Transcripts
1. Intro to Beautiful Lettering in Procreate [trailer]: I was about eight years old and I was home from school for summer break, and I was watching a morning talk show with my mom. There was this lady on it, and she claimed that she could tell what type of personality you had just by looking at your handwriting. That was mind-blowing to me. I didn't want anyone to know who I was just by looking at my handwriting. At that moment, I decided I'm just going to change my handwriting all the time so it'll take way more effort for someone to figure me out. That's what I did. Fast forward roughly 20 years later, and I'm now creating different styles of hand-lettered fonts, custom lettering, teaching hand lettering and incorporating it into graphic design tutorial projects. What began as a way to protect the depth of my character, turn unexpectedly into a way of practicing exactly what that lady knew how to do. It was evaluating lettering and seeing the emotive qualities it had, how the letters communicate, how impactful the message you can make with different letterforms, the shapes, the styles, the embellishments, all of it together creates that personality. In this course, I'm sharing my best tips and methods for creating unique to you modern script lettering styles. We start with beginner friendly foundations, all the rules you need to know to create standard script letterforms. Then we'll talk about how to strategically break those rules to create distinctive and unique, beautiful new styles based on your own lettering goals through fun projects. How do you want your lettering to feel? What emotions do you want others to have when they see your lettering? What kind of statements do you want to make with your lettering styles? All of that and more can be accomplished with the tips and methods shared throughout this course. In the course, we cover all the crucial foundations, including the rhythm exercise, core strokes, and simple script practice. Then we jump into three ways to strategically break those foundations, including bounce lettering, shifting weights, and the different types of embellishments plus when and how to use them. Your enrollment includes two custom color dynamic practice lettering brushes, a lettering guide brush, and an italic pattern brush, so you can apply common italics just by painting them in. For the three-letter and characteristics we cover, I've also included cheatsheets, so you'll have those references available whenever you need them. To practice your lettering and lettering foundations, I've included a core strokes practice sheet and a simple script practice pack, which include all lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and practice words as a Procreate layered file. We complete three fun projects to reinforce the lessons, and project cards with each assignment are included as Procreate files. Finally, a color swatch file is included, so you can follow along with each lesson exactly. To successfully complete this course, you'll need a pressure-sensitive iPad, a compatible stylus, and the Procreate app. If you love hand lettering but are either unsure how to get started or what to do to create unique modern script lettering styles that don't look like everything else out there, then this course was made for you. Hit enroll and begin creating your own beautiful lettering in Procreate.
2. Course Overview: Welcome to the course. I'm so excited you're
here and can't wait to share a bunch
of my methods and processes to creating original and distinctive
hand lettering styles. In this video, I'm
going to give you a brief overview of what
you can expect to learn. We'll start off with
lettering foundations. It's important to
understand and to know the rules surrounding
traditional script lettering, that way we can break
those rules later on. We will cover the
rhythm exercise which is a great
warm-up exercise to get your down-strokes and
upstroke weights consistent based on pressure as well as the angles of your exit stems, which we will discuss all
of that in that module. We'll then move on
to our core strokes, the six main strokes that make up nearly
every letter form, and then we'll finish off
our lettering foundations with some simple script practice
that include lowercase, uppercase numbers,
and practice words. Once our lettering
foundations are complete we'll move
on to breaking those rules and adding personality and we will
do it all strategically, intentionally we'll have a
really good game plan in mind. Once we get started,
we can begin exploring all the
different ways that we can integrate these methods into our own lettering to
create unique styles. The first one will be bound
lettering which we will talk about all the basics
of bounds lettering, how to create extra energy with your letter
fonts by dipping certain letters above
and below the baseline. Next, we will discuss
shifting weights. Traditionally, all of your
downstrokes are heavyweight, all of your upstrokes
are lightweight, but with shifting weights
we're going to change that dynamic and see how it
influences personality. We'll finish everything off by exploring all the
different types of embellishments
that we can add to our lettering to
enhance its message. We have three class projects
to reinforce class lessons, and they alter traditional
thinking a little bit. We'll be lettering words
or phrases that you may not consider lettering
or think to letter, so it will keep the focus
directly on the method. It will really help
those methods to stick whenever you want to explore
different styles later on. Each project will include
a sample assignment. You can see an example of the embellishment project
card over on the right. You'll see that there's an assignment listed
on every card. There's some sample text. You can use any texts that
you would like or you could also pull from the example
text for your project. There will be a walkthrough
demo of me completing each project so you'll see my process from start to finish. I will complete it
right along with you. You can watch how I
do it and then do it yourself or you can
follow right along. This project card is provided as a Procreate file and I letter write in the
white-space on that card, so I have all the
information present and then I letter write on top, and it's a square format, so it's easily shareable if you'd like to do that as well. This course was created with
hand lettering beginners as well as procreate
beginners in mind. But if anything is ever unclear with procreate as our program, all the tools and processes
used within this course are shown in greater detail within my procreate
for beginners course. You can go to my
Skillshare profile and watch it through there. I'm often asked which iPad accessories that
I use most often, and there's really
only three of them. I do use a screen protector. I use the Paperlike
screen protector. I've been using one for over
two years now. I love it. It definitely feels like paper. I would never go to glass now having experienced
Paperlike. It just gives me more of that
traditional feel where I don't realize I'm actually drawing on a screen and
I really love that. There are a lot of Paperlike rip-offs out there
that will wear the nib on your Apple Pencil down so just beware with that. If you get a ripoff brand, you can expect to have to purchase new nibs for
your Apple pencil. But I have not had any issues with the Paperlike
with my nip wearing, it still looks brand new for me. It is a little price here, but in my mind, it's
always been worth it because you don't have to
worry about replacing nibs. I use an Apple Pencil grip which you'll see
in all the videos. It just gives me a
little extra cushion and support for my fingers. It makes a massive difference when you're drawing for
a really long time. I didn't think it would
be so impactful to me but once I started
using it, I never stopped. You do have to slide it off
of your pencil to charge. But there's just a little
bit of tension there. It's just a silicone grip. It's become such a part of my process now when I'm charging that I don't
even think about it. I just pull it off,
charge my pencil, set the grip right on top of
my iPad while it's charging, and then put it back on as
soon as I'm ready to go again. Then finally, you never
see this on screen, but when I'm working at my
desktop or my laptop computer, I do have the nimble stand and
I just pop my Apple pencil in there and it
does fit in there whether the grip is on or off. I really like having
that separate from all of my other writing
utensils on my desk. This entire course was recorded using a fifth-generation
iPad Pro. I have a 256 gig,
12.9 inch iPad, and I'm using Procreate
version 5.1.8. You'll want to be on at least that in order to follow along. You do not need the same type of iPad in
order to complete the class, you really just need an iPad that supports
pressure sensitivity. There's an entire list at
every-tuesday.com/ipads. If you have any iPads on that
list you'll be good to go. I recommend using
an Apple pencil. You do need a compatible
pressure-sensitive stylus. The Apple Pencil
is by far the most reliable because third-party
stylist says that, I've just heard too many stories about them not working properly. To save time and money the Apple pencil is the only
stylus that I recommend. We do have a hashtag
for this class. If you create anything from this class and post
it on social media, I'd be so grateful if
you use the hashtag, HeyBeautifulLettering
and please tag me, my handle is everyTuesday. That way I can check it out
and also send it some love. That is a quick overview
of everything we're about to jump into so
let's get started.
3. Bonuses Location + Install Instructions: In this video, I'm going to show you where you can locate and how to install all the bonuses that are related to this class. First, you want to go to the URL every-tuesday.com/bl for beautiful lettering, and when you put that in you will arrive on a page that looks like this. It's password-protected because this is reserved just for Skillshare students, so please do not share this with anybody. It's because your Skillshare member that this is my gift to you. So where you see password, you're going to tap on it and it's going to be all caps. So make sure your Caps Lock is on and you're just going to type out SKILLSHARE, all one word, and then hit "Go". This will open up, and you can see we've got a filter up here, so if you only want to download a few things to begin with, you can just filter. Like if all you want are brushes, just tap on "Brushes" and you'll see the brushes filtering all. This is everything that was included as bonuses for your enrollment in this class. I'm going to take you through the different types of downloads and how to get them into Procreate. I do want to mention that I'm using the Google Chrome browser. Safari changes a lot. Whenever they do a change, it usually affects how you download and install items. Google Chrome has always been really reliable with Procreate downloads in the past. That's the one that I recommend and that's the one I'm using for the example here. If you're in Google Chrome and you get to this part, let's first download our brushes, and all of these are brushes, so they're going to show up in the same place. So tap on that and then you're going to tap on the little download icon and it'll look like nothing happened, but it's actually right down here at the very bottom. Hit "Download" and then hit "Open in" and then Procreate should show up right here. If it doesn't, you'll want to hit "More", the three dots over here and then toggle down until you find it and then you can select "Procreate" and it'll import it in. Then when you're back in Procreate, you're just going to tap on brush, if you've installed a brush. There'll be a category in your brush library called imported. Just make sure that's selected, and it'll show up at the very, very top of the imported category and then you can start using that brush right away. That'll work the same for all of the brushes that are pre-downloaded. This first four, those are all brushes and they'll show up in your imported category and you'll be able to start using them right away. The next type of download that I've included are practice sheets. I've given you two types of practice sheets. There's the core strokes and the simple script practice sheets. Let's download the simple script. I'm going to tap on the download and then tap on the icon. Then down here, you'll see the name of it and then tap on "Download" tap on "Open in" and choose "Procreate." It'll import it in and it'll look like nothing happened. But you need to go to your gallery and it'll show up right here at the very top of your gallery. Then you can open it up and you'll be ready to use it for that lesson in the class. I'm going to head back to Chrome. The next type of download I've given you are cheat sheets. There are cheat sheets for the main chapters in the class and let's download the embellishments cheat sheet. So what you're going to do is tap on it, download it. These ones are JPEG, so they're going to open automatically within the browser and if you want to save them to your camera roll, so you can reference them later, you just want to tap and hold down on the image until it responds to your finger and then just hit "Save Image" and that will save it to your camera roll so it's there for whatever you need. You will need to hit the back button after you do this to return back to your freebies. That'll be for any JPEG downloads, which are the cheat sheets right here, those are the only JPEGs. Then the next type are Project cards. Project cards are Procreate files, so they're going to install the exact same way that we just installed the simple script file. You're going to download it down here, "Open in", Procreate, and then it'll show up in your gallery view. The last freebie is a set of swatches. What we're going to do, tap on the layer thumbnail, tap on the Download icon. It's going to show up down here. Download, Open in, Procreate. To locate those swatches, you're going to tap on your color dot. Go to Palettes right here, and go all the way down to the bottom of all of your palettes. I have a lot right here and that's where they're going to be. If you want to reposition them, you just tap and hold, and then you can drag them up through your palettes if you want to put them somewhere else within your palettes. So you can reorganize pallets. But if you have a lot of pallets, it could take forever. All right. I'm just going to drop it here. That covers all the different types of bonuses. Just remember, you can always filter them up here if there's something specific you want to download or you're looking for at any point in time.
4. Rhythm Exercise: Welcome to the Foundations module. In this module, we will be talking about all the basics with lettering. It's really important we understand the basics and the traditional roles that way we can break them later on and adapt things to create our own styles and infuse that personality. Even though this is the less exciting part of the class, it's still imperative to understand and to recognize all of these roles before moving on to change the roles and adapt them to fit your own style. The first exercise that I want to do to get us warmed up before we really dive into our core strokes and our practice exercises, is to do something that I call the rhythm exercise. This really helps my hand to get warmed up, and in the mood to create really beautiful lettering. I've got some really simple movements that you can do and that warms up your hand. It starts creating muscle memory so you'll get more consistent strokes. Your weight will be more consistent, and all of your forms will have consistency too. A really good way to begin this is by utilizing our lettering guides. If you open up the lettering guides, I'm just going to use the standard guide right here. You can paint as many of these in it as you would like. I'm just going to paint a few of them to get us started. I think I'll paint like three of these and I need these brushes, so if you accidentally lift up your stylus and you put it back down again, it's going to pick up where you left off. Don't worry if you picked up your stylus by mistake. Let's just throw a fourth one in down here just in case we need it. You want to make sure that your canvas is straight when you're doing this that way, nothing ends up being at an angle. Next, we're going to put in some italic guides. I'm going to create a brand new layer. Come back to our lettering guides and down here there's italics, subtle italics, and vertical. I'm just going to choose italics for this exercise. I'm just going to paint this in, and once again make sure your canvas is upright when you're doing this. Once again, this brush was created, so if you pick up your stylus and you put it back down again, it's going to pick up where it left off. Now that we have our italics in here in our guides, now we can start our rhythm exercise. I'm going to create a brand new layer. I'm going to switch to a color that way we can easily see the difference in the weight of our strokes. I'm going to come down here. Let's choose the pink one from our palette, and I'm going to switch to the signature practice brush. If you naturally letter at more of an angle, you're not going to see the change in pressure as great. The more upright you hold your stylus, you'll see the weight change more significantly. If you're not seeing that weight change, take a look at how you're tilting the stylus. The first exercise, this is the easiest one to get warmed up. We're just going to letter in a bunch of u's. We're going to pay attention to where our attack lines are and you don't have to follow them perfectly in between if you don't want to. If you want them to be wider than they are just scale them up. If I come back to my layers and I select the layer with my italics, I can grab my cursor down here, just make sure uniform is selected, and I can make this a little bit bigger. Deselect, come back to my lettering layer, and I've got a little more space in between them. I mentioned this in the how to use these guide brushes video, but just to reinforce it, this is your baseline, this is your descender, this is your x-height, cap height, a-sender. Some people just use one line for the cap height and a-sender. I gave you both of them in case you want that flexibility. I use two lines right here. It's more standard and traditional typography to have two. I left two right there, but you're welcome to just use one if you want. Our baseline is where all of your letters will sit. If we have an a, it will sit like this, your x-height is the height of the lowercase x. There are a lot of letters that fit within this x-height. Then descenders, this line is going to tell you how low your descenders go. This very top line will show you how high your ascenders go, so any letters that extend beyond the x-height. Then this is the cap height, so this is where your capital letters are going to go. That's a quick rundown of our guides. Now that we understand the general makeup of our guides, let's do this rhythm exercise. For the rhythm exercise, you're going to just draw a bunch of u's. The u is an x-height letter. This is our baseline. Lots of pressure, light pressure, lots of pressure, light pressure, lots of pressure, light pressure. The goal of this exercise is once you do this enough times, you'll notice you're going to get almost a pattern right here. You want consistent max weight. Whatever the yellow is showing, we want that size to be the same. Whatever the pink is showing right here, we want that size to be the same. We also want consistent angles. This angle of our upstroke, here's the downstroke, upstroke. Downstrokes are heavy pressure, upstrokes are light pressure. Wherever our downstrokes are we want them to be consistent in weight, upstrokes consistent in weight, downstrokes consistent in angle, upstrokes consistent in angle. I'm just drawing U's so keep doing this until you get that consistency going. Then we're going to start making things more difficult. We're going to do a u, and then we're going to go up into an i, u, i, u, i. Our pattern is breaking a little bit, we've added a new letter. Once that gets comfortable, now let's throw in an ascender, u, i, t, u, i. You can see I've put too much pressure right here. This was perfect, this one's got too much pressure because you can see it's yellow too far, whereas it should've changed to pink as soon as I shifted, and I did it again right here. I need to pay attention to lessening out my pressure when I'm coming up. What letter am I in? i, and right here this weight is less than this weight another thing to pay attention to. Now I'm coming up to a t, u, i. Once you get a few of these down that are correct we can move on to a bigger challenge. We have an ascender, two x-height letters. Now let's add in a descender. We'll do u, you don't have to do them in the same order. That's totally up to you what order you want to do them in. t, now we're going to do a y. You can see I'm keeping the same angle as my italics right here. Back to u, i, too much weight on the sub-stroke, there we go. That's what I want, I want that transition to happen right at the baseline, t, y and you can just keep going and going like this. Some other letters you could add on would be a w, an x. We could do an l without a loop, you do an l with a loop. We're going to get to all of these loops, though later. The main thing is getting this rhythm down. You're switching from heavyweight to lightweight. If I created a brand new layer and I copied this angle, I'm just tracing over my angles that I did before. I move these over, do they all look the same? Do they all look like they're at the same angle? They look pretty close. This one could be a little bit better. But for the most part, they look like they're at the same angle. That can be one of the trickiest things to do, but once you have that down, all of your lettering will start becoming more and more consistent. Whenever your lettering is feeling a little out of whack or something just doesn't seem quite right, do a few of these rhythm exercises, and you will see a noticeable change. In the next video, we're going to get into the core strokes of lettering that make up most letters and then we'll be all set to complete some practice sheets.
5. Core Strokes: In this video we're going to talk about core lettering strokes, how to practice them and how to get ready to begin integrating them within lettering. This file, when you open it up, this is what it will look like, this is your title page, just uncheck the visibility of the title page and you'll see all these core strokes which we're going to go through together. If you toggle down this group where core strokes is, you can see there's a layer labeled use this layer, so tap on that and then you can change it to whatever color you would like. I'm going to switch to this teal color so we can see some changes in color really obviously, because we're going to continue using the signature practice brush for this. We can practice our upstroke, so you're just going to go straight up, up on a curve, up at an angle and you can do this over and over again. Downstroke max pressure, max pressure, max pressure. You'll want to make sure that you're getting consistent weight here. So if you completed the rhythm exercise in the previous video, your hand is already warmed up and you're ready to go with these. These are some letters that these would be integrated in. They're integrated in basically every letter because they're upstrokes and downstrokes, so we can practice changing the weight. With an M, you're going to go light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure, heavy pressure. Try and complete it. If you want to challenge yourself, just try and complete it in one stroke instead of breaking them up, instead of going like one stroke down. There's nothing wrong with doing this either. But as an added challenge, you can try completing them all. That way you're doing multiple pressure shifts within one motion. Our x is going to be light pressure, heavy pressure, uppercase a, light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure across. Moving on, our overturn you see this very commonly in letters like lowercase n, m, h. Let's practice this, you're going to go light pressure and transition to heavy pressure right at the top. You want to make sure that you're maintaining that heavy pressure all the way down. You can see that mine, if I turn off my core strokes layer, mine change down here. This isn't what we want, we want this to be consistent. This weight, once it shifts to heavyweight, we want it to go all the way down. We want this to be a smooth transition, which is why we see this gradient right here. This is a nice transition, it's not abrupt, it's not like going like light pressure, like this, we don't want this, we want this nice gradient happening. But once it changes, we want to keep that nice heavyweight all the way through the full stroke, so I'm going to do that one again. I make sure I'm on the right layer. Light pressure, heavy pressure. Light pressure transition, heavy pressure. One more time and there we go. If we turn that off, we can compare. This one is a little thicker than the other two, so just something to be aware of and that's what the rhythm exercise is for, it's getting that consistency down. But these two are nearly identical and that's what we want. Turn that back on and now we can practice our overturn strokes. So, heavy pressure, light pressure, heavy pressure. You can see we've got a nice transition from heavy to light and then light to heavy. Same thing with the M. This one's a little bit more of a challenge because we have to keep it going and we want to make sure that things are consistent. I ended a little wider than my middle, so let's try that again. That looks good. I've got a nice transition that's happening in a very similar place. This one is down just slightly from this one, so that's the only thing that I can really see, but they're pretty similar. Where that transitions happening here, I want it to happen in the same place as this stroke and then we've got our h. Ascender, transitioning back down to the baseline. For our underturn, same thing, different direction. Start with heavy and then transition to light at the baseline. Same rules apply, we're just transitioning in a different place. Let's stop this one right at the x-height. For practice, let's do our u, which should be really familiar now. I'll go from heavy to light and then I'll pick up and then come back down to finish it off for my descender. You'll want to make that transition as soon as you hit the descender line right here. Take your time with these because these are the rules that we're going to be breaking later, so we need to understand these thoroughly and get some good practicing before we can break them and adapt them for our own styles. For the t, heavy pressure and then light pressure right there. So that's why we did this one and then bring it across. Right here with the w, it's really clear to see where the transition is happening and it looks like it's happening in the same place. So that's good, we want that. The next one is the compound curve. This is seen in letters like y, n and x. It's going to go light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure. Light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure. You can see that this one went from the baseline to our cap height, baseline to our x-height and then x-height to our x-height. We've got some different variations here and now we can put it into practice. For our y, just make sure you're creating that transition in the right place, right at the lines. Bring it down and around. The next one is the oval and the biggest mistake that most people make with the oval is they start heavy or they start mid pressure and when they go to close it, you have to match that precise mid pressure, which can be really tricky. But if you start with no pressure, transitioning into heavy pressure and then transition back to no pressure, you can close it up because this minimum amount of pressure will be the same and because you just know that you're hardly touching the screen instead of some kind of middle pressure area, just make sure that you're transitioning in the right areas. This one can be one of the trickier ones, but it's used in a lot of places and typography. Let's put it into play. Here's a lowercase o, lowercase a, start light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure and then we've got an underturn going from heavy pressure to light pressure. Light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure. We got two left. The next one is the ascending loop, so we're starting right in the middle with light pressure upstroke, transitioning to heavy pressure downstroke. These are loops that I was talking about in the rhythm exercise. It's all about paying attention where that transition happens and making it nice and smooth, which is why a color dynamic brush works really well right here because you get a really pretty gradient. The more vibrant your brush is, the more saturated color differences you're going to see. It's really going to stand out. So I'd suggest vibrant colors over muted colors for this exercise. For our d, we've got our oval, we're going to start light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure and then we move in to our ascending loop. We're going to come up light pressure and then transition to heavy pressure and then come back up with light pressure. Light pressure transition then I always pick up light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure. This is our compound curve, that part of the h. Then here's an l, fancy l. Our descending loop is basically the same thing, it's just flipped. We're going to start with heavy pressure and transition and finish into light pressure. It's all about making that transition in recognizing how much pressure you're putting on the screen and trying to match your greatest pressure and your lightest pressure. Whenever you have instances of high pressure and light pressure, knowing how hard you need to touch the screen when you're doing that and then being able to switch from one to the other, that's the tricky part. That's the part that needs to get practice the most and just pay attention to those gradients and where they're happening. For practice, we've got lowercase f, lowercase j, and lowercase g, we've got our oval and then our descending loop. If you've followed along and went through these exercises with me, you probably recognize which ones were trickier for you than others, so just spend a little extra time. All you have to do is create a brand new layer and turn off the visibility of the layer that you landed on and you're ready to go again. You can do it over and over and over again. You have limitless opportunity to practice because we're in procreate, we're not wasting any supplies, we're not wasting any paper and you get the benefit of having a color dynamic brush, so you can really see those transitions super well. Practices get the hang of them. Look at where those transition areas are, compare your heaviest weight to the heaviest weight on other letters and other strokes. Same thing with your lightest weight. Make sure that they're consistent and you're putting them in the right places. So in the next video, we're going to include these within some practice lettering.
6. Simple Script Practice: Now, that you've had some practice with the rhythm exercise and the core strokes, let's move on to some simple script practice. This file is very similar to the core strokes file. If you open up your layers, you'll see a title page. Just uncheck the visibility of that title page. You'll see that the guidelines are already here for you. Then there's three different categories. We've got uppercase, lowercase, and numbers, and then I've also included some practice words. If we try out our lowercase first, turn on the visibility of that group, toggle it down. Just hit this little arrow to toggle it down and you'll see that we have a use this layer, a black layer, and a color layer. If you want to challenge yourself by not seeing where the heaviest and lightest strokes are color-wise, then just use the black layer. If it's helpful to see that in color, just turn off the visibility of the black layer, and you'll be able to see those colors. Then make sure that Use This Layer is selected because that's the one that you're going to put your lettering on. You don't want to accidentally put your lettering on one of the base layers. You can reduce the opacity by hitting the little n and dragging it over if you want its appearance reduced a little bit so then you can see your lettering on top of it a bit better. I tend to like an opacity between 30 and 50 percent. It's just a lot easier to see the lettering you place on top of it that way and then you can still see the shifts in color underneath it. Let me up this just a little bit so you can see it better on screen. I'm going to come up to 45 percent. I've got Use This Layer selected. I'm going to switch my color this time to the pink and I'm going to make it a little more saturated. I'm just going to bring it up here. It's really obvious. I'm going to continue using the signature practice brush, the same brush that we used for our rhythm exercise and our practice session with core strokes. I'm going to come over here and you can see we start with light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure. The size of my brush is right about eight percent. For this, we'll do light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure. We want to make sure the thickness here is matching the thickness here. Same with our upstroke pressure. We can come around and continue doing all of your letters this way and you'll notice right away where the core strokes are that we're using. Moving on to our d. Light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure, light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure. This is also a good exercise for seeing where these letters hit along our guidelines. I added an entry stem on to this g, so light pressure here and then you'll go light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure and here's our descending loop. Then we move right into an ascending loop with our h and then a compound curve. The h is really the ideal letter to combine the ascending loop to the compound curve. Entry stem to the i, downstroke, upstroke, dot. I'll speed up the video and complete this so you can see the motions for each one. Moving on to the numbers, very similar to what we've already practiced with our letters. A zero, for example, is the same shape as an O. Start light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure, and close it. A one, just pay attention to those colors shifts. It's an upstroke and then a downstroke. We just want to make sure that that weight stays consistent throughout the entire stroke. That completes our lowercase and numbers. We can toggle this up, turn off the visibility. Let's move onto our uppercase. Toggle on the visibility. Tap on the arrow. We're going to turn off the visibility of the black layer and hit the little n on the color layer and reduce the opacity down to about 45 percent. Then tap on "Use This Layer" to complete all of your lettering. I'll switch to a different color for this one. I will go to blue and make this saturated again. I'm just moving it up into the right just a little bit. There's a lot of similar core strokes here as our lowercase as you might imagine. I'll speed up the video and you can just see the different motions that I do for each letter. [MUSIC] Those are our uppercase letters. Let's finish everything off with some practice words so we can put all of this together instead of just drawing letters independently. I'm going to toggle this up, turn off the groups visibility by unchecking it. Now we're going to check the visibility for practice words, toggle it down, turn off the black layer, and on the color layer, reduce the opacity down to 45 percent, just like we've been doing. Make sure Use This Layer is selected. I'm going to choose a different color for this one. I'm going to grab this pine green and move this just a little closer to the upper right for extra vibrancy. Now we can write some actual words using the exact same style that we just practiced because our hand is really nice and warmed up now. [MUSIC] Starting to feel like this color might not be the best choice here because it's a little too close. I'm going to change this just a little bit. I'm going to move this more towards my oranges to get a different color coming out of here. [MUSIC] I'm going to make this even more different. I'm coming right into the reds here. There we go. I'm just looking for a little more contrast than I had. [MUSIC] If it would be more helpful to have some italic guides in here along with the regular guideline, feel free to put that in. All you have to do is paint it in and you can move it around to get it to the angle that you'd like. [MUSIC] There we go. You just want to keep practicing this over and over again. The more you practice, the more you'll pick up on little areas that maybe you struggled with a bit, and just focus your attention on those areas when you're practicing. You get them down, you get nice and uncomfortable, and then you're well-prepared to begin changing things to create new unique styles.
7. Different Ways to Practice: We just finished going through the simple script practice sheets. Before moving on to our breaking the rules module, I want to share a tip for another way you can practice these. Because maybe tracing them just isn't enough for you to then translate it over to writing it yourself when you don't have lettering that's underneath that you're just writing on top of. I want to show you how you can use practice sheets, in a way where you can start writing on your own without feeling insecure once you don't have lettering underneath to trace over anymore. I'm going to switch back up to the lowercase and numbers. I'm going to turn off the version that I lettered on top of, and create a brand new layer right above it. What I'm going to do is, right here, you can see there's a fair amount of space between each letter, you can first trace over the letter. Then you can write right next to the letter so you can reference the letter in close proximity to your own practice. Then what you can do is turn off the layer completely. You can even turn off what you just practiced, and create a brand new layer. Attempt to remember what you did from scratch. Then you can turn it back on again, and you can compare. I can move this over. Here we can see up close of a match it is. For this one, the counter of my a, which is the negative space right here, is a little wider than on my version, which is totally fine. You're adapting this, and you're making it your own. But if it doesn't quite feel right, this still feels right to me even though it doesn't match it perfectly because this one's a little wider. But if I'm happy with it, totally fine. Time to move on. If I do this b, for example, and I didn't look at it. I wrote it out, and something felt funky about it, I turn it back on. Now, I can see. I left off my upstroke right here. That's the part that I messed up on. I can erase it, create a brand new layer. I could trace over it again, and practice that way so I could get my trace on. I could have a version right next to it so I can reference it directly as I'm writing it on my own. Then I can turn everything off, even my test layers, and try again. Now, that it's fresh, now that my hand has just warmed up with it, now I can compare. Turn that back on. I even included an entry swash, which you don't have to do. But now I know because I went through that practice on top of it, next to it, without it. Those three steps are a really good way to advance your skills, and get comfortable really quickly to pickup different styles really fast. If you're feeling a little stuck by just tracing everything, and then you feel lost when you're on your own, do this exercise a few times, especially with turning them off. After you trace over, then right next to it, turn everything off, and try and do the entire alphabet. Because then you'll be nice and warmed up, and you'll be ready to move on to our next module, which starts in the next video with breaking the rules and adding personality. We're going to jump into some bounce lettering basics.
8. Bounce Lettering Basics: Welcome to the module where we break all the rules. Not really. We're going to follow the rules, but we're going to break some rules intentionally so things look consistent and very pro, and we're definitely going to add in a ton of personality. Everything in this module is all about developing your own style and learning how you can inject personality and style into anything you create. You don't have to be bound just by using the guidelines all the time. We're going to have a ton of fun breaking rules and developing your style, that is true to you and how you want it to be. For this first one, we're going to talk about bounce lettering. It's a little bit of sweet because I created the first bounce lettering class that existed back in 2016, and this is the first time I've revisited it. I've got brand new eyes since 2016, and I've really developed my style since then so I've got some tips that I have not shared anywhere before. What better place than right here to do it? What do I mean by bounce? If you are unfamiliar with bounce lettering, it basically means that all the letters feel like they're bouncing along, and they don't feel like they're all sitting on your baseline. Here is my guideline that I drew the sun. You can see that we've got letters that go like normally the bottom part of your U would definitely be touching the baseline and it's not here, same with the N. It's floating right in here where the x-height is. Your C is normal, but your E is floating a little bit and it's a little smaller too. That gives you the feeling that it's bouncing. But how do you do this where it's intentional, where it looks right, where it doesn't look forced? So many times I've seen pretty poor attempts at trying to bounce because you're thinking too much. You're not letting your hand guide you where it needs to go, with the way the letters naturally go. That's the key here. The letters are already telling you where they want to go. You should not be trying to force them in a different direction. I'm going to show you exactly what that means and I made you a cheat sheet for that too. This is what it looks like with bounce. Let me turn off the guideline, and this is what it looks like when your letters are at the party, but they are not dancing this is what they look like. Let me take the guideline away from these ones and you can just immediately see the difference, which one has more personality. It's important that it's still is readable. That is something you're always wanting to keep in mind. Right now we're just injecting personality and bouncing is a really really quick way to do that. Right below this video, you'll see that there's a cheat sheet that you can open up, download, print out however you would like. I'm going to open that up so we can talk about it. Here's the cheat sheet and it's got all of our letters. Don't worry about the style of the letters. This look is pretty standard for most letters. Obviously, everyone draws letters a little differently, but use this as a framework or a guideline. I'm going to share with you what I prefer when I'm creating that bounce. Uppercase. I hardly ever bounce uppercase. My personal recommendation would be, do not bounce your uppercase. You want to start off the reader with understanding what they're reading, and if you start confusing them right after the first letter, or the relationship the first two letters have, it can start creating readability concerns right away. My advice is don't bounce your uppers, but if you do bounce uppers, don't bounce anything with an X next to it because it's going to force it and it's just not going to look right. As a general rule, I usually look for letters that come down and would be completed after it hits right here, and then it naturally progresses upward. This would be a good candidate for bouncing. Any letters that come down and the letter is completed so you'll know what it looks like, and then it comes up this exit stem. This is called an exit stem right here. Once this comes up, then it enters into the next letter, so this is the natural progression of how this ends, versus the L, which it has to complete itself for you to know that it's an L. The only way it goes is up from here. It doesn't go down. If you were to force an L to be bounced, oh my gosh, I don't even know what this would look like. It's not going to be good. If I come around, and then I come way down and then up, if I'm just writing love, how weird is that? You don't want to do that. You don't want to bounce stuff like that. Let's try it. No matter how you look at it, even if you bounce these naturally, this sucker is going to look super weird. It's going to start looking like a different letter altogether. Don't bounce anything that naturally comes up and especially with this uppercase. Let's talk about where you do want to do some bouncing. This is where it all happens is in the lowercase. Like I talked about before, all of these letters when they come down, the letter is completed, we know what it is, and it naturally comes back up. I don't typically bounce with a b because this one, even though it's coming down, you have to close it before it comes back up. There are times when I'll do a b, but most of the time I don't. With any rule, there are always exceptions to the rule. A c is one of my big exceptions. I like bouncing a c when it's appropriate for the word that it's inside of. If there are a lot of letters that just don't feel right when they're bounced and I have a c that's right in the middle that can balance everything out, then I'll bounce the c. Because once I get down to here, I can tell that this is a c. If I'm writing the word "Cat", I can just bring this down lower, and then finish it off like this, and then I have a bounce. It's not super weird right here. I can even reduce the amount and it'll still look okay. It's still readable. I still know that says cat. C is one of my exceptions to that rule with coming down and going back up. D's are pretty good. I've got a list of my favorites over here. That's my general rule of thumb is where it comes down and up, those are the best candidates. This is your cheat sheet to find which ones work well. Letters like this where your case coming down at an angle instead of straight down, it's not as good of a candidate because then you've got to make it down here and then come back up here, and this feels really forced. Where you're creating this really weird negative space and you're creating a brand new shape with this negative space. That's why I don't recommend letters that come down at an angle. I like letters that come straight down. I do L's a lot, I do T's a lot. Right here I'm showing you, here are my favorites. That's usually what I stick to when I'm bouncing. I am going to create a brand new canvas. I'm just going to do the screen size canvas and we'll draw in some guidelines. I'm going to switch to black. I will grab just my standard guideline here, paint these in. One really easy way to use these guidelines, I'm going to make this darker so you can see it better. I'm just going to duplicate it and pinch it. You can select these and drag them down, and you can duplicate that then so you have two. Then you can move them however close together you want or however far apart if you don't want to paint them all. That's a really easy way to just copy them whenever you need more. I'm going to create a brand new layer. I'm going to grab the inky edge practice brush, and let's switch to this dark blue color. Let's write out a few words. I'm going to write the word "Back." We'll just write it normally here. According to our cheat sheet, the a and the c are really good candidates. I want to show you that there isn't just one way to bounce, so don't feel like there's a right or a wrong answer. There's definitely a wrong answer, but there are multiple right answers here. We know that the b is coming straight up. We're not going to bounce the b because it gets funky. I'm going to come down. My b is normal. Now, I can put in my a. Let's bounce the a. I'm going to come a little further down. Maybe my c doesn't quite rest on the baseline. Then I'm going to come right into the k and finish it off. That's one solution, but this still feels a little weird. Let's try again. Let's do a b. This is already coming up. Maybe I just come up a little more. You can see I'm not tipping down, I'm just extending this a little bit further, so now my a is not going to rest on the baseline. It's just going to be a little higher than it normally would feel. I don't have to exaggerate it like a crazy amount for it to be bounced. It's all about the little subtle decisions that you're making that are going to be the most impactful for a viewer. Maybe I come down like this. Now I'm bouncing quite a bit actually. I've got my a and my c. This is funky. We don't like that. Let's continue on. I like my b coming up a little higher, and now my a is going to sit right there, and maybe I make my c normal now. Then I can make my k. Really nice way to trick the eyes and to bounce without even having bounce, is just to add exaggeration to characteristics that are already present in your letters. For example, this downstroke of the k, I can just make this a little bit longer. Then all of a sudden it feels like it's bouncing because it goes further below the baseline than it normally would. I don't even have to adjust the main part of my k. This is just a line down. Your eye is still going to know that this is a k right here. That's a way to bounce the k without bouncing the k. Let's do another one of these. A and, maybe my c just comes above the x-height a little bit, and then come way down with a k. That feels like the most natural version of a bounce. All I did was keep my c a little taller, keep my a, a little taller, and extend my k. You can see I even kept my k. I shifted my whole baseline up right here, but it works. I've got consistency right here between the c and the k and you can see my exit stems. See this, exit stem. In this exit stem, they're angled the same. Just like we talked about with the rhythm exercise, we've got right here and right here, we need to get it with this a, and then that'll feel natural. Even this one is close to the angle. I need to fix it a little bit. But if this one were to come up right here, then it feels perfect. Let's do that down here. We're getting really close. Come down, up a little higher. Right now this feels weird right here because it's taller than my k. I'm seeing I've got a good angle here, a good angle here, here, and here. This is my closest one so far. Let's do it one more time, trying to follow guidelines a little more precisely. I've got my same angle here, here. This one's pretty close, that one's close, and that one's going to be different just naturally because it's an arc. Even this part of my B is pretty close to these ones too. That is definitely the best one out of here. If I draw myself some lines, you can see that I made myself a new guideline right here, but I have my B underneath it. Even though my baseline got shifted up a little bit, because my B is lower and naturally feels like it's bouncing more. The rhythm of these exit stems also gives it a lot of energy. I love that rhythm exercise where I will just constantly go like this. Then I've got my hand going in the right motion to create my bounce lettering. That rhythm exercise before you do bounce lettering can be super super helpful because your hand is already warmed up for that angle. Let's turn off those lines, and we can turn off our guidelines too. Let's look at where we started and where we ended up. This was our original lettering, no bouncing. Here's some force bouncing. Whenever you see something like this happening, you already know what's wrong with it. We don't have proper angles right here, and this scale is just out-of-control. Look at how big the scale is right now, compared to the c. We want similar scale. It just gets so distracting when you have a letter that's just gigantic compared to the rest. But that's why we practice, we adapt, we notice what needs to be changed. This got a little bit better scale-wise. We still saw that this was a problem. Came back through. This is getting a little tight. Everything felt like pretty smushed right here and the angles were also wrong, but it was improving. Then right here we talked about those angles a little bit more. We're just refining. By the time we came down here, we were super close on this one. The A was a little bit large. Then we had it right here. We talked about how the k didn't go all the way to the top, so we can match the ascender of the b because the b started looking too big then. We just matched them right here and now the scale feels comfortable, and all of our angles are correct. That's a quick demo of bounce lettering and the basics of it. In the next video we're going to practice. We're going to do more of these exercises with different words so you can get really comfortable with this so you'll know what you're looking for. As you're practicing, you will be able to tell right away what needs to get changed to make it look the most natural and the cleanest execution.
9. Bounce Lettering Practice: Part 1: In this video, we're just going to be practicing bounce lettering. We're going to do the same thing that we did as the last exercise in the previous video, and we're going to do a bunch of different words, so you can see a lot of different examples from different links of words, different letter combinations, so you'll be really confident when you go to practice all of this on your own. What I did is I used the exact same file as the last exercise where we made the guides on one layer and then I just duplicated them. I added another one to the bottom here, and then I just put them in a group and call them guides. I've got these right here. Three guides or you can just paint with your brush and then you can get as many as you want, and now I'm going to create a brand new layer. I'm going to continue using the inky edge practice brush for this and I'm using, let's use a different color and we're going to use this blue and we're going to start writing things out. When I am practicing, there's two things that I usually default to when I don't know what to write or I'm trying to come up with words to write. I'll go through the alphabet A through Z. I do this when I'm making fonts too. I go through the alphabet A through Z, and usually, I will either choose food, or I will choose cities or countries, locations, I guess. Let's do foods first and then we can do some locations maybe. We'll start with A and we'll just say apple, so here's regular Apple. This is all on the spot right now so you're going to see me figure this out in real time. I did not prepare for this before I hit record on this video, so we are really doing this together. I got Apple. I'm going to look for opportunities and this double p does not present a great opportunity but the l going into the e it's like my best opportunity here. I'm going to make a script version of the A. I'm going to make one of these a's and I'm loosely following the guidelines, so don't hate me if I go outside of the guides. I switch between a loop to l and sometimes I'll just draw a line for now and do one of these. Because I've got a lot of straight lines right here, I think a straight line is a better choice than a loop right here. That's probably what I would do for this one with bouncing because, if I try and do something right here, it's going to feel super force. Yes, I could push this p up a little higher but most of the time, less is more, honestly. If you go too crazy with bouncing, it just looks all over the place and ends up looking messy. It doesn't look as clean or as professional. Whenever you're not sure what to do, just go with the lesser option. Right here, just dipping the cell down, that's plenty, that's all that's needed. Let's go to B. First word, it's banana. This is without a bounce. Oh, this one's going to be a fun one, I can tell already. My a's and my n's are like the ideal letters to bounce. We don't want to go too crazy here, but we're definitely going to have fun with this one. I can even, instead of doing an uppercase, I'm going to do a lowercase one. Let's see. My instinct is to do something like this where I'm just bouncing. This is good. This is also like a rhythm exercise right here. I'm bouncing the a's more than the n's, and you can see I made all of my a's for the most part, this one's a little scrawny, but I made them very consistent, so they're all touching right around the same place. They're all above the regular baseline. This n should have come down a little bit further, so I can match my n's. That way, I've got something to anchor on the baseline along with the b, but all my a's are bouncing up. I get that rhythm without it getting out of control. You don't want something where you're going to go way up here and then come down, this is just nuts and people do, do this, so don't do this. Keeping this confined in this area, but consistent, we're making very intentional decisions here. We're not just going crazy because we can bounce. Yes, it's fun to do this stuff, but at the end of the day that readability really suffers, so we want everything to be tightened up and clean, but we're still injecting that personality, that fun, but everything we're doing is purposeful. That's the whole point of all of this. Make sure you're being consistent. We want consistent angles on all of these right here and we're going to keep a consistent x-height for the a's and their baselines. We want those to match, same thing with the n's and the b starts right here. We can do that again. The difference between these two, I bounced the a much higher than the n, and I actually prefer this one over here. I liked how they were much closer. These depths are consistent right here, so this is totally possible. But I liked that the scale, it was a little more condensed, meaning smushed together. This one's more expanded and I like the feeling of those that have more energy, like bananas, just the sound of it makes it feel like it should be a little bouncy and tighter. I'm just going to do it one more time. I've got the streamline on this one and I just naturally write a little bit faster, so that's why this n go all the way down, even though I was trying to make it go all the way down. I'm already noticing that this right here could be improved, but these a's are pretty close. I'm just eyeballing this here, and I've got this baseline and these ones should have come all the way down. But yeah, it's close. Let's move on to another word. Around to C, I'm going to do, instead of carrot, which is like my instinct, I'm going to do coconut. This is without the bounce, so let's see what we can do with the bounce. I know that my o-c connections, that isn't even my o-n right here. That's not a great place to do bounce, but my c is a good place, so I want to do it here, and my n is really good, and so is my u, so all of these ones are really good candidates. I'm going to make this one lowercase. You can see how I ended my n short. That's another little bounce trick is, instead of coming all the way down or even coming way down, if your next letter starts with down stroke, like the n to the u, you can just end the n a little short. I always make the second hump, not have weight, but that's just my own quirk, and then you can go right into the next one, and then go into a bounce, so you can stop the shore if you want. You just want to make sure that the readability doesn't suffer, that it doesn't end up looking like a different word because coconut is such a well-known word and you've got all the other letters to support it. Even if this one doesn't totally look like an n with all the other letters there beside it, you know what the word is. In those situations, you can get away with it. Let's see what we've got. We've got all of our o's on the same baseline and we're resting the n, the second part of the n on it, and the u. Then we've got this c dips way below, but these ones aren't consistent, and same with how we end it over here. I would suggest just writing it out how you naturally would and then dissect it and then improve. This is just me riffing and just deciding like this is how I just naturally write. What can I do to make it better, the next time I write it? Don't think too hard about it, which is why I recommend writing it out normally, establish a game plan before you write it out. Keep the game plan in mind while you're writing it out, and then look at your connections. Look at where things make sense. Look at opportunities maybe you're not taking advantage of. I don't have really anything coming above the x-height. I don't mind it because I've got a pretty big shift right here, but maybe that's something else I can explore with this word. Moving on, let's do a D word. I was going to do donut, but it'll end the same way as coconut, so I want to do something that's really different. I'm going to write the word dragon fruit. We're going to have a turn of letters here. Let's come down to here. I'm just going to write out the word and then we'll talk about it. We've got an opportunity here, here, here. When you have a descender like a g or y, that loops up into the next word. We're not talking about flourishing right now, once we start talking about flourishing and integrating flourishing, that's going to change the whole game here. But for now, if you choose to have a letter that's not going to be flourished with the descender and it's just going to come right back up, then I would not. You can make your o little higher right here if you wanted to, but don't do anything crazy with this connection outside, we're just pushing the next letter up a little bit. That would pretty much be it for a dragon and then I've got an r right here. I'm not going to do anything here because that would make it weird except pushing the r a little higher, and then these ones are all great opportunities. I'm just going to naturally write this and we'll see what we've got and we can dissect it. I always do a ligature. Ligature is making a connection between two letters where they become one instead of two, so I'm just attaching the dot on the i to the crossbar of the t. I could have an i floating up here, but it always looks weird to me. That's how I'm going to leave mine. I've got my a and my g on the same baseline right here. I could have put my o, up here too, but I think it would have been better if I brought all the way down, so I get consistency with the right here and right here. I think that would have been good. Those probably should have come all the way down or further down and then I'd have this, and then I'm ending this one high, but it's just floating here. It doesn't match this line, and it doesn't match this line, so I need to make a decision of where my n ends up. I think it's closer to this one than it is to the baseline and especially if I have the o coming down to the baseline, I would want this one. Let me make this a different color. I should make this one finish like this. Then we've got the u and the i right here. I think that's good. These two, it would be nice if they match. I can just bring that one up just a little bit in. I like ending in a really strong stroke when I've got a letter that ends in like an l or t right here. This really strong downstroke is always a nice finishing mark. I'm just going to leave that one hanging lower down. The app is never really fun letter to work with, so I'm just going to leave that in there. But, that gives us a pretty good game plan, so I'm going to try and fix my issues and write it out again. I'm going to keep all of the stuff in mind. I think it's a little bit better. I'm not crazy about how I did my o right here. Needle-like, practice how that feels. I think it's better if it feels like this. We should bring my n down and my o up and then we do that one. I still have, let me change my color, my a, my g, and my o right here. I've got my baseline consistency. That's all good. My g should probably have come down a little lower because now this is so small compared to those. When you erase a word in the neighborhood again, ensure you're sticking with the scale. Sometimes it's just better to write the whole thing over again. I've got my u and my i right here. It's similar. This one could have come up a little bit more, but this is good, upwards consistent. The fruit worked out well.
10. Bounce Lettering Practice: Part 2: I'm going to start a brand new layer. I'm going to turn this one off and start again. I'm going to leave my pink this time. Let's switch to locations this time. I'll start with I. We'll start with Ireland; I've always wanted to go there. Write this out. This is without the bounce. Now I'm just going to write it out without thinking too hard. I know I've got opportunity here, here, here, here, and here. The entire word is an opportunity. It all depends on how many of those opportunities we want to take because we don't want to go overboard. I chose to have a looped L because I didn't want it to get confused with the I. This is how I'm going to make my uppercase I. I'm glad I chose this word. I decided to loop this one too for consistency. We can talk about a lot of things with this one. You can see I let my L stop right here and then pick up. This is another little trick that you can use when you're doing bounce. Is you can end a letter, a T would work really well right here and an L. Even when you start flourishing for J's and Y's, you can leave them where they don't connect to the next letter. That gives you an opportunity for this next letter to already be pre-bounced. It's already up higher than the baseline because I wanted this consistency with how I was ending it. I got consistency right here and I got consistency right here. But because this one is ending around the same place where the L is, these two get automatically tied together because I've got consistency in the middle and at the end and even at the beginning, even though this is a pretty strong stroke. If we draw our lines, we've got tons of consistency with our x-height. This one is even bounced up a little bit right here, which I like since we kept everything else beneath. The D could be a little bit larger right here for scale and the loop. Whenever you're drawing loops, couple of things to consider. If you are using the guides, if you want to use the italic guides, that'll make it a lot easier. You want to make sure that the angles are similar on these and the scale. This one's quite a bit smaller than this one, so that's another really big mental note. I like keeping my loops very similar because that will tie any word you write together when you have consistent sized loops and angles. That's actually a really good way to make your own lettering style. Always look at your loops and the angles they are and the scale of them. That is a mini spiel. Obviously you have parts of letters, like the A right here, similar to the D. We want these ones to look the same because then it tells the viewer this is the same style. We've got a lot of mental notes for me to keep in mind when I write this again. I connected it this time and I also still messed up my angle a little bit, but it's way better. The scale difference isn't quite as drastic. This one just needs to be just a tiny bit bigger. But my A, my D looks similar. These all match up. This is really good outside of just my loop getting a little bit larger to match. That's the only thing I really need to change right here and then that would be done. I'll take a stab at it. Pretty close, I like where that's at. After all, we're not robots, so it's never going to be perfect, but we can get close. I like how that looks. I'm going to go through one more word for practice and then we're going to start our first lettering project of the class. Let's choose another location. Another place I've always wanted to go is New-Zealand. A lot of times I'll use a sans-serif uppercase for my script. It's just what I've always done. I can make it all fancy and do a script one, we'll see what works better for us. This is without the bounce, so let's look at our opportunities. I have one right here and right here if I stick with this N. I'm going to play around a little bit with whether or not I do the scripts or the sans-serif. Then opportunities literally all the way through Zealand. We have a lot of freedom right here. I'm just going to do what feels natural to me, which is my sans-serif uppercase and then we can try a script one. This was probably not the best choice because I just realized we're ending in the same way. We had Ireland up here, but it is good because we're adding extra letters in. We're using what we learned right here and applying it to a new word. This feels pretty good actually, I've got lot of consistency here. I need to tweak my angle. This should have been angled a little bit more. All that's good. Then same thing over here. Let's do another one since this was so similar to Ireland. I will do Australia. Let's just write it out. This one will be good because I want to talk to you about S's, we haven't talked about that yet. S's, it all depends on what it looks like, with whether or not you have opportunity. This style of S, which is the one I usually use because it gives us the most opportunity. I could keep it un-bounced like this and I can also bounce it by bringing the bottom loop way down. I've got more opportunity than if I use a traditional script S. I'm bound right here, I have to live in this area. When I use this type of S, I can go crazy. This S can have a lot of fun, but it all depends on what you're writing, the word that you're writing, the meaning that you want it to have, the feeling of your overall piece. I just want you to be aware that you have more bounce opportunity with this style of S than this style of S. Let's talk about the rest of this. This one's a good opportunity because I'm using this S, I had an opportunity here, the T. You can see most words you're going to have a lot of opportunity to bounce. It's when you have O's and V's and W's, those ones can get tricky. You just want to not bounce when you get to those ones. I'm just going to letter this out normally, I'm going to erase this so I've got some extra room right here and we'll see what happens. Right away, I left way too big of a gap right here. It's looking like it's two words instead of one. If you split things up, if you decide not to connect them, make sure your proximity is close enough where the reader wouldn't be confused. This needs to get tightened up. I'm going to use a different color. This needs to get tightened up. That feels pretty good. If you want to draw in, make your own guidelines for bouncing, you can do that too. You can go as slow or as fast as you like. I tend to have more luck by going fast because I don't think about it too much; when I go slow I always confuse myself. I have my A which came down, come up to the U. I can connect my S if I want, and I can bring it way down to connect my T. I like leaving my T straight down. But if I didn't leave it on its own right here, I would definitely connect it without going too low because I've already got a letter that dips way down. If I have two things that dip way down together, it can look strange. If I'm dipping right here and connecting my T to the next letter, then I'm going to keep this one on the regular baseline. This will come up and then I can stay up here. I can move up here for a little bit, dip down again for my L because it's that really strong down stroke and then come back up again to finish it off. That's basically what I'm thinking about when I'm doing it. Let's write this out. I let the L hang loose this time instead of the T just to see what that would look like. But I'm still keeping all of this. I wrote at an angle here that need to be bumped down a little bit, but you get the idea. All of these ones live in the same space, and then I'm bumping above and bumping below. Let me take those away so you can see what that looks like. I can turn off my guides too so you can get an idea of how that bouncing affects everything and the different looks that you can get. This one looks like it's all on the same line right here and then I'm just bouncing my L. This is really subtle, but really effective. Once again, you don't have to go too crazy with bouncing. You just want to add little subtle shifts that are going to inject that personality and make it feel more special. That's it for our practice session. Remember you can refer to that cheat sheet. In the next video we are going to complete our bounce lettering project.
11. Bounce Lettering: Project 1: Welcome to the first project of our course, and this one's going to be focused entirely on bounce lettering. Everything that we just went over in the past videos we're going to incorporate with our project right here. This assignment for this project is to choose three spices. You can choose any spices you'd like. I gave some examples right here, but don't feel like you have to choose these ones. If you don't want to, you can choose any spice or whatever you want and you're going to letter it in the bounce style. We want to focus just on bouncing right here without giving too much meaning. That's why I use spices for this one. To get started, let's add in our guidelines. You can see when you open up your layers, we've got the project card which you can use or you can turn off if you just want to use a blank Canvas for this. You can just open that up in Procreate and work right alongside me, or you can just create a brand new Canvas that is 1,500 pixels by 1,500 pixels at 300 DPI. I work in the Display P3 color profile, but you can use sRGB if you don't have that color profile available. You can use that for lettering, you can use it for the guides. I'm going to use it for the guide so I'm just going to rename this one Guides. Change to black, so double-tap where black is, and let's choose a lettering guide. You can use whatever you would like right here. I tend to just keep with standard, but then I just adjust it for myself as I'm going. I'll letter one of these in. Remember if it's too big, like this is way too big for me right here, you can just go into the brushes settings and then reduce the scale. I'm going to bring this down to 12 percent and hit Done. Let's see, that's much better. I'm going to keep that. I'll erase away this extra bit. You can see this really well on screen. I'm going to duplicate these and pinch them together so it's extra dark and then I'm going to give myself three of these because we're going to do three spices. Make sure you've given yourself enough space between them so you can tell them apart and group these together and then just move these up. Since we practiced with our inky edge brush, that's the one I'm going to use for this project so everything stays consistent. I'm just going to write the words up at the top that I'm going to use for this one. I'm going to use cinnamon, I'm going to use paprika and garlic powder. That's just my own notes. Create a brand new layer. You can use the pro brush if you want for these, if you want to do some color changing, make sure you're using the practice version of the brush. I'm going to change my color. I'm going to use this teal color and write this out. For cinnamon, I already know that my I's, my N's, my A, my M and not my O. Basically the majority of this word I can bounce. So I'm just going to see what feels most natural for me. Let's evaluate it. I've got one end bouncing. I feel like my A and my N should probably match right here so I got to push this second N up and then my M's back in my baseline and this O should match where my A is. This N needs to come the rest the way down. Other than that, everything else is good. I started with a bounce with the C. It's the beginning of the word and you can definitely see that it's a C right away. I'm going to create a brand new layer and I'm actually going to reduce the opacity of this layer and letter right on top of it since I just have really minor changes. Let's see how this one works if I turn off the original one, you can take a look at it. That feels pretty good. I'm not crazy about this N. That's the only one that I really want to change. Everything else looks good. This distance is a little uncomfortable. I want to move this over a little bit and I'm going to bring this N down a little. I think it's all set, so I'm going to reduce the opacity of this one and then create a brand new layer right above it and finish this one off. Let's see what that looks like. That feels a lot better to me. The only thing that I might have changed is making this A a little bit smaller because this is O is pretty tiny. I'm going do that really quick because it's bugging me too much. That feels pretty good so I'm going to go with that. That is my cinnamon. I can label that layer cinnamon. We can either keep our practice layers or delete them. I am going to delete these. Next word. Let's change the color. I'm going to go to this lime green color and I'm going to write out paprika. For paprika, I've got a P, which is difficult, but I can go from the A into the P, the R into the I, the I into the K. The K can be a little funky. We'll see if we can make enough happen right here. We don't have to worry about that. If you remember what I said about these down-strokes like the T and the L, we can do it with the K. We're going to add and bounce to the K without adjusting this part at all. I do have the A sitting slightly higher, but I didn't do that here. It feels weird that I have this one so high and then this one doesn't match that one or that one. This needs to get figured out and I think the best solution for that one would be to bring the I down a little bit so it does match it. These two share the same baseline, that's just a little higher than the regular baseline. Everything else fits because this top of the R matches the top of the I. I've got this strong vertical and I've got these strong verticals. This one's pretty close, I just need my I to come a little bit lower. You can see I've got that rhythm. Definitely do that rhythm exercise and figure out what angle you want your exit stems to be, that way they're all consistent. You get your hand going in that motion so when you start writing, it naturally goes in that angle in that direction. I'm going to reduce the opacity on this and letter on top of it making those changes. I think that's pretty good, that this relationship is too weird. I need to fix that, reduce the opacity, and go again. Let's see how that looks now. That definitely feels more comfortable. Remember, you can always turn on your Italic guides if you want to make sure that these angles are correct as well, that can make that angle. Even if you don't have that muscle memory built up yet, that can make it consistent without having to worry about that. Label this one paprika and we can delete the other layers. All right, last one. Let's change the color to this blue one and garlic powder. We've got two words here. I definitely have room right here, right here, the L, the I. This part will be a little tricky. The E will work right here. Let's see what happens with the powder. But I've got quite a bit of freedom with the garlic part and I'm on my new layer. You can see I didn't go too crazy with the bouncing. This one is the deepest bounce and I didn't even really have to go that deep. That one could have come up a little further. Let's see, my I needs to get moved over here. I notice that I did a looped L so I should be doing a looped D. If I have a straight down L, straight down D. I'm going to loop this one for consistency, especially because these letters appear right in the middle of each word. They draw more attention and they look more unified if they're similar. This one's really subtle right here. There's a little bit here and then I ended it with a little bit of a bounce too. It really doesn't have to have bounce everywhere. This one is just going to be a more subtle effect than the paprika. That one's the bounciest one out of all of these ones. Let's reduce the opacity, make those corrections, and then we'll be all set. Turn off the other one, have a look. These loops and angles feel pretty close so I'm going to keep those. I feel like my C is a little bit large right here, which maybe I can just correct without having to rewrite the whole thing. That feels a little bit better. This A probably could have just sat on the baseline since I don't have much bouncing going on here. All I have are these exit stumps that just dip a little bit but outside of that, just bringing this A a little further down, that would be it. I can turn off my little notes, get rid of my test-run and turn off my guides and that project is complete. Now it's your turn to pick three different spices and letter it out and improve as you go. Writing right over the top of a reduced opacity layer is a really nice way to also practice and make those improvements without feeling like you have to start over every single time. Pick your three spices, letter them out. If you post this on social media, make sure you use the hashtag, "HeyBeautifulLettering." and also tag me so I can see it and give it some love.
12. Shifting Weights: In this video, we're going to talk about shifting weights. To give you an example of that and to explain it all, I'm going to create a brand new screen-size canvas. We're going to talk about this one a little bit differently than bounce lettering. I'm going to use the second color in the color palette, and this time I'm going to use the Signature Practice brush. Instead of using the guides for this one, I'm just going to turn on the drawing guide, just the default drawing guides just so I have some straight lines, so we can talk through everything. What do I mean by shifting weights? The standard calligraphic rule is that you have heavy pressure, thick downstrokes and light pressure thin upstrokes. This would be your standard appearance. All of our down strokes are larger than our upstrokes. By shifting the weights and breaking some of these standard rules, we can actually add quite a bit of personality and an entirely different emotion or feel to the lettering for the reader. I want to give you some examples of this and examples that have worked really well for me and my own lettering. My favorite way of shifting weights would look something like this. You can immediately tell that there's a difference between these two, but it can be a little difficult to understand what's happening that's making it look so different. What I like to do is, whenever I have a letter that has two downstrokes. This w, this is the first downstroke of it. This is an upstroke. This would be the second downstroke. Same thing with the h. This would be the first downstroke, here's my upstroke and this would be my second downstroke. Whenever a letter has two downstrokes in it, I will leave the pressure off of the second downstroke. You can see right here this is the same way as an upstroke. The second downstroke, I'm leaving as an upstroke weight. That is the main difference right here, and then I haven't added additional weight on this downstroke of the GE there because this is my first downstroke. Sometimes I'll add the weight to that extra stroke in a descender, but sometimes I don't, and it works either way. You have that flexibility with this method of shifting weights. That is all I did here. You'll see everything else I've kept consistent so I've just made the decision. I'm changing this one rule, I'm breaking this one traditional rule. This is the new rule that I've replaced it with, and I'm going to be very consistent with my new rule. That's the thing. If you decide to change this, and you only apply it to this one, then you don't really have a rule, you just have one instance of a change, and then it can look like a mistake. If you decide to do this, just make sure you're being very consistent with any type of new rule you create for yourself. That's one of my favorite shifting weights, breaking rule, and then replacing a rule with my own. I want to give you a few more examples of how you can shift weights to create personality or establish your own style. Another way that you can do this is just by changing the weight as the word progresses. I can add a lot of weight at the beginning of the word and slightly reduce it as I get to the end of the word. This is what that would look like. We start with really heavy weight on our downstrokes. As the word progresses, by the time you get to the end, it's the same weight as your upstrokes. The reason why you would do something like this is you would create meaning depending on what word you are writing out or what it's representing. Since I used the word weight for this example, if this were an article about weight loss or a healthy dieting, this is a way that you could represent some of the words. You can create more meaning or impact, and you can even create some symbolism by adding this effect as well. Just by creating even a subtle shift of the weight that you're putting on your different letters has a really powerful effect. Another example of this, besides just using the word weight, I can write carefree. You can see at the beginning, I've got heavyweight and then by the time I get to the end of it, you're losing your cares in the world, you have less worry. This is another way to create meaning, impact, and symbolism just by shifting where the weight is within the word. Another way to shift weight, I can write the word hopeful. Here all I have is weight at the beginning and at the end. By having weight at the beginning and the end of the word, it incurs everything and draws you in. They can make what's in between those feel light and delicate. Another new rule that you can invent like this one right here, something even simpler because right here we excluded the second down strokes weight. You can do something as simple as saying for all the letter Is, if you're writing a word with a lot of Is in it, just say, I'm not going to put any downstroke weight on just the letter I, and I'm going to be consistent with that, but everything else is going to look like you would expect it to look. Just by changing one letter's appearance and making that consistent, it changes the entire feel of the message that you're sending across. It's just another one of those little tricks that you can put in your back pocket whenever you're infusing something with style or personality, symbolism, meaning, impact. Think about shifting the weight, and you can make your own rules like this, but you just want to make sure that you're being consistent, and you don't want to go overboard. If you add in too many rules, then no one's going to understand what the rules are. If you're breaking too many rules at once, then you just have confusion, so keep that in mind. If you decide to start creating your own rules, limit it to one or two at max. Make sure that everything is consistent. Now that we've gone over all of the rules for shifting weights, we're ready to move on to the shifting weights project.
13. Shifting Weights: Project 2: We're on to our next project, which is the shifting weights project. We just went over all the different rules you can apply or that you can break or you can create to apply to your lettering. The assignment for this project is to hand letter the name of any color twice. You're going to keep that same word, that same color name twice and you're going to shift the weights in each so you can create a new feeling or new personality with the new rules that you invent. On the same way that I gave you some examples in the bounce lettering project, I completed the project with you, so you've got an idea of how the project can be applied. I'm going to do the same thing here. Here are some examples of colors you can use. You can use any color you can think of, even if it's not on that list, I'm going to use the color magenta. My eyes will make this color magenta. I'm going to grab this blue color. Let me write it up here. I've got as an example and I'm also going to add in some guidelines for this. I want these to be fairly small because I'm going to give you five different examples of this one. That way you'll have a lot of different ideas to work with for your own. I'm going to switch to black and head into the lettering guides. I'm just going to keep the standard lettering guide. Let's see how big this is, it's a little larger than I want mine to be. I'm going to adjust that setting, just tap on it, and where scale is. I'm going to take this down to 9 percent. I'm going to create a brand new layer for these guides and just paint these in. That looks like a really good size for me. Paint a bunch of rows, so I've got them and I'm going to duplicate this. It'll be a little darker for you on screen and drag this down here and then create a brand new layer above it. This one, we're going to put all the lettering. I'm going to be using the signature practice brush for this. I'm going to switch to the blue color. Let's letter this out. I'm just going to write it out normally first, so we've got something to compare it to. Here is our standard lettering where we have not shifted any weight at all. For my first example, I'm going to create a new layer for each one of these examples. My first example is going to be where I exclude the second downstroke. Even though my M has three downstrokes, technically, I'm only going to leave to the last one off. My A will have this left off, my G will have a left off, my N will, and then my last A. If we compare our traditional to changing that one rule, let me turn off the guides so it can be a little cleaner here. You can see what a difference this made. I didn't even add any bouncer, any type of stylistic changes besides just shifting the weight on those, I did make my G a little fancier though, I didn't even realize I did that until I'm looking at it right now. But everything else is the same as up here. You can see that just by adding that one new rule, how much we have changed, how this word feels. That's why I chose color names for this project is because I didn't want you to focus too much on the word. I wanted you to see how impactful it can be, even if you're using just a super random word that doesn't really have too much emotional meaning behind it. Let's turn on our guides again, create a brand new layer. For the next rule, I'm going to turn off all of my weight except for my descenders and crossbars. This one was not part of our examples in the last video. I want to show you what that looks like here. It's definitely a different type of look and you can see we're still writing things pretty much the same. I [inaudible] my fancy G going on, but I wanted you to see by adding that weight to the descender and then the crossbar also helps to balance it out. I've got some weight above and below. You can see that this feels super different than this one, which everything feels different than our standard one. The focus of this class is to create original lettering styles that are filled with personality. This is definitely getting us there. I'm going to turn our guides back on, create a brand new layer. The next example, this is another one that I didn't talk about in the last video. I'm trying to equip you with a lot of ideas here. This one, I'm going to go max weight throughout the entire word, but my entry stem going into the M, that's this right here. This entry stem and the exit stem of the A are going to be lightweight, but the rest of it's going to be max weight, even my upstrokes. I'm going to leave my crossbar has no weight as well. That is quite a change right here. This one's a little more italicized, but you get the idea lots of weight, no way on the ends, and no weight on our crossbar. I'm going to create a brand new layer. This next example is basically the opposite of this, but tweaked a little bit. My entry stem and my exit stem are still not going to have any weight, but my first stroke right here and my last stroke right here are going to have weight. It's like the hopeful example from the last video where everything has no weight in between, but they're anchored by weight on both ends. That's what I'm going to replicate with this word. You can see how that looks. I want to show you, if we add some bounds to it and a little more personality, how we can make this one come to life even more. This is the same thing, except I've added a little more personality to it by exaggerating the proportions of my G and my T and even this first stroke of my M. Let's turn off the guides. Here we go. We've got one word written all these different ways by shifting the weight. That's it for these examples and now it's your turn. Choose the name of any color that you'd like and experiment with different shifting weights. The minimum is two. You can see the difference in feel and personality and meaning and impact that you get from yours. If you'd like to take it even further and try a bunch of different shifting weight rules that you invent for yourself or steal any of these ones. You are welcome to steal any of these roles and see what fits you best.
14. Embellishments: Part 1: In this video, we're going to talk about all the different ways that embellishments can influence style and add personality. There are five main embellishments that I've found to be the most impactful when it comes to adding style to your lettering, so I'm going to walk you through every single one of these. The first, and one of the most well-known is flourishing. But we're going to skip that one for now, and we'll focus on the next four within this video. The second one would be inline or outline. The third is 3D, making your lettering appear like it's coming up off the screen. The fourth is lacking it into a shape, and then the fifth one is adding in really fun decorative doodles, which I really love. Let's talk about inline and outline first. We'll start with inline. This is just a screen-size canvas because I want to do sketch notes for those so we can walk through each type and I'll leave notes on screen for them too. For this first one, the inline, I'm going to use the inky Edge Pro for this one just so you can see things really well. I'm going to keep it one color for these first examples so we can put all the focus on the embellishment. I'm just going to write the word hey, and I'm going to make two more copies of this so we can add stuff to each one. There are three types of inline styles that I like to use. There are dots, lines, and doodles. My recommendation is to place these inside of just your downstrokes or the heaviest weight unless all of your lettering is uniform and weight if you're using a monoweight brush, all of your strokes are going to be uniform. You can put these inlines throughout the entire word. You don't have to exclude any of the shapes. But over here, we have some pretty thin upstrokes or light pressure areas. In that case, if they can't comfortably accommodate an inline, then just skip them. Don't force it because if you force it, it's going to draw a lot of attention to these really thinner areas, and it's going to create visual attention, which is creating attention where you don't want it to go for the wrong reasons. Just leave those out and don't feel bad about them. Just make sure that you're consistent with putting all of your inlines in the heaviest strokes of your letters. Some examples of inlines. This would just be a regular line. If you want to get a little fancier, you could do a heavy line next to a skinny line and put both of these together, your standard dots. You can do a pattern like a dot line pattern, dashed lines, squiggly lines. You could do two lines with dots between them. You can do all kinds of different things. If you wanted to do doodles, you could do little swirlies all the way through your letters. You could do little stars. It's really up to you and your imagination and what you want to emphasize within the word, like if the word is Stardust, maybe you want to put stars throughout it to enhance the meaning of that word. There's a lot of opportunity to get really decorative and add more personality that way. Let's add a few to these just so you can see what that looks like. I'm going to change my color to white, so it'll show up in these and reduce my weight. This one will just be a standard line. You can also add pressure to these if you don't want to keep it just a single weight, but you want to make sure it's consistent if you do that. If I always wanted to start with heavyweight and then finish with lightweight, I just want to make sure that I'm being consistent with the way that I do that. Then I'll do one with dots too. I'll put a line pretty close to the edge here, so then I've got space to put my dots. This one will definitely be more decorative. You don't want to put this on really tiny lettering where the reader wouldn't even be able to see or appreciate the work that you put into these inlines. These would be reserved for headline text. Texts that's meant to command a lot of attention, so it's naturally going to be more decorative because of that. That would be inline. Let's talk about outline. Unfortunately, Procreate doesn't currently have an option to just add an outline onto lettering or any type of layer styles. If you're familiar with Photoshop, we don't have Layer Styles yet in Procreate, but there is a way to outline your lettering and I want to show you how to do that. I'm going to switch to a color for this one, and I'm just going to choose, let's do a random light blue color for this. I've got my inky Edge Pro selected. I'm going to make this a little bit bigger. If I write out my lettering, we are going to add an outline onto it. What you want to do is come over here, select your lettering, so tap on the layer thumbnail and choose ''Select''. You want to make sure that color fill is not selected down here. Make sure free hand and Add are the only things that are selected down here. If color fill is selected, uncheck it and then come back to your layer and reselect it over here. You should see the diagonal lines appearing and create a brand new layer right above it. Now we're going to change the color so we can see the outline. I'm just going to change it to a darker blue color and then tap on the layer thumbnail and choose ''Fill layer''. What that did is we have the exact same lettering only now it's a darker blue, and you can see over here we've got two layers. One is a light blue layer, one is that dark blue layer. We want the dark blue layer to be our outline layer, so I'm going to drag this underneath the light blue layer still here. If I turn off my light blue, you can see it's right underneath it. With the dark blue layer selected, come to your Magic Wand, choose ''Gaussian Blur'', choose ''Layer''. We're just going to increase it a very small amount. Since I wrote this pretty tiny, I'm going to come up to like 2.5 percent right up here at the top, and then come back to this layer, the dark blue layer. I still have dark blue selected over here. Tap on the layer thumbnail. Let me zoom in here so you can see what happens. You can see there's that blur around the outside edge. Tap on the layer thumbnail, choose, ''Select'', come back to layer, tap on the layer thumbnail and choose ''Fill Layer''. It's darkening up that Gaussian Blur. Tap on layer thumbnail, Select, tap on the layer thumbnail, Fill Layer. You're just going to do this over and over again. Usually do it like at least five times, that way have a hard edge around the outside. You can see it's still pretty soft right here. Every time I do it, it hardens it up or crisps it up so it's less blurry along that edge. Tap on the layer thumbnail. I'm just going to do it two more times. Now, you can see we've got outline lettering and you can merge these two together if you want or group them together. We're going to group these together, and I'm also going to make a copy of it because once you have your outline lettering, now you can take what you already know about inline lettering and add inline to outline so you can start combining different embellishments to get unique new looks. I still have my brush. We're going to reduce the size a bit and we're going to change the color to almost white, and I'm just going to add an inline to this. There we go. That is outline and inline. Now, we're going to talk about our third one, which is 3D lettering. I'm going to show you a few different ways that you can do 3D lettering super fast. We're going to stick with our same example. I'm going to write out the word hey again. The first example is probably the most well-known example. I'm going to select this lettering, create a brand new layer, change my color to a light gray so you'll be able to see it, fill that layer, drag it underneath that original lettering layer and we're just going to offset it. So I'm just going to drag it over and down. Just like that, we have some 3D looking lettering and some people like connecting ends. But you can see they're obvious. You can do that. That would be the first way. Let me group these together. I'm going to duplicate this group. Bring it down here, and I'm going to show you another thing you can do here. If you want it to look a little more hand-drawn, you can create a brand new layer. Let me select a new color. I'm going to go back to my layer, light blue or medium blue color. I'm going to reduce the size of my brush, and I'm just going to follow the lines that are not connecting to the letter. You could use it like this if you wanted to, but I like turning off my fore shadow on this. Now I've got a hand-drawn 3D outline look that is also accurate, has the proper amount of distance from the letter and it's consistent all the way through and it's still looks hand-drawn because we did do it manually. That's another way to do 3D in a more unique way than just making a copy and dragging it over. We could also take this original version. Let me make a copy of that one and drag it over here. We could take the shadow of that one. I'm selecting this versions shadow layer, the light gray, and I can apply a Motion Blur to it. Just select Motion Blur, Layer and just drag it a little bit. I'm dragging it down into the right, and you can see it really softens it up, deselect. You can see how nice and soft that is. If you want it hardened up a little bit, just duplicate this and then pinch it together. Then you've got a softer looking 3D look. You can see that this fills a lot nicer on the eyes than this could be depending on what word you're using. Now, I want to show you a bit more of an advanced technique of using this example. I'm going to duplicate that one, this one right here. This one's going to involve layer masking. If you have not taken my free Procreate for beginners class, I walk you through all the ways that you can use layer masking, it will not be a mystery at all to you anymore. If this is unfamiliar at all, check out that course, it's totally free and you'll know exactly what to do. The way that you can make this a little more original is come in here, you're going to select the top lettering, so the black lettering. Tap on layer thumbnail, choose ''Select''. You're going to come down here and choose ''Invert''. It's doing the opposite, it's selecting the opposite of your lettering. Everything but the black lettering is now selected. I'm going to come to this gray layer, tap on the layer thumbnail and choose ''Mask'', and then I'm going to uncheck the visibility of the black layer. I'm just going to turn it off and then deselect it by tapping on this icon up here. Now we just have the 3D effect without any lettering and we can put any color behind us now. If I create a brand new layer and I want to paint blue behind it, you put any color behind it that you want. It doesn't have to be blue, but you get the idea. That's a nice way of doing like shadow style lettering that fills 3D. The last one that I want to share is like appealing sticker effect. Let me toggle this up. Now create a copy of our original lettering. I just need the black part of it. Duplicate it, drag it down here, and I'm going to remove the gray layer. All I have is black lettering right here. That's just the original one. I'm going to select that black lettering and just change the color by dragging the blue into it. That way you can see the shadow a little bit better for it. We're going to create a copy of this again. Tap on the layer thumbnail, choose ''Select'', and we're going to change the color, let's do the dark blue color, almost black down here. Create a brand new layer, tap on the layer thumbnail and choose ''Fill Layer''. Now I've got two of the same layer, just different colors. We're going to drag this one to the back, same thing we did earlier on. Only this time we're going to take this blue layer, select it down here, choose ''Warp'', and we're just going to drag this end down here, and we'll drag this top corner out too. We're going to leave everything else the same. It's almost like it's a sticker and it's stuck right in the middle, but the ends are starting to fold up, so you're getting the shadow from this part that's peeling up from the wall. This part's peeling up, this part is stuck to the wall. I can even adjust the center parts because I don't want that shadow to move much. I can push that back into place a little bit more. Then deselect, reduce the opacity, and that's your 3D peeling sticker effects. You can even blur it a little bit if you wanted to. I'm going to increase the opacity a little bit more on this. If you wanted to blur it, we can see what that looks like. Click ''Gaussian Blur'', drag it up a little bit. This is, I'm going to go to two percent. I don't want it to be too blurry. That's five really quick and easy ways to do some simple 3D effects to any lettering in Procreate as an embellishment. In the next video, we're going to go over the last two. I want to give you some ideas that you can use within actual lettering layouts, aside from just developing a lettering style. Now you can use that style in a layout with other styles to create a really cohesive layout. I want to make sure you're equipped with all the tools you'll need, whatever you would like to do down the road.
15. Embellishments part2: We're going to finish up our embellishment's overview in this video. We're going to talk about locking your lettering into a shape as well as decorative doodles. When it comes to locking your letters within a shape, I've found that it usually works pretty well with serif and sans serif versus script. There are definitely times when you can use script, but if you're having difficulties or struggling at all, switch to serif or sans serif and see how that works for you. I'm going to do just a few examples right here on how I would lock this into a shape or change the shape of my lettering. I'm going to let out the phrase ''The mountains are calling '' and I want mountains to be in the shape of mountains. What I will do is on a brand new layer, I'll just draw my mountains. Then I'll create a brand new layer and write that word so it fills up and is as readable as I can make it. Sometimes it can be tricky, so just work with what you've got. My T is going to be super funky right here. I can either do that, I can split the difference a little. I want my A to be right in the middle there, so I'm going to change the size of my N. T is still really funky there. I'm going to redraw this. Let's turn off our outline and see how that looks. I think that's pretty good. Then I can just add in the rest of my lettering. I can drop in, I could even add some decorative details there, and then add in script right below it. You can do something like that. That would be locking it into a shape. I would say if you have a phrase like those, don't lock the entire phrase up into the shape. Just lock the word that is the most meaningful in that phrase within the shape, that way you're drawing even more attention to that really important word. Another example would be if you want to maybe letter along a curve. If you draw an arc and hold it, it'll snap to a perfectly smooth arc. You can change it and edit it if you'd like to, by just hitting ''Edit Shape. Then you got nodes and you can drag the nodes so you can affect how curvy your arc is or how intensive a curve you have. I'm just going to leave mine pretty simple. Then create a brand new layer right above it. You can just letter write along that curve. If you want an extra guideline, just duplicate that and then drag it up a little bit if you want to give yourself an x-height to go by. Then on the new layer, let me reduce the opacity of this, that way they're not too distracting with the lettering. On the brand new layer up at the top, now I can write it in and it'll all be consistent because I have a baseline and an x-height. You can even give yourself an ascender height if you wanted to, and then just turn those off. Then you've got your lettering that is curved. The last example would be if you want a wavy lettering. What I like to do on a brand new layer, give yourself some wonky lines and then reduce the opacity of that, and then create a brand new layer and letter in whatever you'd like. Then I can turn off those lines. Then I get another option where I'm adding that extra personality or style. This one also works really well with sans serifs. If I just grab my guideline and move it, I can recreate this with sans serif and this can be a little bit easier to follow the guidelines than two because you can go from one extreme to the other verses with scripts, sometimes it's really tricky to stay top to bottom touching each time. I usually give myself just a little bit hairline space right here so they don't completely touch. You can see the difference between the script and then the sans serif if I turn off those guides. Pretty fun. That covers our creative shape embellishment. Then the last one is decorative doodles. You can do so much with decorative doodles. Basically, however many decorative doodles you want to come up with and how you want to embellish things, you do not have to be an illustrator to use the decorative doodles. I'm going to show you some really basic doodles that I use and then how I use them so you can see exactly how easy it is to inject that personality to create style by just using some simple doodles. I'm going to create a brand new layer. Some decorative doodles that I like to use that are pretty common, you've got your dots, which you can just add around anything. You can do circles that are just open and not filled in. You can do different size of those so this could be bubbles really easily. You can do little stars, asterisks, more of a filled star. These ones are really fun. What you do is you just make a t and then a swooped curve and then make this bottom swoop curve little bit longer. Swirls, lines. You can do water droplets, regular stars, you can do hearts, arrows, lines, curvy lines, ribbons. You could just put a box around something that's decorative. That's a really good holding shape for like, the, and two, four. You can add propositions in there pretty easily. You can do little bursts, lines with dots. But you get the idea. There's so many things that you can do right here. It's totally up to you how many types of doodles you want to do. I want to give you some examples of when you could add this in. I wanted to use some words that are really fun, that could be embellished really well with some decorative doodles. The first one is if I wrote out the words, so fancy. I want to add some sparkles to it since it's fancy. So I'm going to put in my little stars, and I don't have to overdo it. I can just put a few in here, and then I can even add a few dots around it. Super simple and now it's embellished. It gives that phrase more meaning, more attention, more style. I wrote this down as one of my examples. I can use the word YES, lots of excitement. We can put this one in a ribbon. We can add some lines to our ribbon, we can add some shading to the folds. We are going to add some bursts lines. But we could add an inline to it if I switch to white and reduce my size way down. I wanted to do this in black and white, that way you could focus entirely on the embellishment. But obviously, yes, infuse this with color and you can hit it home even more. I've got two more examples that we can do really quick. The next one is an open sign and I am going to use color for this one just because it'll be a lot easier to show it off. I'm going to use orange and up my brush size, I'm going to write now OPEN. I want to add some 3D effects to this, so we can do exactly what we did before. The 3D effect I'm going to do is the flow outline. Select, create a brand new layer, change it to any color that's different, fill it, drag it underneath your original lettering and then just offset it to however far you want it to go. I'm going to make it go this way and then create a brand new layer. This one, I think, I'm going to keep a little darker in that shadow and reduce my brush size and follow it along. I can turn off that shadow layer and I can work with that outline. I'm going to reduce the opacity, I feel like it's a little dark. I'm going to create a brand new layer and grab my orange again and add in some dots in between these two. We've got some embellishment here. I'm going to write in, now open on it. That's another fun way. Is adding some detail in your 3D. The last example I have, let me switch back to black, is the word bubble gum. I thought that this would be a fun word to play around with. As far as embellishment goes, we can put it in a holding shape. By holding shape, I just mean some shape around it that's going to contain whatever you've lettered. I felt like a little splat, a bubble gum would be a really cute idea and then I wanted to embellish it even more. I wanted to add some details along the edge, some little dots. You don't even have to make it a complete border, some fun little curls. I also added in some water drops because it's really juicy bubble gum. Then just a few little dots because I needed something just a little bit extra. If you have an assignment to create some decorative lettering, this is one way that you can infuse some extra meaning to that lettering. That was my last one. I just wanted to give you some really fun, cute examples of how you can just add some doodles to some lettering to enhance their meaning. In the next video, we are going to use everything that we talked about right here, all of these embellishments, and apply them to our embellishment project.
16. Embellishments: Project 3: Welcome to project number 3, which is our embellishment project. We are going to use some of the different embellishments that we talked about in the previous videos within what I hope you'll consider a really fun assignment. The assignment is to choose a two word chore and add embellishment to enhance its meanings. The two word chore, hopefully you have a verb in there so we've got some type of action going on where we can enhance that action with embellishment. I've listed some examples that you can use or please feel free to come up with any that you'd like. Just make sure it's a two word chore. We're going to see how it can look normally versus how it looks once it's embellished and how it changes its meaning and its style. The example that I'm going to use for my project is wash clothes. Just like before, I'm going to give you a few different examples. Hopefully that'll help get the wheels turning and get you excited to complete this project. I'm going to use the inky edge practice for this one because I want some color change happening so it's a little more fun. I'm going to change this to more of a purple color. The first idea that comes to mind is just writing out wash, really fun, and then adding in clothes right beneath it. It's locking it in there, so it gives it a little more energy. To add the embellishment, I just want to put in some bubbles, so something really simple. You're washing clothes, you're going to get some bubbles. Then I'll put some dots in here too. Maybe I've got a few bubbles that have already popped, give my bubbles a little highlight. That would be my first idea. For this next one, I'm going to paint in a guideline. I can keep things straight. Just going to give myself a little guideline here, create a brand new layer. I'm going to grab a darker blue color. I'm just going to write the word "WASH" and reduce the size just a smidge, and get rid of my guide now. I'm going to write "clothes" a little more fun since I had this one. I'm going to write this one script just to change up the style and see how that feels. I'm going to make "WASH" a little bit smaller, and I'm going to make it like those laundry signs. I'm going to put it in a holding shape. It needs a little bit extra, so let's put in some water droplets because that's relevant, and maybe a few dots too. That would be my second version. Then the last one, maybe a funky style retro laundromat. Then this one, I'm just going to do decorative flourishes all the way around it. There are three different ideas of executing this assignment. Hopefully that gives you some ideas for your own two-word chore. Once again, if you decide to post any of these projects on social media, I would love it if you use the hashtag, HeyBeautifulLettering, that way I can see it and also send it some love.
17. Thank You + Next Steps: We made it. Thanks so much
for being a part of Intro to Beautiful Lettering in
Procreate here on Skillshare. Before you go, I
want to give you some ideas of how you can use your brand new hand
lettering styles moving forward. What can you do with custom
hand lettering styles? You can basically use them
for anything that you see, text or lettering on. This can be creating and selling custom fonts
for passive income. You could do the same with
SVGs if you're familiar with cricket and silhouette
crafting or cutting programs, you could create
custom logotypes. Those are logos that are
made up of just typography. That would be
hand-lettered logos, any kind of branding assets
that a company might need, whether it's packaging, signage, stationary web
assets, you name it. You could create
social media posts, hand-letter out some
quote graphics. You can create custom
posters or promotions. If you're a freelancer, it's an additional
option that you could provide your clients, and the stationary
options are just endless, especially when it
comes to weddings, you could create signage,
invitations, place cards. You can create greeting cards
for any time of the year, coasters, gift tags, the
list goes on and on. I mean, this is
just a fraction of all the different
things that you can create with custom
hand lettering. If you're looking for other
hand lettering courses right here on Skillshare, I have two other lettering
courses in procreate. The first is watercolor
lettering in Procreate. That course teaches
you how to apply realistic watercolor
textures and effects to your hand lettering. Then, the 3D lettering class is exactly what it sounds like. It's how to create stunning pop-off-the-screen
lettering by applying several effects
within procreate. You can find those
Skillshare classes just by clicking on
my profile picture, visiting my profile here on Skillshare, and you
can toggle through. I have a bunch of
illustration courses as well. If that's also something
that interests you. A quick reminder before we go, don't forget to
download your bonuses. Refer to the video titled downloading and installing
class bonuses for the download link and the full walk-through
of how to download all the different types of bonuses that came
with the course. If you post any of your
work on social media, please use the
#HeyBeautifulLettering, and tag me, my handle is @everytuesday, so I can see your
beautiful artwork, and I can send it some love. That's it for this class. I hope to see you soon.
