Transcripts
1. Hand Lettering Introduction: Hello, I'm Ray, and this is
hand lettering essentials. I learned some sign painting
techniques from my dad. Dad used to say draw
your letters carefully. Really take your time
on laying them out. Take a look around next
time you're out and about, check-out some of the signs
around your local area. This is from the studio
tour we took recently, a couple that I did
out at the ranch. So in this class we'll go over some basic letter structure in the Roman alphabet
or the Latin alphabet. Then we'll cover
some cursive writing because we need to get an a in our cursive handwriting and it's a great style for
some hand lettering. Find work. After that. We'll look at some bubble
letter shapes that I like to use on t-shirts
and cartoon art, the class project, making
a sign for your shop. We'll go over a quick lesson on how to design a
logo before lunch. Sometimes you've gotta come up with an idea really quickly. And here's a few techniques
that helped me along the way. So let's look at some materials and get started with hand
lettering essentials. I forgot to add that. We're going to do a
little chalkboard art and some dry erase art. You don't like for
your lunch menu or your coffee shop menu. What's the special today? What's the coffee of the day? Let's go find out here on
hand lettering essentials.
2. Materials: Materials for your art desk. Quite a few things here, but you can really
get started with just regular notebook
with lined paper, like a regular school
pencil number two pencil and a ruler. And that's good to get
started with because then we could just use the lines that are on the notebook paper to lay out some grids
for practicing. Maybe make her a little storyboards for our logo
design before lunch. So now I have real quickly if the grid with some boxes that we could do some designs for blocking in some texts
like, here's our title. Maybe you're a little subtitle, maybe an illustration
right here. And then you can just
mess around with composition shapes and ideas. So all in one book. No barrier, because
three things. If you want to expand
your collection, I like to use a fine tip marker. This pen is a
prismacolor premier, or you can use pilot
markers or whatever. It has a fine tip. I like doing that for outlining shapes. Here's a brush pen, this is a Copic, but there's other brands
with flexible brushed tips. Irregular like permanent marker. I'll use a water brush pen. You fill the tube with
water and then we could work with
some watercolors. Later. Erasers, kneaded eraser, regular eraser,
pencil sharpener. I also have electric
pencil sharpener. Have this eraser
that I like to use. It's got a retractable eraser. So you can really get in
and dial in and erase with a little more precision
than for the class project. We're going to use
some card stock. This will be our final
sign board piece. It's an eight by eight square, eight inches by eight inches. I cut it a little, couple
of small ones off of the scrap that we can
use for practice. I also have a triangle. Now what's cool
about the triangle? Let's say you had just
a blank sheet to work on a grid so you get that straight up and
down, put that against it. Now you can quickly draw some parallel lines for
practicing some letter shapes. And we'll get our brush pen. This also has a chisel tip on one side for calligraphy style. So still not a lot of art
supplies. So enough of that. Let's get into practicing
some alphabet shapes. And we're going to use
these PDF printouts. There's a link in
the description where you can
download the sheets and then have some grids to practice with
letter shapes on. We're going to talk about
the Roman or Latin alphabet, the basic shapes to get some
food balanced and spacing. The last two items
on my list of three. Grid, Notepad or sketchpad grid, already lightly printed on it. These are one-inch squares with quarter-inch subdivisions. This is great for doing. This one is 11 by 17. I'll put links to some of these pads supplies in the description in
our bonus section, we're gonna do some chalkboard
art and dry eraser. So getting dry erase
board or a chalkboard, like I said before, you can just follow
along with the notebook. All this other stuff can
come later if period two. And let's get on to a Roman Latin alphabet.
See you over there.
3. ROMAN CAPITALS - Letter Width: For our first set of letters, we're going to go to
Roman Latin alphabet. This style of letter goes back
centuries and evolved into what we have today in
our 26 letter alphabet. You'll find me at the public
library getting books on calligraphy or topography. And that's where I
did the research for getting some of
the material for this class, this first group, it's actually broken down into five sized groups for the Roman Catholic all
capitals, alphabet. That's what I learned
from a calligraphy.
4. ROMAN CAPITALS - Letter Practice: We'll run through the
rest of these real quick. Just follow the guides that are indicated on the chart here. So a in our
three-quarter group, h, k and TUV XYZ One, 23. I need more practice here. This group is mostly
straight lines, with the exception of
the curve on the bottom. So let's fast forward to this. Now for the narrow group, will draw together the
order of the strokes. We'll start it off with the B. You draw that the LC at first. And then do the b
part and connected. We'll stop here. Like right about there. Then loop it. Can get a nice arts. I'm fully there are
21 stroke down. One stroke. We try to do it with one stroke. Especially when you're
doing brush lettering. But it's beginning, it's
okay to sketch and get your shapes dialed in and then you'll do a clean-up pass
after you do your layout. For the E is just to the
side and the bottom. And then cross weight crooked. It's a little tricky to
draw them into the camera, sometimes a blade
looking at the camera to make sure it's in the shot and then you don't look
where you're going. This is where you want to
maybe move your whole arm because if you're just
moving your fingers, you might have a tendency
to draw that crooked line. If you move your whole
hand or your whole arm, you can you can go straight across as opposed to just do my fingers. That movement of the fingers is kind of a diagonal movement. Here's a little tip. Can't draw a straight line. That's because I'm
holding my hand-drawn. Now the scene with
the F Street down and then maybe turn your
hand and use your whole arm. Because I'm kinda moving
from the elbow and the shoulder here to get
that line straight across. And then on the s, you imagine these two
connect your points here. You start right about there. Little curvy shape. Then get the top of
your S and the bottom. Top, bottom. That's where the L, of course, just one line down. Here's what we get
out of the shot here. On the piece. It's two strokes, one down, and loop around. Here we are in the very
narrow letters and the venue wide letter, I and j. My chart, I just
put two dots here. So connect the dots. Just practice drawing
lines street down. Here. You can draw from like your shoulder and get a
real nice straight line. And then on the j, u hook it around at the
end of my street. Sometimes you got
to make a face. Tried to draw
straight, very wide. And this has the stroke into TV. Do the outside first two and then meet in
the middle. Food. For the W is W starts out a
little farther out. This one. Instead of doing the
outsides like the m, you do the two diagonal ones first, Outside, the middle. And then connect 34. I was actually see, I was off center
here on this one. Maybe even give yourself a little idea of
where the center is. Of your box. For the W, the bottoms of UW are in the middle
of the boxes. So it gives you a
little idea of where to point your diagonal lines. And then connect. I started outside the box
and connect letters or ECG, dequeue, the medium group, which is three-quarters box. Each key in. The marrow group, which
is half size of a box. Braf SLP, to very
narrow letters. I and J are of course
the wide group. And so keep these nearby for reference
practice a few sheets. And then we'll put some words together and
talks about spacing.
5. Letter Spacing and Balance: I have my reference
sheet with all of my letters in those
file size groups. And I'm going to
use the line paper and just draw it at this size. Here's my square. Three quarters of a squared. Here's half a square. Of course narrow and then
the very wide, which we do, we'll do the M's
and the W's outside the box to kinda try to visualize
these different groups. Let's just choose something
directors like Roman letters. We got R, which is the
half size, litter, which is a wide
letter, M, extra wide. And a which is three-quarters. And which is also
three-quarters. Of all we go any further. Not too bad here. On my first rough pass in here, we want to make the same amount of volume
that's between the letters. Like if this was holding water, in-between the letters, you want the same amount of water. Instead of if we put these these boxes right
next to each other, Let's do it underneath. We get it up close. Now, these amounts are
a little different, like this is a little
less than over here. This might be a little more. So you wanna, you
wanna give them a little bit of breathing room. And then when you space it, just imagine there's an OH here. Basically like a one,
a one-to-one square. And then draw our next letter. L is is a half size. So it was an e. T is three-quarters size so that cross the T
a little longer. Do it twice in a row. And also have size. S is half size. Good. That space between kind
of balanced with how much, how much it's going to fill up. So let's ink those in. Knock out the pencil. More balanced. I might be crowding the end
a little bit next to the a. You can get the idea. I would just start
with some short words and just sort of try to balance the different letter
groups are well balanced. There's a good word, I miss one, I'm going to use two lines. There's my full-sized
box, a half box. Malibu place three corner box. Narrow. Of course, why witches
goes outside the box down is the half size of the box. Recorder, one-to-one box,
trim it off a little bit. Right there. This is probably
going to help me a lot, especially when you get your
lettering aside for all to see some more out of
someone's business. He can kind of
visualize the box. First. Here's a half size,
another three-quarters. There is a full square, but
then there's a three-quarter. Make sure you get to the top. Sometimes I tend to make the
peak of the a too short. You don't want to get
to the top of the line. For goods shapes. And then n is three quarters. So I'm going to draw
another full cube and then trim it off
at three-quarter. And drama in. Already I can see. I might have this
be too far over. So as I'm, as I'm going, I'm going to adjust the edge of my three-quarter box a little
closer or the half box a little closer to the
a because that was holding more more water
than it needed to go. Now we could see like this, this is holding about the
same amount of water. This is, this is kind of big. Maybe the a can come
a little closer over. So the end of my
eight will be here. And my a is a three-quarter box. So here's a box, three-quarters. So that's probably
a little better. Which is going to
move my n over. Also a three-quarter box. So this is what
helps, helps me even. Now, even after years of
doing drawing and lettering. Sometimes you're a little
rusty. And then a C. So now we're getting a
nice balance of space. And a C, You don't wanna get too close because that
fits in a box. But when you draw the loop, you're measuring up
here and down here too. So imagine what's filling
up this space here. And last but not least, the E, which is a half size, half of a box. Ie the loom close. We go and we'll
balance and spacing. Here's where we can
break some of the rules. We'll talk about this in another chapter on designing
logos before lunch. Like I want to fit balance
and spacing in a box. So how can I, how
can I stretch out spacing to go from here to here? And this is where
you think about it. Here illustrates spacing
here for reference. This is where it's a combination of mechanical spacing and balancing with thinking about the holding of volume
of water in-between. So I got 1234567 liters. My c is approximately
the center. Then I'll stretch
those litter shapes. Ray backwards and just
scribble it lightly. Then you still draw this, draw the shapes in
the same order. Now we're kinda breaking
the rules of making sure they're three-quarter boxes
or half boxes or whatever. We wanted to get this design
in line and then we click, make a little curly cues
and put a frame on it. I'm going to time-lapse
this phrase. There it is. This
has every letter in the alphabet that's
class project. With your Roman alphabet, keeps some of the
basic shapes in mind. Wide group, three-quarter group, half group, narrow group
and very wide group. M and M, w and M. This
pencil in this phrase, the Quick Brown Fox
jumped over the lazy dog. I'll go ahead and
choose a time-lapse and make it kind of big. I'll use my lined paper
in and do big squares. So two lines per word, and then between one's, one space between the lines. Very readable,
pretty well spaced. Definitely. Spend more time. If this was gonna be a
permanent sign out somewhere, you get the idea of looking at some of these
calligraphy principles to draw some better letter
shapes that are well spaced. I could critique this. Now I can already see I'm a
little farther away here. The name should be. This didn't come out too bad. I'm just looking at all
the spaces in-between. When you when you get to
the back of the book and you check your answers,
check yourself. This is crowded against
the F a little bit, maybe just a little
more space so I can get that volume going. And same here are crowded
the P and the S a bit. This is a little better. I think that's a
habit I'm having is we can scoot the T
a little closer. When you've got two
straight lines together, you can maybe get those a
little closer together. This one was good. This one could come
over a little. This is all pretty good
in here. These are good. This is like a little
hourglass that kinda spacing is easy when you have a lot of round
shapes together, you can get this
volume well spaced. And then Fox's quick
and the dog is lazy. He's that actually lazy. I think he's just
had a long day.
6. Gothic Letter Practice Sheet: Really keep working in
our notebook and make a grid so we can practice
some Gothic letters. We'll just use the Lion paper, but I've got to go halfway between each line
and make a mark. Now have slightly smaller grid, basically five
millimeters squares. And there's links
in the description where you can find grid paper. That's a little bit relaxing
to just sit down with a pencil and ruler and draw out a grid so you can practice. Doesn't take too long. It might take five
or ten minutes to draw this grid out here. Across the top for
the vertical lines, we'll do five
millimeters spacing. And I like millimeters
and metric because going every
three-sixteenths of an inch or some other fraction is hard to keep
track of on a ruler. After marking five millimeters
across the bottom. We'll go ahead and connect
the vertical lines. Is accurately. Well, that's a pretty good grant.
Let's finish it up.
7. Gothic Alphabet & Numerals: We have a grid and
we'll go ahead and practice the first
couple of lines. These Gothic letters, I believe the little
cheat sheet here, some of the letters
are five units wide, summer six units wide, and they're all six units high. So unit meeting a
square on my grid. So 123456. So there's, my first
little group will be on that line and we'll leave a
gap of one right in here. Dude over six. So we'll use a ruler
to strengthen up the line to define the top
and the bottom of the letter. And the spaces in
between the lines. I'll just go to the ABCs. These are my cheat sheet here
on how wide to make them. I'll go ahead and
put it together grid that you can download
and practice with. We'll start with a and a
is six units wide, 123456. So it's within this area here. A six grid square
from the center. When? Two. And for the letter a, I'd like to put the line
about two squares up. A nice bold look. You might want to put
the cross up here. I always feel that if
you leave this area too small for the opening of
an a from a distance, it might be hard to read. This is nice and wide-open. Would go in with a
black pen to three. And it will put this,
this one is 66 wide. The letter B is a
five wide, 12345. So within this area here, the B will loop
around and the top of the B doesn't quite go all
the way to the fifth line. But the bottom will, which gives it a little
more weight on the bottom. Now, it's like
sitting down on the, on the line and you could
draw it in this direction. C is also five. You just draw a nice
circular shape. D, Another five unit letter. Make a nice arch
that goes halfway, meets in the middle. We've got room for any e. And e is also five. Top of the EAD. Don't go all
the way to the fifth one. And then the cross of
the E is three units. And then the bottom can be five, which gives a
little more weight. Let's fast forward
through the rest. You can get the idea. I'll put a little music worked through a sheet
of practice here. Sometimes a little rock and
roll, sometimes classical. Well, I would say sometimes the music can distract you too. I was going five hides
that have six high. Now we got it. Well, the w was the exception. It is eight units wide on the x. It's actually six units wide. So we'll start here. 123456, work inside
this little box here. But the top of the x will
start in the middle of the two end boxes and
then go diagonally x. So the top is five, but the bottom is six. And it gives us a
little more weight, kinda like what we did on the B. Just a little
thinner at the top. So we do that with the x. So this is five in here, then six in here. Somebody didn't forget the W. And Y is also a wide letter. We'll start here. And it meets about the center
of the box, just like that. So we do the two top bars
and then draw street down. We'll put the z over here
because I'm going to make some room for letter or numerals in the next
line starts here, and a Z is five units wide. We can draw the top
and the bottom. And I'm just making
those the same link, both the top and the
bottom connected. Those are gothic
capital letters. Can I get them
all? A, B, C, D E, F G H I J K L M N O P
Q R S T U V W X Y, Z. This like my third time, to
have a look at the numbers, sketch those out
for the numbers. Of course the one is the
same as the letter I. Sometimes I like to just put a little indicator at the top to show that it's a one to
differentiate it from the eye. The eye is a straight
up and down line. If you just did this
as the number one, that's optional with
the number two. I'm going to start it over here. It's five wide, so
work within this box. The top of the two
starts about the middle. It doesn't go all the way. And then you curve it down. And then you could draw
that out to the end. It's basically when we
get to the number eight, it's kinda the same formula. You think of a number
eight in here. And then the two
follows that curve. The idea week from the technical drawing manual was this has to
be super legible, so no mistakes are made
when they're reading floor plans and diagrams
for building stuff. And number three is the same, also five units wide, sort of built around
a figure eight. So I'm just going to draw a
little figure eight here. Most loops. Maybe knock it down a little bit
with my kneaded eraser. So you started to appear the imbalance maybe a
little wider at the bottom. Number four, I started here. 12345 fits inside this box here, but the stem is on
the fourth box at angles down to about the
middle of the second, third box, and
then crosses over. Well, but the middle of the second box up
from the bottom. Nice and big loop here. So it's wide-open. And the number five, I have to go out
to the edge here. You draw it in this order. This goes down halfway. One, draw a big loop. Two. And then three. For a great big mechanical five. 1234545. Then number six, not
perfectly round. It's five units across. You draw the top
part as line 11. And it starts up around
the second square. Circle that around 2312. This is also five or six. I'm confusing myself. And the seven is a five
unit litter and then it ends up two units
over from the bottom. So it can be straight. And then you kinda curve it
down right at the bottom. And that's a nice
readable seven. Now we do our Figure eight
again for the number eight, what the center to be here. So the top doesn't quite
go across all five. And then the bottom
goes across all five. So it's 1234. In that order. The left side of
the top of the one, you just drawing two circles, 2349, pretty much
the upside down six, which is five units. So they have one drops
below the middle. Here's the big one. Too. Three. Start almost at the
middle and go 1235495. We'll get to nine or 006 by six. But 0 is six by five. Slightly narrower so we can tell the difference
between a 0. It's more elliptical shape. Try not to be too, too
much of an egg shape. This is also 540. That's not a very good return. Put down five and I got 0. Okay, there it is, our Gothic capital letters. Let's write some
phrases with it.
8. Cursive Lettering: After penciling in the
cursive letters shapes, based on the stuff we
learned in grade school. And you develop your own
style for the loops. But you want to be
consistent at least with your heights and widths
and the spacing. I'm gonna go ahead and use this little chisel
point pen ink the then just try to flow with the
wrist and your arm as well. We can try the brush
tip and you want to be heavy on the downstroke and
then light on the upstroke. You kinda get a natural
thick and thin line working. Press a little bit, press, lighten up with a brush tip. Just experiment with
the pressure that you put on to get the
thick and thin lines. So we're gonna go up
thin, down thick. So I press a little
harder up soon. So here we started out a little light on the down
and I'm going to press a little bit and then press a little
bit and it's not much, this one is very flexible
and kind of really wet tip. It just depends on the
type of pen you find. But in general, on
some of these letters, you want this side to
be a little thicker. It's actually been a long time since I practiced handwriting. Thin up, thick, press
a little bit up. So we can actually kinda
go back and test that out. Up. Press. Go. Maybe right here, press. You get some shapes, have a nice quality to them. And I'll flip it over
to the chisel point. Just use the thin
enter into the chisel. Keep the ankle the same. With a chisel point. Just try to hold it
at the same angle. So you get some thick
lines going this way, but thin lines going this way. You could use a
little pressure on it to to try that with
the brush tip. I want to be light. Light, press, press
a little bit and up. So lightly on the way up. Press a little more
on the way down. And then you can get that
thick and thin style. Maybe even work a little faster. When you start getting
the hang of how, how much the press really thin. As far as the shapes go. Designer choice. So he called which loop and how, how big you want the
stems to come off. The sticks, the brush tip. It's good practice just to see what happens when
you press a little harder. You might think you
there backwards, back from his next page, or maybe even try a
different pen color. So on this one, I'm going
to lighten up the graphite. We can still see it lightly. And then we'll use
a little watercolor and kind of brush in
these letters, shapes. So I was just used the blue. This pen has water in it. So you can see the
water come out. So we'll get a
little bit of blue here and try the sic going down. It'll be light. Maybe
we can be less watery. You can get more
pigment on the brush. That's a little better.
Press a little bit. And then you can leave it wet and maybe
get some cool effects. Let's try the VIF. I'm getting a little bit of
the purple so it's darker. So lightly. Start by swirl lightly. Then press a little harder. Then lightly coming up. Press light. So I like adding that
extra swirl on there. And maybe we can always go back and fat and those
up a little bit. If you prefer. For that thick and thin style. You don't have to try to perfect that perfect stroke
every time you can draw it thin to start with. And then come in and fatten
them up a little bit. Just a couple more here. Squeeze little more
water, more pigment. Go with my swirly effect. Press on the z instead of looping it
right here where Max, I'm making it a sharp
corners to kinda tell the story that I'm
a Z in cursing. And the same here. You want to make sure
when you're doing a y, you get both sides high. Then when you do a Z, the
bottom is not so high. Fare man, with that. And then
we'll write some phrases. Here's a little
snippet of a poem, or my daughter wrote
for Christmas. Finger, silly tune. Just do it right. Silly tune. Look up at the moon. What time? We were at a party. And there's like a
handwriting analysis person as entertainment. And you wrote down
a couple of things, your signature, and a
couple of sentences, and then they analyze it. They told me because
when I write fast, I don't touch the line. So they tell me the analysis. The analyst says, you
have a hard time being grounded because you're always writing off the line like
if I just wrote this real fast, senior silly song. Look up at the moon. Moon. So you see, I'm not touching the line here. When you want to
do lettering for my invitations and sign work. Have a good a good layout going, maybe even consider this as a layout in the center
to my next line, we can mark a line for the halfway point as a guide
to take some time to play. Now we can leave that
out and we have a guide. Grounded here. Your layout pretty fast because cursor
is nice and readable. You just get your shapes nicely
slanted, looped together. And this one will just do
it with the fine tip pen. He could come in and thicken up the backside
little bit porcelain. Calligraphy style. Singer, silly to
look up at the moon. Take some time to play. Here, the whistle-blowing,
get up and get going, start another day. You just knock out the
pencil afterwards, which we use a permanent
and let it dry. Sometimes I smudge after. You're writing it
in practice much. Take some time to play
with these letters. Then I'll have downloadable
practice sheets with the cursive alphabet.
9. ROMAN style numbers: Numbers started off
with one, has no width. Although I do like to put the little hook on the top
to indicate that it's a one. It's different from the letter. I will consider a full box, but half size that we
can do the member to. Here. Sometimes I like to increase the flat on the top like that. Or you can do three rounded meet in the middle and maybe even the top half is
slightly smaller. For, Let's imagine
this whole square. And then we do have, now are for you want that upright stem to
be inside the edge. When you go out, maybe a little
more towards the bottom, then have it come
out and meet here. This way. It's standing up, solute, more balanced as opposed to going right up
against the box. And then a five in some of the reference material I
have on Roman letters. I like how the angle that
five back like that. And then we'll give
it a big loop around. You can also just draw
it straight down. So that's designer's choice. I would say, take my
number six down here. The same width here. I kinda go above the middle
line slightly with the loop, my seven, and then the seven doesn't go all
the way to the corner. I would go just inside the edge. This kind of gives a little more balance,
something to stand on. And then that's just
a figure eight. And the topic of the
eight can be slightly smaller than the nine is. Just flip the six over here and loop it around the
middle of the line. And now for a 0, consider an O, which was a full
size square meter, is 0, is more elliptical. That's how we tell
them to apart. And try to avoid ancients to
be kind of consistent here. Then we could do
some punctuation, like the dollar sign
is an S line down. You can do two
lines if you want. I think for easier to read, the single line tells the story. You percentage. Here's one that throws me off the ampersand comes up, loop. Kind of goes wide here. It's like a G, kind
of to me that, that confuses me
with a treble clef. Because they draw
a treble clefs a lot because I like
to do music charts. You can do asterix is
just the little star. Here's the at. And that's designer's choice. An apostrophe, exclamation
point, question mark. And that's also
designer's choice. So colon, semicolon, or is
it the other way around? Semi-colon, colon? And then left quotes, right quotes, and parentheses, which we can start to appear
with the parentheses. Parentheses. Parentheses. That's a good jumping off
point for our letters. In the Roman capital, not to be confused
with Roman numerals. So it's good to
know our numbers. And let's say you want
to make coffee side, I'm always making coffee signs. Wide letter for c. Not so wide for price here. We would like the handle
on the other side. So California coffee swirl. Allen.
10. Design A Logo Before Lunch: His art studio. I was wondering if I can get
a logo design before lunch. Sure. We could do up a few illustrations and send
them all group before lines. Oh, thank you so much. I'll call you later. Okay, bye for now. So how am I going to design
a logo before lunch? When we talk about how to
design a logo before lunch, there's so many
questions that go into that in our scenario. How are we going to come
up with an idea for our sharp or studio
sign before lunch. And there could be a logo. It could just be some kind of layout that we're gonna do on our six-by-six square or
eight by eight square. A scenario that had come
up for me in the past. Somebody I drew caricatures
for was working on maybe building and gas stations or something or up
and down the coast. And he wanted to come
up with an idea that had to do with the
coast and the ocean. So I filled up a page of
ideas of different shapes, little marks to indicate it. Maybe a road. And the ocean and
waves just started doodling different
swirls and ideas. The first exercise is just
fill a page with ideas. Then you take a
break and go back to it and see what
stands out to you. So I always encourage
sketch book journaling and doodling
different ideas. Because you never know
something could come up and be a funny idea to do an illustration or on
your next drawing gig. So we'll go back to our
trusty notebook pads are fictitious studio name. Mine is either raise art studio, guitar shop stick
figures with style. There's three now I'm
all over the place. Let's get down to one. Let's do raise our studio. So something I came across
once working within a box and taken your letters and just
use those inside the box. Bred out the letters
to fit in the box. Start doodling ideas. Maybe the outside
couldn't have paintbrush, a pencil, a ruler, and across the top a pen. Or you can stylize
the initials of big R. Just started doodling
ideas like so I have, Are they put the AS down
and I connect that to the, are not all going
to be great ideas, but you just get
the pencil moving. And I'm thinking
about how to display or make a mark around
some of these ideas, so-called designs work well too, or you can actually use arch
the letters over the top. Raise our studio on the bottom. This is something
that I was trying for a long time as an idea for. A little illustration of a hand holding a
pencil or a pen, and maybe the pen breaks out
over the top of the arch. You can work in a
square in circles. Stylize the letters somehow. Sometimes you need to
come up with vertical. We're just kinda work
with this word art. That's the vertical version. Then the client will go, well, I need a horizontal version two, you can put it all
in one string. Maybe choose a font style
on the computer that might be more suitable
than a hand-drawn style. But for this class we're
going to hand paint or sign. So I'll stick with like the Roman and the Gothic
style in here again, we can just use a paintbrush and a pencil to go
across the bottom. So now we have a vertical. Maybe instead of
having all four costs, which seemed kinda busy, maybe it is just the pencil on the top and a paintbrush
on the bottom. So that's kinda cool. And in Iraq, so this will later, but just keep filling
up a page with ideas. There's a few things
coming along. I can like this one. This one. Just a few things that
get the ideas flowing. Then I started doodling. These weird little shapes here, when it comes to logo design, maybe that's the thing. It's just some
little simple shapes that are accompanied
with your name. And then eventually they
get to recognize that this shape means your brand
and your company name. So these little ideas, I'm kinda struggling with the S. And then I see this little part. And I kinda like just that. These three little
shapes sort of indicate are an R and an a
kind of stylized. Like this could be
the r's sticking out. So now there's, there's
like these little, these little shapes that
sort of go together. This could be res art, also designing logos
and brand marks. What are they look like just
in black and white, I think, like little felt pen and
just scribble in some of the ideas that I like triangles and I like arch
shapes and angles. That's kind of an
interesting mark. And maybe we could riff on that idea and change the sizes. Maybe it's not quite
as tall because this is rectangular and I want
to get it into a square. Maybe this shape a
little bit bigger. Then these are like a big
and a medium and a small. This goes a little farther down. And then those triangles
can be smaller. So we have big,
medium, small shape. Something at Disney
animator always told me to look out for
when you're designing. You want to work in
big, medium and small. That way everything doesn't
look so even get a nice arch. And then a small triangle. I kinda like that as a mark. Here's what we could do
with that with this one. Later. I'll go back to the
sketch book and a couple of days and go
What was I thinking? So I've circled the
one my eye that I like and then go
to a fresh page. Don't wanna do that same mark. A little bigger. We're
going to work in a square. Refer back-and-forth. And what about halfway across with the big line,
with the big seat? Sort of a parallelogram. Then the friendly the
curvy shape was a little like two-thirds of
the way. Curvy shape. This is my personal preference. Out of all these ideas, I'm going to run with this one. Should also read with this one, which is pretty straightforward
for a sign board. But here's a little logo. And then for my sign board, we can just do a circle with, it's almost like a
badge or a plaque. We use our cursive style, which is, you know, this is how I would sign my name anyway. And then we'll do
kind of a stylized, almost like Art Deco style
letters on the bottom. And maybe this is like,
we do it in color, will do like a little
watercolor wash for the circle and
then ink in this part. Then up in the corner. Put her little symbol here. These three shapes. And then you put
that in the corner, or it could be here in
the middle of the header. Then eventually, I keep
putting this out there. You keep marketing.
That's what they do to us on television and print, newspapers and the internet now is I just keeps
throwing things out there and look at all of
these logos and icons that you can
look at it once and recognize that all of the social media icons like this is pretty
cool right here. And that's logo design. Before length, how long
have I been spending on it? This video is only going
to be a few minutes long, but I've been out here
for about a half-hour, 40 minutes, get the
pencil moving and you come up with a couple
of cool things to run with. Now, if you were doing
something for a client, come up with three or four
different ones and send them. I'll send them this
idea, this idea, this idea, maybe one
more and send them for, and then the client goes, Oh, I like this one a lot
or I like these two. Can you combine them? And
that's kinda how it goes. And then you eventually get to a place where they
go, Great, Looks good. That's another topic
of discussion, is how to manage your
freelance clients. Because you can end up
with endless revisions and make yourself sad as
an artist because you keep redoing things
and they're never happy. Set of limitation of how
many revisions you get. Beyond that, it's X amount of dollars for
each new revision. And that usually gets
them to make a decision. There's the lettering class. Let's get to painting our sign. Now that we have an
idea to run with. Going with this one, with
our new little logo mark.
11. Class Project - Paint Your Sign: Now for the class
project from gonna make my sign board for the shop, have some poster
board or mat board. And I'll cut it to eight
inch by eight inch squared and then lay out
our sign design here. Clean it up a little sign, Leah, you definitely want to give
yourself a little bit of a margin on the outside here. And this, I'll use that
how to draw straight line? Typically, you run your finger along the edge and
you hold the pencil. You can measure if you want. This is about a
half inch, I guess. It's about three-quarters
of an inch. It's about right. It's
designer's choice of how big you want your margin. We're going to go
with the circle, kind of bad style with
our logo mark at the top. So you can use a compass to, if you have a compass for drawing guide a circle
guide, draw a circle. This is the little circles, a little smaller here. But you definitely want to have some pretty straight
lines for you letters. Even inside my margin, I'm still going to go
in and just a little more rough it in. There we go, That's
a little better. Will find the center. We made an eight inch board, so we've got forage
for the center. The center above my my
lines are, is about three. So it's right about here, the center of my circle. This can help you draw a circle. If you don't have like
accomplice or something, you just make four slices of pie here that kind of look
all the same size. And get your whole arm moving. You could draw a
nice circle shape. But he's my eraser and knock down some of the pencil lines. Clean it up that advance. I'll leave my construction
lines real life. This is where kneaded eraser
can come in handy to. This kneaded eraser came with
a big block in the package. I don't need that whole thing. I'm going to pinch off a bit. Now we have this. It's like
a little hoodie rubber. And this will really clean
up the edges nicely. But I'll go lightly so I
can still see my circle. I'll just use my ruler. We're going to angle the name just slightly, maybe
halfway between. Just to kinda give you an idea of where the letters
are going to go. And I also want to make sure I'm consistent with this
angle for my cursive. Appear at the top is R. We're going to
paint our little mark. Not real big, big,
medium and small. Just lightly shaded in
some cursive letters. And I might even stylized how
the letters flow together. We'll do some more
details on that later. Let's get a piece
of scratch paper before we mark up
the board kinda decided to do from here
how big that's gonna be. It's gonna be about that big. Within this area. Wherever I go start my letters, they're all spaced nicely using some of our
Roman capital ideas. Like maybe I started out art, maybe too big now I'm
squashed over to that side. So let's try again. I have
to be a little more narrow. Here's another way that
I'll center letters to. I'll just write
them and I'll count the space to 12345678910, halfway between here and here. So 12345, so somewhere around here that the S is actually
going to be in the middle. Not exactly, but just kinda
gives me a jumping off point. In order to try to fit all these letters and
give them a good style. Maybe they're more narrow. The S is a narrow group. The T is sort of
the medium group. D is wide. And o as wide. Sorry, I need to Stylize and squish these together
a little more. Always good to try to solve this before you commit
to your sign board. Leave a space here. So it's more,
they're going to be more tall and narrow space. So now we're getting
there. So we're breaking some of the rules from our Roman letters by
getting a little more squished together so we can get these words all
in that one line. Okay, Kind, kind of like that. Then I keep that
from my reference. And I can see the top of my line is going to be
here in the bottom here. Here's my center space that'll fit in all the lines. This can be slightly
a wider letter, marrow, slightly wider. Okay. I'm kind of
liking that layout and here's something assigned
painters tip that I, that my dad taught me. And others sign painters too. It's sort of a
optical illusion to make your biggest round letters
like O's and G's and C's. That goes just a little bit above the top and bottom line. For some reason that optically balances it so they
don't look too small. Now we blocked it
in a little more. I've made the circle slightly bigger because
I would actually like it's gonna be kind
of a sunset design. And I would like that to sort of intersect into the
bottom line here. So here's where we're
going to use watercolor. This poster board has a
bit of a texture on it. If you want to use acrylic, or we could just
use colored pencil, whatever your medium
of choice is. In this medium, I'm gonna do a little wash for the sunset. And then build on top of that. You gotta get some art supplies. I use this little
watercolor cakes at the water brush pen. I get a little cup of water
and some paper towels to the water brush pen has water inside the barrel
and you give it a give it a little squeeze
to get some water. And I'm just going to wet down where my circle
is going to be. You can also use regular watercolor brush like this might be a little
easier to control. Maybe it's something
with a wider brush. It's your choice.
I have a class on watercolor painting to
watercolor and ink, cartoony. I'm going to go with orange. Get my water brush, ping, get some water in
there, squeeze it in. And just washing a
little orange sunset. Because I'm a big
fan of sunsets. More water color and splashing. Now I'm going to add
maybe a touch of yellow. Darker depth was the bottom. Slit that sort of flow. Round off my circle. More water. Sort of blend some
of this stuff out. Little more of the darker orange on the top and on the bottom. I'll even hit it with
the paper towel a little bit for some texture. We let that dry. Actually the top
is a little flat. When you lift that rain down. Debit up for some texture. Let's let that dry.
Okay, now we get some of the dark color for
the main lettering. This is squeeze and then
get a little color. Just paint it in carefully. I want to break
outside of the circle, will take a couple of passes here.
With this medium. Now I'm going to strengthen
up the art studio part. A little bit of doodle
designs with this ink dry, cleaning up some more of the
pencil marks on the outside. Then finding out if I hit it with the kneaded
eraser too soon, I will smudge the dryer. I'm working around it. You can use pencil marks up and you're squishing
it and clean it up. Actually kind of
cleans up through your eraser when
you need it for it. Mixes up whatever graphite
and pick up wont, rub off onto the paper. Up on the inside. Sometimes I like leaving some of the construction lines visible. It gives it the
hand-drawn quality to it. But I'm going to
stylize these little more with some thickness. On the left side. A little bit of cross hatching. Strengthen up the
letters a little. And it also gives it a bit
of a hand-drawn quality. But not too much. We don't want to run into each other and keep our spacing. Maybe thicken up that
loop of the honor. And this slightly this is a bit of the doodle
art coming into play. When you fill your
sketchbook with doodles. We'll be a little heavier on
this side than on the front, on the right side. And be sure to relax. You know, sometimes
when I'm drawing, I'm going to be pressing
super hard with this hand to hold it still
and I don't realize it. And then before you knew it, outcome my hands on this, try and relax and
just hold onto it. Don't have to squish it. I need to tell myself. Maybe just a little bit of
thickness on that side. I'm a little bit on
the front of the D. There I go. I'm pushing on my
left hand again. I'm not paying attention. Maybe this side isn't as thick but a little
bit of thickness. And I might add a
little color to this now with the, some watercolor, because let's use
the brush pen and some blue one I
want right there. Not too opaque, just
a bit of a wash. Knew some of the brush
pens have a fatter tip. I believe you can
even get like a set that has different
types of breast pins. I'll get a marker, an outline, this part and add a little more weight
on the bottom of it. We can define this shape. A little. Note in here. I want to pay attention to where it's
going to cross over. This loop of the Y
is going in front. I'm going to establish that now. And then that goes underneath. I put a little more weight
right in here where it crosses over the
stick of the R. And now this will go under the R. Stop there and put a little more weight
right into there. And now let's get back to it. I'll even turn this way. As my hand pulls it, I can get this shape. Pull in a little easier. Then go under and over a
little more of a wheat, just a little darker line. And then connect it. Keep it loose in here and
get thicker up here. Here's where I will pollute
more wheat right under here. Give it a bit of a shadow, helps it pop a little more. We'll also do it down here. Just a bit of a shadow. It's coming down this way. So I'm going to make
my lines heavier. Just underneath here. Not much, I'm not going
to exaggerate it. If you ever do drop shadows on, unlike Photoshop or something, you can do the distance and you put the shadow
on farther away. But I'm just doing it
to define the letter and just give it a little
more weight onto the surface. And it helps it
pop a little more.
13. Chalkboard Sign: For our boards sign is fill up the sketchbook
with a few thumbnail ideas. Of course, I worked
with coffee shop. I started a couple
of ideas and then I changed my mind and then I latched onto something
that I kind of like sort of flowed into this design with a coffee
cup on Safe Board. Use regular chalkboard, chalk did sharpening a
pencil sharp mirror. So you can get some
points for sketching with you some pastel colors. Prime your chalkboard with
some white and dusted off, especially if it's a
neutral chalkboard. Sketch it out with
your pointed chalk. Drawing your shapes carefully. Then you can strengthen
the rough with the colors and press a little harder to get good coverage. Just keep building it. The next we'll go in with a charcoal pencil is the
regular black charcoal pencil. To add some detail. A little bit of
shadow is dark in the background
behind the letters that will help them
pop a little more. Clear. We go the little alert dude's
got his cup of coffee and he's ready for
the next class.
14. Dry Erase Board Sign: So now we're gonna make
a dry erase board sign, make sure you clean it off. You can get some of
that spray cleaner for dry erase boards. I have a little set
with an eraser on it. I drew up a thumbnail
in my sketchbook, more coffee, or use a kind of a dry marker
for the layout. That way it's not too dark, but you can still see
where you're headed. And then you go in with a darker markers and
finish up redesigning, keep your whole arm swing in for these big shapes
on a big surface. Simple. But it's all about
laying it out first and then drawing it carefully.
15. Final Thoughts: Let's do this and then we'll have a couple of coffee later. Thanks for watching hand
lettering essentials. Just remember to keep
that pencil moving. Drawing your letters carefully
and share your projects. Look to class. We'd love to see what you're working on it. And that's it for hand
lettering essentials. I'll stick around for
some of my other courses. Stick figures with style, cover, some cartooning basics. Watercolor and ink, cartooning
and pastel, cat portraits. And we'll see you
on skills here. Thanks again. Stick around for some more
classes from my skill Chair. Thanks for watching hand
lettering essentials. Just remember to keep
that pencil moving.
Ray Hofstedt, Keep That Pencil Moving
