time, three or four letters scooting them over can really give your whole composition a lot of breathing room. Of course, we need to take a look at the spacing as well. I can already see an issue here with this e and r being way too close to each other. I'm going to go in there, give those a little more room. I think some people when they write have the issue of things being too crowded and other people have the issue of it being too spaced out. Whichever one of those you are, you will have to battle with that and just make little tweaks until it looks at least close to perfect spacing, doesn't have to be perfect though. I think all of those little edits look good, this is going to be my last sketch layer hopefully. I'll just go over, making sure I'm paying attention to all of those little edits that I just made, and do my final sketch layer. 11. Thickening Your Letters: I think this all looks good. I'm going to make all of my other guide layers invisible. Now I can just go through and thicken this. I'm making that sketch semi-transparent and creating a new layer. I'm going to grab a dark color. I like to just use black. Then you can choose here if you want to do a subtle thickening or an extreme thickening. I'll show you what I mean here. Let's look at this a, typically with this kind of script, when your brush goes up, you will press hard, and then when it goes down you'll press harder. Here's an example. So hard, light, hard, light. That's the subtle version. If you want to go with the extreme version, use that extreme thickener and then you can get even more of an intense look. Just depends on what you're in the mood for. I think I'm going to go with the extreme this time. This isn't our final inking layer. This is just a guide, so don't feel like this has to be perfect. But you do want it to be the basic thickness that your final letters will be. Just like we did with the last composition, I'm starting by figuring out how thick can this be based on my smallest loop. Typically that's going to be your E. If it looks good with the E and that little loop on the O, then you're pretty much good to go. I'm going to stick with that thickness. I tried to do this somewhat quickly so we get a nice kind of fluid feel. I'm not trying to do calligraphy here, I'm just setting my thicks and thins. Then I'm going to come through and do some sketching over this to make it a little more refined. As I told you before, one thing I always do with this is I make sure every line is wobbly or loopy. I don't have any lines that are just straight like that. My eye has like an S curve to it. This T has an S curve to it. Everything has its own fluid feel. I'm not going to worry about the dots on the eyes for now. I'm going to focus on those later. For now, I just want to set this thickness for each of my letters. When I step back I can see where my thicks and thins are. I can already see that my S does not have enough space. Let's grab the guide layer and the sketch layer and just pull that down just a little bit. I really want that S to have plenty of room to have lots of beautiful fluidity to it. It can take a little bit of practice to get that thick thin movement down, but just remember that it doesn't have to be perfect. This is like a sketch layer. We're going to come over with the pencil and fix any issues that we have. This is really just to get the process started. You can see how that thick to thin takes a little bit of practice, so one thing you can do before you start doing this if you're having some trouble, is just practice. Pulling up when you go up, down, when you go down. That's a good practice method for anyone who's struggling with this a little bit. 12. Adding Curves: If everything looks good, then we can start doing our sketch layer over this. All I'm going to do is make my sketch invisible, but leave my guides there because I really do need to see those guides. Make this thickening layer semi-transparent new color with a sketching pencil. Now I need to decide what the overall fill of these ends are going to be. Let's do one and then we'll step back and think about it. Inner curves are going to be straight. Outer curves are going to puff out and come back in. You have to decide here what you want to do. Do you want to have a subtle curve like that? Maybe you want to have something really dramatic like that. I think I'm going to go with something subtle. I don't want it to be too intense. Then I'm just really slowly incorporating it into that thickness. That will be the overall shape and of course, you have to step back here and just get a bird's eye view. You really can't do this from up-close. I like to just take a few strokes here, to play around with those, step back, make sure that looks good, and then let's do another one of these really prominent ones right here. Keeping this one in view so that I can make them sisters. That looks good. I think those two work well together. Let's do another one down here. I'm starting with these super prominent ones because that's what's going to really stand out on the page when someone looks at this he's like, there's several big swashes sticking out and they all need to be somewhat similar. They don't have to be exact, but they're speaking to each other in a conversation and you don't want that to be a confusing conversation. This one, it just got too oval here, so I'm bringing it back to that circle shape. One thing you'll notice about how I'm doing these curves is we've got a curve and then this part of the curve almost comes straight out instead of going like that and being super sharp, it almost goes straight out. You might want to practice that a little bit. I know that took me some time in the beginning to fill my curves with the right shape. Every time stepping back. Now that one seems a little too chunky, so let's go back and just thin it out a little bit. I like to look back at my original first and say, am I getting thicker and thicker as I go or am I sticking to what I did for my original swash? I think those all look about even, finishing up these prominent ones. Sometimes you have to change this layout because overall that just wasn't fitting with that s, so this one may need a total reworking. Let's go with that. I think it got a little too far up here, so rather than going all the way up here and encroaching on that s, let's just stay down here in this area. You can see I'm really just going through and starting with the prominent ones. This became way too straight. See how it's almost straight across. Let's give that some curve. This has a nice little fun element to it. I'm really just going to continue this same process on every single end. If you see an end like that, it needs to become one of these little curves. Now that you've set your overall look, you know you're just going to repeat that on every single one. Some of these you may have to play around with a little bit because they've got to fit within the guides and they've got to fit with the overall look of your other curves. I constantly step back with this and just make sure I haven't done any that are just huge or just sticking out way too much. It's easy to get out of control with these because they're so fun to draw, but you don't want to go so far that you are just overwhelming your viewer with swashes and taking away from your letters. That's always something to be careful with. I'm also going through and any issues that I see, I'm just marking those now, so that as I ink, I just have a little note there that, that little area needs to be fixed. I'll show you an example here. See how this is almost a triangle. That needs to be a nice rounded edge, so that's going to be fixed when I go into the inking stage. You can see how just adding that little curve on there really transforms this r from being just a little bit awkward to really pretty. I'm also seeing some spacing issues as I do this and so I'm just going to go in. I'm selecting both of these layers using the Freehand Selection tool and then just shifting that over. I also see an e that I just really don't like. I'm just going to erase that e. I did the Freehand Selection tool, circle this e, drag three fingers down, and tap Duplicate. Just move this over here and I'll have to go on that red layer and just play around with incorporating that in. Any time you have an awkward meet up here, I think it's fine for some letters to not touch other letters. Because I've done that in other parts of the composition, I think I'm just going to separate that w from this e. I think that's going to work a lot better than trying to keep those lining up. It was just becoming an awkward meeting there, whereas I would rather just have a really nice open fill here between the w and e. I would say that same thing, any time you have an issue where you're like, I just don't feel like there's a good way to connect these two letters that doesn't look awkward, just separate them like I did the p and the o right here. I would say though, if you do that in one place in your composition, it's probably a good idea to do it in at least one or two other places. If you don't, it might get a little bit visually confusing, why are some words separated when others aren't? Just something to think about as you're building your composition. 13. Inking and Color: I'm pretty happy with how this looks. I feel like the swashes are all pretty similar with a little bit of fun variation. The letters are nicely spaced. I've gone through my four S's. I'm ready to start inking. I'll create a new layer, just like we did with the last composition. I've got that fluid ink brush. I'm just going to go through and trying to always pull towards me rather than away. On a new layer and create a nice smooth line. Of course, you can go over these as many times as you need to, but I do recommend trying to make each big swath one line rather than going over and over and over something because I think the viewers can really feel if you've just worked something to death. That kind of effort, ink shows up in the line. Just try to pull one big graceful stroke. It takes practice, of course, but the more you do it, the easier it's going to get. I'm just going to go through and ink this whole composition just like we did the last one. [MUSIC] I'm happy with how my inked letters look so I'm going to make all my sketch layers invisible. As you know, I save all my sketch layers in case I need to go back and reuse anything. I just group all of those. Then I have my inked layer on its own layer. Let's turn off that drawing guide. I'm just going to go again with a simple color palette. I have a class that's all about using limited color palette. If you want to dig deeper into color, check out that class. Of course, this is the final stage where you may need to make a few little tweaks. Sometimes you'll see things like this space just looks a little bit too small. I probably would go in, get the freehand selection tool, pull that open, and just get a little more space in between those two letters. I'm really just looking for tiny little refinement issues. Anything that hurts the readability of the composition, this is a good time to fix that. Now if I pull back, that R looks a lot better. There may be other little things that you need to fix at this point or if you're ready to move on, just let the piece go and move on. 14. Animation and More Examples: I want to show you one fun thing you can do with this style. I'm going to make this layer semi-transparent and create a new layer above it and then get the dry wash brash. If you go in here and you just redraw these letters with this dry wash brash and keep it rough so you can see some of those strokes in there, you can create a really beautiful effect on your letters. I'm not going to go through and do all of these, but I do want to show you how I did that and turned it into an animation. Here's a composition where I redrew the entire word and I did that three different times. The first layer here, I drew the pink in the dry gouache brush, and then this puts some simple stars around it. Then I reduced the opacity i that layer, created a new layer above it, and redrew the exact same thing. Basically, I just have three of the same thing. You can see when I click on them, how they just shift a little bit. After I have those three layers that are all the same, I go to the tool symbol ''Canvas'', turn on animation assist, and then down here on animation assist, you can tap on your background layer and set that to background. You can go to your settings and play around with your animation settings. I'll just press ''Play'' here so you can see what my animation looks like. I might reduce the frames per second a little bit so it doesn't wiggle quite so much, or maybe you want to increase it so it's just going wild. You can play around with various animation versions. I like the loop. I'm going to go with loop for frames and that's just a nice little animation that you can share on Instagram. I think the easiest way to export this to get to Instagram is to press ''Play''. Pull down here on your settings menu and tap the screen recording and just record for a few seconds. I've found if export straight from procreate, you have to change the length, then you have to do a lot of extra steps, whereas if you just do this screen recording, so I just stopped that screen recording. Now I can go to my photos app, go to that screen recording, tap ''Edit'', and just find a spot in the animation where I can use it as a marker. This is one part of the animation where this part looks really big and so then I can press "Done", "Save Video", edit again, go to the ''Crop Presets'' and go to ''Square.'' Now I can crop this as a square and press "Done". Now I have a finished animation that I can share on Instagram. It's going to repeat several times and then on Instagram, it'll just keep looping. You can share this on Facebook, your website, wherever you would like to share it. I want to show you another example of what you can do with this style. In this piece, I did a lot more playing around with the swashes. I really let the swashes bounce around the canvas and you'll see later in this sketch how I make it even more dramatic because I just felt like with the theme of rule benders, I really needed to have some crazy rule-bending situation going on with the letters. I just made that R really go crazy around the canvas, and then I just added these simple little bubbles to make each letter stand out a little bit more. Here's another example of combining this with a really simple illustration and you can see I didn't spend a lot of time on the illustration part of this. It's just a rectangular piece of paper and a little pencil, but it really transformed the quote from being just a symbol set of words on a page to being a fun, playful illustration where you feel like the viewer is seeing someone create something on a piece of paper. It really transforms the whole concept of the quote to just have a tiny bit of illustration in there. Again, I have a class on combining lettering and illustration, so if you want to get deeper into that, you can check out that class. I also included some serif letters in here. If that's something you want to do, check that out in the lettering and illustration class, I go a little deeper into how I create my serif letters there. I also want to show you a piece where I totally changed my concept because this happens all the time with lettering where you think you know exactly how a piece is going to be laid out and what's going to look good and then you get through the whole composition and it just doesn't look right. There are certainly times where I just scrap almost everything and go back to square one and recreate a piece, and that's just part of the process. It hurts sometimes still lose a lot of work, but it's also really important to stay flexible with your compositions because you don't want to get so invested in a composition that you're willing to share something that's not your best work just because you don't want to lose the investment in time that you've made. Here I just deleted all the illustration stuff because I ended up just thinking that it was confusing for the viewer and just went with the words alone. Sometimes you have to go too far and then back it up and that's just how you find the final solution. Another fun thing that I've done with my script is create some Instagram stickers. I do have a short tutorial where I show you exactly how to create your own Instagram stickers, so if you'd like to do this with your script, you can definitely do that. It's just a fun way to personalize your Instagram stories. I did a few words that I want to use all the time, but I can never really find the exact words that I want so I just made my own and now I can pop my script in there and I can tell my followers that they can use it as well. It's just a fun way to engage with your audience and create something where they can use your work in their own stories. I'll put a link to the tutorial for how I did that on the downloads and resources page. 15. Planning Your Composition: For this last project, we're going to do a slightly more complex style that I call skinny fat because it combines really thin lines with big chunky bottoms, giving it beautiful variation so I do recommend using a shorter quote for this composition because the style doesn't read well at a small scale so feel free to just follow along and copy me or come up with your own short quote. Let's start by creating the sketch. Just like we did with the last ones, I'm going kind of guess here about how I want my layout to be. I'm going to sketch the words you're now is not yours forever. I think that layout is going to work well so now I'm going to start with my guides and since this is one of the more difficult styles that we'll be doing today. You may want to have this workbook where I have the style so it's this section here and if you look at these guides, you'll see that the bottom portion is really big and then the top portion is really small. I'm thinking about that as I'm laying these guides down and let's start with the middle guide and here so it's going to be really tall this way. Cut that big wide open space. The next one is just going to be that tiny little space, that's one thing that kind of defines this style is having this big wide open space here. Also with this style, you can add in a line that is for thickening, I tend to do that because you can see when you get to these thickening sections, it's nice to have some kind of guide to help you know where to thicken. I'm going to do this about halfway in between the bottom and middle lines and my guide. Now I can merge all my guide layers and duplicate that, merge those two, duplicate that and now I've got some nice spacing with my guides, of course, we want to turn on our drawing guide. Set the angle here. You can just go with what you're seeing here exactly or you can go a little more extreme whenever you want to do. That's what defines your style, is those little decisions that you make as you create these letters. One trick here that I want to show you that can make it a little bit easier to keep your letters consistent, is to set your guide so that letters, especially the O shapes, are two blocks wide. If you see my guide is here, these letters are two blocks wide. What I tend to do is go to the edit drawing guide and then play around with this until you get it to the size where you would only need two blocks, draw a letter. The nice thing about that is then you have a lot less work to do when you're working on your parents shapes. I don't know exactly how that's going to end up, but for now, I'm just going to stick that little swash there and you can see how many of these letters will fit perfectly within this two-block grid so can save you a lot of work to just do that one little step. Already we're seriously running out of space here so shifting these down big time. Duplicating my guides. Moving them up and let's reduce the opacity on those guides so it's a little bit easier to see. Sometimes I'll even intentionally space out letters too much just because I want to use that two-block section the size it and then I can get the selection tool and just shift it over here. If you'd like to use that just as I'm doing to get that two-block space, then just draw the letter and shifted it over afterward. I'm just doing these all by hand, but remember, all of these are in the workbook so if you'd rather follow along in the workbook rather than just watching me do it here, you certainly can do that. I've already drawn the word, your up here, so I might just reuse that doesn't have to be a totally new word every single time and if you really like how you drew it the first time, you can just grab it. I probably will end up making some changes to it later, but for now, I'm just going to stick it in there. I am running out of space again, so we're going to have to downshift just a little bit. I am seeing that I can definitely space these out a little more vertically so I'm just going to take a few minutes to play around with some ideas for how far space these could be. I think these could move up at least that much and forever could move down a little bit so then I just need to move my guides to match with those letters. That I've space those out, I can kind of shift some other things to fit a little bit better in here and I can also come up with some ways to differentiate because I copied that word, your I think I want to just make some little changes to it so it's not exactly like, your on top. 16. 16 Refining and Adding Weight: I'm happy with how that looks, but of course I need to do my parent shaped check. In Adobe reader, you can actually slide down here to go to different pages. That is an easy way to slide from page to page. Let's check our slant, looks good. The shapes probably need a little work, so let's go through and check by starting with an o shape. I always start with the o shapes because I just feel like that's such an essential part of the overall structure of a script. I think if you start with that and that's your basis, then you always know that you're staying within something cohesive as you create your whole script. For me, starting with these os is just part of my process. That y definitely needs to be the candle a lot, both of those ys do. Then as you can see here, the w is typically about the size of two os, but you can flex by overlapping those a little bit because I don't want this to be a super wide w. That just doesn't really work with the style that you needs to be beefed up quite a bit. I love this part of the process because I'm always learning about my own errors and script when I do this. I don't realize as I'm writing, but I think it does improve my writing overall. The more I do this process, because I just realize that's an issue that I always have, and so that's something I need to watch out for every time I letter. This can really help you identify your own issues. Now we know that y needs to be much chunkier, so keeping in mind where those guides are. Now I can make those previous layers invisible. Now I'm going to start adding what I think is the most fun part of this process, which is the thickening. I'm going to flip to that page here. For this thickening, we're going to use that middle guideline to show us where these thickened areas need to happen. What I like to do is halfway between this line and this line is where I like to start my thickening. I'm going to start it there, that's my halfway point. Then I like to touch that line and then sometimes you'll come up above it, sometimes you'll stop right there. That's what I'm looking for as I'm placing these, so stopping there. That's going to be my thickening part of my r. I'm going to go through every single letter and just create that little bowl. Then on letters like this that just stick up, what I like to do is this but you could also do a rounded thing, you can just go straight up like this and not thicken at all. It's totally up to you here. Maybe play around with a few different versions and see what works for your style. Every time I do this, I'm thinking about that middle point, touching that thickening line and then coming back up. That applies to these connections too. This is the u here, so that u has to be thickened. You may also want to thicken top things, but for me I like to just thicken the bottom. I think it gives a really interesting flair when it's just the bottom that's thickened. Some letters like this n, I'm actually going to thicken by coming up under it, because you just don't have enough space to thicken it all right there. I encroach on that center area, the n, and then we just have a nice simple little curve. You can see how this is fun part. You're just giving this, it's chunky feel and you really transforming these from just simple skeletons to really fun chunky letters. Once you get comfortable with this process, you honestly could do any letter style. It's just about figuring out where does the width come in? Where do you add weight? How close are the letters to each other? That's literally any letter style that you want to do. This is a great just practice style for anyone who feels like they don't know how to jump into some new style, this is a great way to get started. Something like this, I might just add a really simple chunky weight. Since this has all the chunky weight on the bottom, we really need something chunky down here. I can't just leave that as a skeleton because it's going to just get confusing for the viewer. Sometimes you just have to improvise, this sheet will get you part of the way, but every composition is different and so you're going to have to make your own way in a lot of cases. Sometimes just going over a curve a few times like this can help you find the right curve. The first pass, sometimes it's a little difficult to figure out, am I making this chunky enough? Is it smooth? Does it feel right? That's why you just need to go over it a few times until you get it. I'm going to move the e a little bit because it wasn't working well with this lower bar, so I just moved it up here. I like that e so much. I'm just going to grab it. Select it with the free hand selection, swipe three fingers down and duplicate and then now I've got it over here. I could even grab that r, I did really like this r up here. Let's go ahead and grab that r, duplicate. I need to go back and erase this previous r. Sorry r, you're not needed anymore. Now I've got some little bit more of a cohesive field there. I could do that with this r too because we've got a few different kind of loops going on. You have to decide, do you want to just sketch it in or do you want to actually copy a letter? Sketching, I think I can manage on this one. Really just a matter of fixing that loop. 17. 17 Inking: I'm happy with this. I'm going to go ahead and dive into the inking process. You know all about this part of the process. I'm just going to go through, follow my sketch using that fluid inking brush on a new layer, and just taking my time to do each of these curves separately, and just making sure I didn't miss anything. There will always be things that just don't quite look right and you have to come in and figure out a solution. Here's something I forgot. I didn't know what I was going to do with that y, but let's just give it a simple swash. Of course, you can always go back to the sketching stage at anytime if something just isn't working. The size of the fluid ink brush is pretty important on this because it's going to determine the thickness of all these upper loop. Before you get too deep into this, you want to just make sure that you like that size. I'm happy with it, I think it's going to be a really bold contrast between the weighted bottoms and the super thin loops. But if that contrast is too much for your style, then of course, tone it down a little bit. I'm going to make all my sketch layers invisible, make my guide invisible so I can see, does all my spacing look good? Are there any letters that are some readable or confusing? I think I need a little bit more space in between some of these words. The word not is shifted over to the right a little bit. I want to make sure someone can look at this really quickly and see that the styles there of course, but also that it's really readable. Readability always should have precedence over the style. 18. 18 Animation and More Examples: I'm happy with that. Let's make the guide invisible. Let's pop in a fun color on the background. Again, I'm going to do that color select option to choose a color here. I like this pink but I want to also add a little bit more of a bold background. I'm going to duplicate that layer on that layer below, I'm going to choose a different color. Let's go with this reddish color. Swipe two fingers right to alpha lock it, tap one time and fill. Now I've got a bold pink as my secondary color. I'm just going to go through and give that some perspective. One thing you might notice about the selection method of filling colors is sometimes there will be a little bit of a haze of a different color. All you have to do is alpha lock that layer, tap one time and tap fill. Now you can see it's pure pink. If you're not familiar with perspective all you need to do through here is connect all these little parts of the previous letters. Sometimes I'll just go through and do all my connections first. I feel like when you batch it like that it's a little easier. Then you can go back through the bigger brush and just fill in all these extra spaces. I won't make you sit here and watch me do that. I've already finished this piece on another document so that you can see the final version. I want to show you how I turned this into an animation. I did that same process that I just showed you, creating that perspective layer. Then I repeated the same process with another perspective layer. Then you can create these layers that are the first one here, just a solid word. The second layer here is a solid word with perspective, and then the third layer is solid word with perspective with perspective. So it's three layers. Now when I turn all of those on and press ''Play'' I have set this to ping-pong two frames per second. It just pops back and forth to really give this just some eye-catching movement online so people will look at this just a little bit longer than they would if it was just a standalone piece of lettering. I want to show you one other piece that I created here that is an animation. Rather than doing the three perspective layers, I did one perspective layer and then the next perspective layer shifted over here. It's like a shadow of the words. It's the same idea but rather than shifting the perspective layer this way I shifted it that way with a darker color. You can see how that gives just a fun bit of movement where it's like perspective and then a shadow popped in. Just a slightly different way of animating these kinds of letters. Here is one more piece that I did using this exact same process. You can see that I went a little more wild with the swashes in this one because I could just see that G and that B gave me the opportunity to create just some really interesting fun movement. I really went crazy with the movement on this one and just let it to balance each other out on the top and bottom with that B and the G having a reverse effect on each other. Then the two swashes in the middle on the Y and the H just balance each other out so we have some even weight across the piece. Then I just added a really simple perspective layer and a color that's slightly darker than the background, so it has a shadow effect. Of course you can also incorporate this style into illustrations. Just like I did with the last style, I added this on a piece of paper with a pencil and I added in a drink as well. It just gets the quotes so much more playful feel and it's like the viewer can be a part of the story rather than it just being a stand-alone quote. It's like there's some story going on here that they can follow. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating some hand lettered script compositions. Remember if you click ''Follow'' on my profile you can get a notification every time I come out with a new class too check out my profile to get more iPad or design classes like this one in your inbox. If you liked this class you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to hand letter and draw on your iPad, like my 70s lettering class, how to combine lettering and illustration, and how to design a hand lettered font in Procreate. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of free downloads and resources for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more resources like what you got for this class, Check out my site. I would absolutely love to see your lettering composition so remember to join me in the lettering challenge by using the #iPadscriptchallenge on Instagram or Facebook. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You could reply to my discussion here on Skillshare or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.