Intro to Illustrative Lettering

1. Intro to Illustrative Lettering: Have you ever been inspired to incorporate some hand lettering into your work? Or maybe create a text based illustration from scratch only to discover that it's not as easy as it might look. This class will show you that it's not as hard as you may think with actionable steps. Following my process, you'll learn how to compose and create a text based illustration from scratch. Oh, hey, my name is Chris Bias and I have a unique background that makes me well suited to teach this class. Although I am an independent illustrator, I studied typography and graphic design. Even worked as a designer for five years before transitioning full time into illustration. Hand lettering has always been a big part of the work that I do. In fact, I've done lettering based illustrations for clients like Cartoon Network, Adobe, Google, Nike, and countless others. This class is aimed at people who are interested in getting started with hand lettering. Or even people who have already started to play around with lettering, but would like a little bit more structure and some tips and tricks. Take their work to the next level, whether you're a freelance illustrator in house designer or just someone who loves doodling, this class is for you. In this class, you'll learn typography, fundamentals, basic and more advanced lettering styles. How to plan your composition. Paying attention to visual hierarchy. How to utilize grids, shapes, and simple letter forms to create a framework to draw over. And how to slowly refine your illustration until it's just right. And I'll also show you some finishing techniques and enhancements that I like to do to just bring it all together. The techniques you'll learn in this class will also work for standalone lettering treatments. And also for incorporating lettering into existing pieces which can really bring them to life. This class will serve as a great starting point if you want to pursue lettering. If you've already been playing around with lettering a bit. The tips and techniques that I'll show you in this class will help you to create more dynamic lettering based compositions. Hand lettering is an extremely marketable skill that can make your portfolio more attractive to potential commissions. Creating expressive lettering is one of my favorite things to do. So join me in this class so you can discover just how fun it can be, please. 2. The Project: The project for this class is to create a text based illustration of a short quote or phrase. Once you've picked out your quote, you'll brainstorm ideas for visuals and lettering styles that will help accentuate the key points of your phrase or quote. Here's an example of one that I did, which is a quote by my friend Monique, Amy, which says, trust your gut and work on your craft. I love the message here. And also, I wanted to just draw some letters that look like at. Here's another one I did with the phrase far around and find out which is a little play on words. I expressed the meaning of this quote using letters that emulated a fart and had a little angry. But man in the middle, sometimes they're a little bit more straightforward. Like this one that says, support your local artist. And this one I just wanted to sort of emulate, almost like a badge like shape. And just pair that with some simple bold lettering and some fancy script to give it a little flavor if you will. This quote was from Pat and Oswald's late wife. It is. It's chaos. Be kind. It's just a really nice message that I firmly believe in. And I wanted to mix this sort of chaotic loud type with just a nice elegant little be kind with some light shining through at the bottom. After you've brainstormed some ideas, maybe gathered some inspiration, the next step is to create some thumbnail sketches. We'll work through several of these to figure out visual hierarchy and overall composition. In addition, we'll experiment with different lettering styles to best express one of the key words within your phrase. Next, we'll choose one of our thumbnail sketches and blow that up to use as the framework for our main composition. We'll then use this new version to revise and iterate by tracing over it. This part can be repeated as many times as you want until you're satisfied with the results. Remember that this is all part of the process and it's not important to get something great right away. In fact, it can be a bad thing. Even after doing this professionally for 15 plus years, I still find myself going through many revisions and refinements to get to a finished piece. By completing this project, you'll gain experience with and have an understanding of hand lettering and basic typographic fundamentals that will make your work much more versatile. Learning about the basic fundamentals of typography will also better help you present your work. Bad typography can take away from your work and be really distracting, especially to designers and art directors who may be looking to commission you. Those people can spot bad type from a mile away. Speaking from experience, we can't look away and did I forget to mention fun, You'll also gain maximum fun times. I'll also be providing you with some supporting materials like my working files, Practice compositional grids, a super fancy lettering style worksheet, and a typography tips worksheet. Your final piece should be a finished text based illustration that you will share to the project gallery. There's no specific size or format. That is all up to you. Please share your work in the project gallery so we can all check it out. As always, I will provide feedback for each and every one, and I can't wait to see what you make. 3. Typographic Fundamentals: Although illustrative lettering can feel very distant from traditional typography, the best hand lettering compositions have an underlying basis in typographic fundamentals. Even if it's not immediately clear, you might just notice that something's a little bit easier to read or just feels more balanced. Maybe you can't put your finger on exactly what it is. It just feels right. Just feels a little bit better. In this lesson, I will teach you some of the most elusive secrets of the mystical art of typography. Just kidding. It's actually pretty straightforward. Although you could spend years and years studying typography, just knowing a little bit about the basic fundamentals will go a long way in helping you to improve your illustrative lettering compositions. When we think about typography, we think about designers. So let's all just take a moment and put on our designer hats for this segment. You have your hat on. All right, let's go. Typography helps readers navigate the flow of content. Meaning what to read first, next, and so on. To do this, a designer must provide a way into and out of a pile of words by breaking the text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through the masses of text and information. One way to do this is through typographic hierarchy, which emphasizes some things and diminishes others. And this is the same for a strong illustration. You'll find that the fundamentals of design and typography overlap quite a bit with illustration and art in general. So let's talk a little bit more about visual hierarchy in terms of lettering and type. Every level of hierarchy should be signaled by one or more Es. Q can be spatial, like an indent, line spacing, or placement on a page, or graphic like the size, the style, the color of a typeface. Infinite variations are possible. As a general rule of thumb, three levels of visual hierarchy are plenty. We've got the most important thing, the second most important thing, and then everything else. When you start to have more levels of visual hierarchy than that, it starts to take away that emphasis. Because when you put emphasis on lots of things, nothing is emphasized. The only way to emphasize something is to make it stand out from all the rest. All right, let's move on to the actual letters. Did you know letters have basic parts just like us? Well, arms and legs, elbows, noses. Just kidding. They don't really have noses. We can look at these parts to differentiate the different characteristics of different letter styles. So let's just go over a few terms and talk about what they mean to keep this from lasting in eternity. I'm definitely going to simplify and generalize some of these things, but it will be plenty for our purposes. In most cases we have upper case and lower case letters. The height of the lower case letter is the x height. All right, you're ready for a pro tip. I know it's a little bit early in the class, but I think you're ready for a pro tip. Round letters almost always extend beyond the X height to visually have the same weight as the other letters. The baseline is the line where they start, where the line is sitting. This is the baseline. Some letters like Y and go below that baseline, and that is called a descender. Some letters like H and K above the X height, and that's called a sender. There's tons of terms for all the different parts of the letters, but I don't want to overwhelm you. And it's not that important for this class. So I'm just going to talk about the ones that I may inadvertently use in this class when talking about letter forms. Weight refers to the thickness of the lines that make up a letter. The counter is the space inside a closed area of a letter, like a. Although it can also describe a semi closed area like this part of an M. A stem is like a tree trunk or a stem, I guess. And these are called crossbars. The part coming off a letter like this. Part of the K is the arm. This part is referred to as the tail. That makes sense, right? These are the butt cheeks, just a term. These little feet are called seraph type styles. With feet like this are referred to as seraph type faces. You may have heard this before. Letters without feet are called sand. Seraph sands, meaning without, without feet. These are the letters without the feet. Letting refers to the amount of space between lines of text. Letter spacing or tracking is the overall spacing between letters in a line of text. Burning is the adjustment of horizontal space between individual characters different from overall letter spacing. This is just fine tuning the space between two different characters. A ligature refers to two or more letters combining into one single letter. In addition to seraph and sand seraph, there is also script style letters. Script is based on cursive lettering. There are some terms specific to script lettering, such as swash, which is basically just getting real fancy with part of the letter. Like this, part of the a flourish is some even more fancy stuff as you're thinking about type and looking at type and paying more attention to typography. And typography in your work. An important thing to remember that design is as much of an act of spacing as it is of marking, Meaning that the space around your letters is just as important as the letters themselves. 4. Lettering Styles Part 1: Good typography is meant to be clean and easy to read. The lettering definitely has some wiggle room because it often serves as a piece of art on its own. And in that way, it's expected that someone's going to spend more time with it than simply looking at it to pull information out of it. Challenging the viewer to decipher some of the words within a compelling composition can be a good thing because it can enhance the experience. Allowing you to control what is read first and so on. Which in a way, allows you to control how the information is received. When getting started with and even progressing with illustrative hand lettering, drawing and practicing and experimenting is key to finding your own style. The more you draw, the more ways you'll discover new ways to render letter forms and words. Something I highly recommend is to spend some time tracing letter forms from existing typefaces. Getting used to drawing the shapes, curves, thicks, and thins will help you in creating your own. You'll get a feel for the nuances of how each one is constructed. This is a great learning tool and we'll also train your hand to be more comfortable with in drawing letter forms. Hand lettering can be as simple as a clean lettering style. In fact, this kind of thing often works really well as secondary type within a composition. If you aren't comfortable with this yet or want some more structure, you could use something like Helvetico or any other simple sensor of typeface to use as a guide to draw your letters on top of. If you're working traditionally, maybe you can print out some letters or find some letters in a book or a magazine, or wherever else there's letters. No matter what style I'm drawing in, I'll often start with just plain simple uppercase letters like this, because it gives me a quick way to see all the letters together and analyze ways they can fit together and how much space I might need. And then I can use this as a guide and maybe draw a wall around letters to create a more bold look. I should say I will be doing the majority of the drawing in this class, within the Adobe Fresco app on the ipad, just because it's my favorite way to draw. But you can do this anyway you want. If you're using paper, I suggest using tracing paper to go through the layer process that I'll be doing or any other app. Maybe if you are working in Photoshop or in procreate, I'm not going to be doing anything that's fresco specific that you can't do anywhere else or even with traditional materials. Don't worry about that. But if you want to try Fresco, it's actually a free download. If you have an ipad or Windows device on this new layer, I can come in here and just draw around the letter forms almost like it's a wall. And this just allows me to get a nice bold shape, having that simple lettering as a starting point. Obviously, this is pretty messy. Nothing too fancy here, but this is a way to quickly get the letters down. This is also super helpful when you're trying to work within a specific space. I wouldn't want to immediately start drawing stylized letters because I don't know how much space it's going to take up by just writing it out simply like this. I can do it fast, much faster than if I was trying to do these like thick letters to fill that space. That's my first pro tip. Just write the words in there and then that'll help you determine how much space you have. Whether I'm doing lettering or traditional illustration, I always work in a very iterative process. Meaning I'm constantly doing something and then drawing on top of that and adjusting it and fine tuning and going. I'm never just immediately trying to go for just this full finished part right from the start. Even with all the experience I have with lettering, I could sort of freestyle in some clean letter forms that I'd be pretty happy with. But allowing myself to work iterative like this, allows me to discover new things that I might not see if I were just immediately going for something good. As I'm playing around and experimenting, I'm shifting things. I'm redrawing things, I'm finding new connections between letters and words. And if I already had a final idea in my head going into this, I may miss out on all of these unique opportunities. So I highly encourage an iterative process. I think going right in and trying to make something perfect from the start, even if you technically can, I don't think it's a good thing because it may lead to a more sterile result and not give you that experience to create something that maybe you wouldn't have gotten to otherwise. To carry on with this iterative process, I'm going to bring down the opacity. I'm going to turn off that underlying letters. I'm just going to, I'm just going to play with these start letters right here. You can do simple things like just, maybe adjusting the baseline where you have some letters up and down to give it like a more chaotic or energetic book, for example. We could come in here, we can draw this as it is, but maybe I put the up a little higher and at a angle, then maybe I rotate this a back like that. And now we've got a totally different feel. We've got this kind of crazy energy, just a little bit more exciting. Another thing I like to do with just the basic letter forms like this is try to see if there's maybe different ways I could fit the letters together. I really enjoy that process of kind, putting things together like a puzzle and making a unique shape out of it. The T has this line at the top that comes over. Maybe we could play around with like tucking that underneath there. Extend that over. Maybe we could do the same thing with the. We could tuck that in there. Extend that. Then maybe the R could come in here. And I want to pause for a moment to just look at how bad this is. And that's the point. You don't want it to be good at this point. We're experimenting. We're trying things out. We're playing. We're not trying to make great artwork yet. We're trying to think about these letter forms and making them great. These letter forms aren't the letter forms I want to focus on. I'm just sort of using them to experiment. That makes sense. Now maybe I'll push it even more. So maybe I'll take this R, maybe pull this leg down like that. And it's like, okay, is this looking cool? Maybe it's because we are doing the word start. Maybe it's like a race. Like it's the start of a race. And this is sort of looking like a racetrack now. Like maybe there's ways that we can combine this all together right off the bat, I think. Oh, what about connecting this R into the T? But that leads me to a word of warning when you are playing around with illustrative lettering. And that is, you always want to be aware of what makes each letter specifically unique. Because part of this illustrative lettering is really pushing letter forms and experimenting with shapes and styles and pushing them as far as you can go, but you don't want them to lose that legibility fully. You can delay the readability a little bit. But why this is important is because if you think about the letter, and then you think about the letter J. These are very, very close. But what makes a different than a J is that the T does not have this curve over here. If we were to connect these two letters, this starts to look like a J. And that is something that we do not want 'cause it doesn't read properly. So that may not be the best solution there, even though you know it's kind of fun with the whole racetrack idea. So always keep that in mind. Another thing you can do with these simple bold letters is make like a three D sort of look. And this is actually pretty easy. So what you could do is I'm going to duplicate my layer. But if you are using traditional medium or whatever, you know, you could just trace. I'm going to stop saying that throughout the rest of this video. Just assume that if I duplicated layer or something like that, I'm asking you to trace or whatever you're doing. If you're using another app, you would be duplicating. Anyway, on this duplicated layer, we can just shift it up like this. We're just going to draw lines connecting the same points of the letters that copy that, pull that down. And then you're just drawing a line to where they connect. So it's a little bit more straightforward with like the T. So we're connecting that point that now you've got this cool three D effect. And you can do that with any style of letters. But working in this simple way where you just write out a word and just simple uppercase letters. And then using that as a guide to build from can lead to countless variations. By just sort of doing this process where you draw like almost like a wall around the letter forms for example. One of my favorite ways to do this is to do like a shaky line to give like a cool punk rock aesthetic. So I'll just come in here and just wiggle my hand as I'm drawing. You get this just cool punk rock, horror movie, whatever lettering, I'm just shaking my hand. And if you're not good at shaking your hand this much, just drink several cups of coffee and then do your lettering and you'll do this automatically. This is, you know, one of my most fun styles to work with. I don't know. I just, I think that sort of gritty punk look is something that I was really drawn to as a teenager and I love drawing that. Let's say you don't want to be a punk Rocker, what about some fluffy cloud letters make a new layer here? So do this, you're just sort of making a bunch of half circles, different sizes and just doing that same process where you're building around this little wall and we just got some fluffy cloud letters. You can start to overlap them a little bit if you want. Again, still keeping it loose, not trying to do anything super tight yet. That's part of the refining stage. This is the playing around and experimenting and seeing if it'll work. So I'm doing it, but very quickly, just to, you know, get a feel for what's working, what's not working, how the letters interact with each other, how much space it takes up. Just experimenting and sort of keeping in your mind what it could look like. This will be easier as you do more. For me, I can look at this garbage sketch and envision it as a nice fluffy cloud lettering. But we're playing now. Another thing that's really fun is like a wiggly line, which can give it sort of like a water wet vibes, sort of like a splash or something like that. So for this, I'll just sort of make this wiggly line. Just the way I've done everything else, but just sort of wiggling around can do it here. I like to sort of make the letters interact with each other a little bit. This is another situation where you want to be mindful of the letter forms, because an O can start to look like a D if you're not careful. So what I try to do is just try to be balanced on both sides of the letter and have the counter centered. Because even just shifting it over to the right can make this start to sort of look like a D. So we want to be careful about that. I also like to sort of mirror what's happening on the outer edge to make it feel a little bit more fluid. I'm just going to pull the L a little bit closer as splash lines, give it some more character. Maybe some little watermarks inside the letters. It's pretty cool. Let's draw neat. Isn't that neat? Again, garbage letters. Not worried too much about it. Looking good. Just a framework. Just some letter bones. I'll put some letter meat on. I forgot to cover letter meat as a term in the typographic introduction, I would say my favorite type of lettering to do is just gross, drippy letters. So for these, I'm just sort of doing that same wiggly line that I did before, but then putting like droplet dribbles drippiness as I go. And then sort of like overlapping these lines onto each other for now. We'll just do it here. I like to leave openings as I'm sketching and then maybe connect things to give it sort of like a slime snot look. Then maybe like have it drip onto itself. I'm just using that framework. Keep mentioning that. Just using that to shape the snot around. I'm just varying the size of the droplets, the length. Just trying to make it look real. I mean, come back in, add some more little dribbles, little wiggles. We got some disgusting letter forms. What about some crazy explosion, lightning letters? We could do that. Just come in here, just draw some wild points coming off these letters, boom, explosion, fire. Draw some fire letters. We could do fire letters where we just sort of wiggle a little bit, but then put a point on the end to mimic, you know, fire is like always going up. So we can just make sure that our letter shapes are going up, like this, coming to a point. But just having it be a little bit different so it doesn't look, I don't know, unnatural or whatever. You could come in and put some little little wicks. Is it a wick, a lick of flame, something? I don't know what that is. You could do some just chunky letters. Just make this real thick. So just the opening is just like a little crease. You could chunk them together, make the tea chunky. I like to put little kind of fold overs there on those letters. You can also take your letter forms and like stretch them and make like real tall letters like this. When you stretch them, they'll look bad. But you can then use that as a guide to make it a little bit better, like fix the proportions. So we could come in here, maybe pull that down, get these really tall letters. Then you can decide like, you know, where is that cross bar on the egg going to go? And I think that will help determine the style. So, you know, you can try something up high or maybe like real down low. I think that sort of exaggerates the height and I think that's kind of fun. Do this for short, squat letters and instead of squishing them on this one, I will just eyeball and draw short letters. Just making them wider than normal, but just drawing them as regular capitalized letters and just exaggerating those features. But then you can use that as like a guide as we did before to maybe come in and give them some more style. Maybe they're like short and wide, but also chunky letters. I'm just doing that same thing where I'm drawing the wall around these letters and we got short. And we are expressing things through our letter forms here. 5. Lettering Styles Part: Another thing you can do to get started is to use a shape to build your word into and let it be that shape. You can start with something like a circle. I have a circle here and I'm going to make a new layer for my lettering so that I may not get it right the first try, and I don't want it to be tied to that circle. First thing I'll do is just write out the word to measure the space like this. Not really trying to fit perfectly, but just trying to get a feel for how much space I have and how much space the word is going to take up. I'll bring down the opacity, and then on a new layer, I'll see if I can find ways to fit this to the circle a little bit. I might try to match the curve of the circle with the letter without distorting the letter too much. Then maybe the can come up like this and wrap close to the side of this O, so that O can go like that. I'm still doing the same thing as I was doing before, like building that shape around the letter, but also wrapping it to the shape that I'm working with here. It worked okay with the, so far. But I think it's going to be a little bit tricky over here because the P has empty space below it no matter how we wrap it. If we try to wrap the E, it's going to get pretty crazy like that. What we can do maybe is try to tuck the E underneath the, maybe we pull the P all the way over like this, have it come down. And then the E can fit into this space right here. We could maybe make the rest of that shape of the circle and then just draw some diagonal lines there to finish that out. And then we can come in here and erase those extra lines. A cool way to actually make the finished or final tightened up lettering for this and have it still fit nicely is to actually start with the circle and then erase what you don't need. I've got this circle and I'm going to bring down the opacity with the initial drawing underneath. Now on this layer, what I'm going to do is just come in with an eraser and erase what I don't need. This is going to help us maintain that overall shape of the circle. And then decide what I want to do here. Like maybe I want to round these off a little bit more. I think that is good. Then you can come back in and fill in some areas if you think it needs to be, could help with eligibility. If this was a little bit, that angle was a little bit more clear on the end. Another thing you can do in addition to shapes is to make some curved baselines or just a different framework to put your letters within. For example, you could do like a curved line like this that maybe put some ends on it and just write out a word within that. Just like you would regularly I'm writing the word curve and you'll see that I didn't make it to the end. And that's the whole point of doing it on a new layer or on a new sheet of paper. What I can do is either just stretch it over to make it fit and looks like it works pretty well. And even though it doesn't fit the curve perfectly, it doesn't really matter. It's just there as like a visual reference to help me space it out. And if you wanted to and you still felt like you wanted to use these letter forms as like a wire frame or whatever, you could do that, you could just come in here and draw them in to fit the curve properly, since it was being messed up by the stretching of the letters. Then we can use this as a new starting point. So you can decide if you want these letters to be like maybe they're in like a flag or a shape or whatever, that's this shape. Or you want them to actually be the shape that were the case. You could do something similar to what we did with the circle and sort of wrap the letters to that shape. Like bending the bottom of this to fit the curve of the shape. One thing that I find helpful when I'm doing lettering is to always kind of move my artboard around or my piece of paper or whatever you're doing. Sometimes pushing a curve is easier than pulling a curve. You'll figure out what works best for you. I'll often skip around too, especially when I'm doing something that fills a long shape. Because I want to make sure that the letters feel cohesive. And sometimes you could be slightly expanding them and end up like with a squished word at the end. Then another thing I need to think about is if I want this to match this shape, I'm going to need to maybe curve this little bit so it wraps to that V. And then we can just draw the rest of the letter forms in. Then down here at the R, we could just do a normal R like this, but then it breaks. This whole, all these letters fit together so nicely. So we could try to figure out a way to make it work better. One thing would be maybe we expand the top counter of the R, and then maybe this bottom leg gets like a little bit of a curve. Again, I've said this 1 million times already. We're staying messy. Like I'm aware that this doesn't look good yet, but that's not the point. I could call this done and then move on to a tightened version if that's what I want to do. Or I could keep iterating and see if we can make this even more special and unique, and fun. I'm going to try that. I'm going to experiment with maybe pulling this bottom part of the C, maybe it can tuck under the U and give a cool look. The other reason I think this could be fun is that because the top part of this R got big to fill this shape, I think we could do that with the C to just have that consistency. I think when you're pushing the letter form shapes, you can make it feel more cohesive by being consistent with the way that you stylize some letters. So we can try tucking the U up top there. And then, I don't know, maybe we can do the same thing with the R. Pull this leg of the R all the way over here, and then we can try tucking the V on top like that. And now we've got an even more interesting composition to sort of tighten this up, build that cohesiveness between the letter forms so that they have similarities. And I would do that by making some universal lines and shapes that sort of pull it all together. What I would do is tighten this curve up and like draw it in nicely. And then draw this other curve because it carries through most of the composition. Let's see, it's a little wonky here. We can just fix that up. And then what I'll do is fill this in. Then I'm just going to come in here and erase these extra bits. Now using this as like a guide, it'll help me rebuild those shapes so that they're more cohesive. So we could do the same thing we did before in the circle and erase the areas that we don't need. This will make that line just flow through all of the letters, making it feel more fit together. And just a little bit nicer down here and curve this off. Now when we would go in and draw the rest of these letters, they would have that underlying structure that would make it flow all the way. And I would do the same thing up at the top and then build the rest of the letters into that. And then that curve, which is the underlying structure of the letters, would be fully locked in and ready to go. And you can do this sort of thing with any shape, doesn't have to be a curved line. You could do it with like a triangle, right? The word. Yes. You could draw it with an abstract shape if you're trying to make candy, candy letters. Anything you want. Doing this same sort of process will help you to that easier. Because you're not just trying to immediately start doing it. You have this sort of structure and then you're building around that. So all of those letters were loosely built around San Seraph letter forms, the ones that don't have the feet. If you remember, you can also bring serfs into the equation to maybe give a more retro vintage or fancy look. You can start drawing like something with saps by doing the same, just uppercase simple letters like this. To use as your guide, you just make them a little fancier. Using this underlying structure, you could come in and just do like simple line seraph like this. You could do some fancier curved ones like this. You could try making really parts of the letter, like just one part of it and then there's like a seraph on it that you could do more like curved, sort of elaborate ones. The possibilities are endless. If you can make up seraph that don't even exist. Like you could do a little circle with, I don't know, a little thing like that. You could do curved lines like this. Aside from Sarah, or sand seraph or fluffy or drippy or slimy. You can also use like angles to sort of, you know, give some energy. For example, if we shift this really far forward, like it's super italic, it could give it like fast, speedy, energetic look. And you could do that by just sort of using that underlying guide and like shifting it over and then maybe bringing the lower points back to match the bottom areas give you this sort of really dynamic angled look. And even just like the shape of let some are bigger, I think it has this character and energy that I really like. So I think starting with imperfect guides can be a fun way to sort of give you some extra energy. And I think that's an important thing to remember. The hand in hand lettering is just as important as the lettering itself. That imperfection and handmade touch is what gives the lettering character and gives it that warmth and just a fun expression. And remember, you don't have to stick to just one lettering style. Mixing and matching these lettering styles, even within a word, can give sort of like a fun, naive, playful look. That could be just what you're looking for. For example, I could come in here, maybe I want to do like a wiggly W here for the weird. Just making some wiggles, wiggling around. Then maybe for the E, I'll come in here and do a seraph old timey looking lettering style. And maybe for the eye, I'll, you know, do like a weird little, not even weird, we'll just do like a little little cursive eye, little small one. And when you're playing around and experimenting, you may find that your underlying structure is no longer helpful. So, you know, you could just go ahead and shift that around. So I'll pull this over here, do a chunky R with a long, weird leg like that. And then maybe we'll just throw in an upper case D, right on top. And now we've got this weird combination of letter forms here that you are starting to sort of feel a little bit cohesive. 6. Script Tips: Script lettering is based on that varied fluid stroke created by handwriting cursive with a brush. As a result, when we draw script, we try to emulate that by keeping the downstroke thicker than the upstroke, just as it would have been if it were done with a brush. Obviously, there's some flexibility here and you can interpret this with your own style. You can change how thick that downstroke is in relation to how thin the upstroke is. You just don't want to mix them up and put them in the wrong spots because then it can look a little bit weird and sometimes just not read right either. I'm using a brush here that emulates that thick and thin process. But generally, when we're doing illustrative hand lettering, we're drawing out these shapes and not depending on the brush. I don't really like to use brushes like this. I like to really control the way I'm drawing. So I use just a brush that has normal pressure sensitivity and normal changes to really control how I want my letters to look when I'm drawing script with just almost a monoweight line and I want to add in those thicks and thins. I'll do it after the fact usually or I'll just come in and make sure the upstrokes are thin and then start to get thicker as down like this. And then just sort of color those areas in. And then this area, it would be a downstroke. And sometimes, especially when you're starting, you really have to think about how it would be written. So you may just find yourself writing it on the side just to sort of test or even just like Er writing it. I often write letters to sort of figure these things out, but it's like up, down, up, down, up, then down like that. I'll either add the thick that way, or I might like outline it if I'm trying to do like a really thick letter. This is a little bit more of a sort of advanced, even though this looks terrible, the idea of drawing it that way. But you can still use the same technique that we did when we were making the different style letters. You can just go ahead and draw your letter in. And then just come in after that, draw that extended area onto it where the thicker areas would be. And you can experiment with some dramatic differences, like the play around with some massive thick to thin ratios to get a really unique look. You can also go the opposite and have almost no difference, or literally no difference. You can have a very monoweight look. That's okay too. What you don't want to do though is just put things in the wrong area because then it just looks a bit a bit weird, but maybe you know that's wrong and you want to do that. Anyway, that's the whole kind of thing with a luster of lettering. You can break the rules, but I think you should know them before you break them. You can do a lot of the same things that I talked about earlier with like maybe a curved baseline. This tends to work really well with script lettering, where you draw your curve baseline and then come in and wrap your letters to that line to get a interesting look. Something that you can do to make sure that your type is looking extra clean is to make some guides for yourself to make sure that your angles are consistent. So I'm going to grab a ruler here and going to come over here, set the ruler at this angle matching this main letter. And I'm just going to draw some guides throughout the word and then use these to re, draw my lettering to match these angles a little bit. We'll turn off the ruler, bring down the opacity here. Now we can do a tighter version of this lettering that we drew quickly that uses these angles as a guide that's looking a little neater though the spacing is a little off here. I think this A could be a little bit wider, but again, these are just some tweaks that we can make to finesse things. We can just over here just kind of pull this letter out a little bit, and we can still use that line as a guide like that. And now our spacing is a little bit better, size is a little wonky. But listen, it's just an example sub judging my letters. Script lettering is a lettering style that can be a little bit more difficult to read than traditional letter styles. And as a result, you want to be extra mindful of what makes each letter unique, especially when there are very similar letters. For example, the H and the K here. Now they're fine like this, But if you start to get a little bit more crazy and you're doing some walkie shapes that you're trying to fit these letters to. And you're like playing around with like pinching letters. Hong Kong was the only thing that I could think of that had both of these words off the top of my head. Because we're warping this type so much. You can see that both the H and the K are getting a little compromised. And this coming in like that, this is starting to read like a K and that gets confusing. What you want to do is make sure that you are not. Distorting too much. What makes that letter unique or emphasizing it more than it needs to be? Like you could do things like pull this in even more dramatically to get that K shape. Or just making sure that there is a clear space between that area, even if you're warping it. So even if you were bending this letter, you could still make sure that it feels like an HI. Just maintaining that spacing. And while we're talking about individual letters and what makes them unique, let's talk about traditional cursive lettering for a second and what the letters look like. So this is just a school assignment sheet for teaching cursive lettering. Maybe you remember some of these letters are kind of weird, like the cursive G. Listen, these are wild letters and I do a lot of script lettering and I do not ever draw my G like that. I never draw my eye like that, I never draw my like that. My suggestion would be to make up your own letters. I would argue that made up versions of these upper script letters would read better because people are more used to seeing non script letters. So if you create a letter that looks like the letter is supposed to be, but in a script context, I think it'll read better. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, this cue, or we've got this shape like that, that's just going to read like a cue. Most people are not going to read this as queen. Instead, what I do is just, you know, maybe we put an on an angle and then just get a little fancy curly cue. And that's definitely a cue. No one is going to question what letter that is. What about the this? What is that? I don't want to ever draw that, that's disgusting. You know what I do? I'll just it's almost wiggly angles. Look at that. There we go. I'll just do this. I'll do this all day. Don't give a foot in heck, or the G. I have to remember how to even draw that. That's weird. Usually for a G I'll, you know, maybe do something like this or kind of go for the lower case and just make it look bigger. But this isn't bad. I think that's okay. You could do with or without that. I think it'll still read that way because it's different. The J sometimes I don't like, I think that J can get a little bit confusing. I'll do the same sort of thing where I'll just get a little fancy, like this. There we go, that's my J. I'll do that. Instead of getting all like, I don't even do that properly, let's cut that cut that. We don't need that in here. So make up your own rules. That's my next pro tip. One of the most fun things to do with script lettering is to play around the squash, not squashes. Play around the pumpkins. Playing around the squashes. And ligatures, swash, swashes or just, you know, extending. Some of the lines get a little fancy. They're just sort of decoration. Like for example, we could come down here, build something like that. We've got this little fancy going on. A ligature is when you combine two or more characters into one letter. So for example, we bring this over into this L and now we've got this really fancy lettering treatment for Al. There you go, Al. That's for you. And you can just sort of like add these things on. It's one of those things where you want to try to balance it out and not get too wild, but you know, you can take it too far and then dial it back. I like to use them to sort of shape the way my lettering goes. We could pull this over here, you could do some more, could loop this up like this. You can get pretty, pretty fancy sometimes. It's just kind of extending the end of the letter, pull that in. One of my favorite things to do with script lettering is to find ways to connect the words into just so they're all attached using swashes and ligatures. In my earlier typography lesson, I made a lettering treatment for just a little ridiculous thing I said about the most elusive secrets of hand lettering or something like that. And you know, this is what it looks like, just script on its own in the same sort of composition. But kind of went in after that and found all these ways to connect the letter forms. And this is super fun and something I really enjoy doing when I'm doing something that has all those like crazy connections. Like the other one, I'm looking at something like this and just finding areas where I can sort of like make them fit together. I'm like, okay, this can come over here, maybe this can swash over and oh, look, there's that I there. We can dot the eye with that. Maybe we can extend this a little bit to like fit down there. We can just have this sort of curl up a little bit more and then I'm like, oh, look at this, these two could connect maybe. So then I'm like, make this little fancier pull this up over here. And then just, you know, just looking for these ways that I can sort of pull them together. So maybe this can come up a little bit bigger to fill that space. Maybe we can tie this together by like crossing the T or something like that. It was hard for me to not go wild and just bring it all the way through over to here, but that would be too much. So sometimes, you know, you got to dial it back a little bit and then I'll just sort of fit it in there and just sort of make it, make it all work as well as I can. And I'll noodle with this kind of thing, a lot too much. Another thing to think about when you're doing script lettering is how the angle of the letters can really sort of affect the vibe, if you will. For example, if I do something very vertical and sort of loopy, like this, feels very sort of, I don't know, friendly, playful, almost a little cutesy. But like if you do the same thing at like an angle, it's a very different, oh, it's oh, over here. It's like, oh, you feel me? My voice said okay, okay, over here, it's like okay, okay, that's enough for now. 7. Choosing Your Phrase: The first step in creating a lettering based illustration is choosing a phrase to draw. I recommend choosing something short so you can focus more on lettering style and composition. And less time on fitting it all in and getting it done. Also, with less words, your letters will be bigger, which will make it easier to stylize them. You can pick something meaningful or something that inspires you or just something silly. Maybe it's something you always say. Maybe it's something from a book or a movie, or your second favorite song. If you're struggling to come up with something, I would suggest not overthinking it. Just choose anything. And if you come up with a better idea, do another one afterwards, then you'll have double practice. And practice is the only way to get better at illustrative hand lettering. That's another. Once you have your phrase selected, simply write it out. Doing this will give us a quick visual reference for the length of each word. Before we start doing any sort of sketching, we'll need to figure out the visual hierarchy for our composition. Basically, what's the most important word or words within our composition that we want to really make the star of the show. 8. Letter Style Sketching: For my demonstration, I decided to illustrate this quote by Care Fresher that I've always liked. That is, I'm very sane about how crazy I am. I just think it's a fun, silly quote. So for my visual hierarchy, I want crazy to be the focal point. It's kind of the most important part of this phrase, That's what the whole thing is about. So I'm going to sort of build the composition around the word crazy. So that can really be the focal point of everything. And what I like to do at this point before I start sketching out the composition, is just play around with some different lettering styles for the word crazy that may influence the overall composition. Before I started sketching out different styles for the word crazy, I wanted to just think a little bit more about what it means in different ways I could express that. So crazy, you know, it means like wild, It could mean like erratic, unpredictable, could be energetic. So I wanted to think about those things in ways that I could visually express them. So here are the sketches that I worked on. The first one is just sort of like some crazy, kind of, you know, energetic, pointy, spiky crazy letters. I guess the second one was just simply making the letters really big and like breaking it onto two lines just because it's just so big, it's crazy. I don't know for this one I tried just like mixing different kinds of lettering styles because it's sort of like crazy that it's all different things. It's like, you know, multiple personalities or something like that. For this one, I kept it more simple and just tried to express energy and sort of unpredictability by having these shifting baselines and the letters sort of skewed like they're just bouncing all over the place. This one, I think it's kind of cool, but I think it's a little too hard to read. But I tried to really challenge myself by using a shape to make the letters. So thinking of like energy and like crazy, like a burst, a burst of energy. So I made that burst shape and tried to fit the letters into it. And although I think it's kind of cool, I think it's maybe a little too hard to read. I was liking the idea of the stacked type, so I tried to sort of combine mixing styles a little bit and just sort of making an overall shape with the stacked type. And then just, you know, another simple, just kind of crazy lettering. So as you can see, I was just trying to explore a lot of different variations and play around with different ways that I could illustrate crazy. And then maybe use that as a starting point to build my composition. 9. Thumbnail Sketches: An important step in creating a good solid composition in any sort of illustration or piece is to do some thumbnail sketches at the beginning. When you're doing thumbnail sketches, I think it's important to keep the thumb part of it in mind and make sure that they are small. The reason for this is that you can generate a bunch of them quickly and also see them from like a bird's eye perspective. Like you can see the whole thing and get a feel for the overall shape. Another important thing to keep in mind is that you want your thumbnail sketches to be close to the same aspect ratio of your final illustration, so that they relate for me, I'm thinking about doing like a four by five composition. So I went ahead and made some little squares in that proportion, but they are small so that I can iterate a bunch of different compositions quickly. Another way to make this process even faster when you're doing something like illustrative lettering is to not redraw the words over and over again because that can be very tedious and we're trying to think about overall compositions. Breaking it down into simple shapes will help you think about the composition just as an image as opposed to words on a page. An easy way to do that is to take your simply written phrase and then go ahead and put some rectangles around the words like this. And this will give us a visual reference for the length of the words. And then we can just use these rectangles when we are doing our sketches. And the point of this is that you're just sketch with these rectangles based on their rough shape. And you can change the size of them, but you've got your proportions like you could have a big one based on that. So here are the rough sketches that I did. As you can see, they are very rough and I think that's the point. You don't want your sketches to be too tight. You want them to be quick. If you look at your sketches and they look very good, that tells me that you're just so good at drawing. It tells me that you're spending too much time focusing on the details and not the big picture at this stage, we just want to think about the big picture. We want composition overall, not individual things. I started with that stacked crazy type treatment, and I just put that on all of these to sort of build around. And then I mostly used the rectangles to sort of play around with placement. But I did draw in some of the shore letters. Like on this first one I wrote out, I'm and I am because it was not much more work than the boxes themselves. Then I found it to be more helpful, but I tried some staggered angles for the type and just playing around with how it flows. This first one was pretty straightforward, just like a centered symmetrical design where very sane was like the second level of visual hierarchy here. And then I was making the other stuff be subdued a little bit. On the second one, I was pushing that visual hierarchy to make it even more clear that there was like crazy, very sane. And then all the other information, I started introducing the idea of like a script lettering for very Sane because it felt like it expressed very sane. Just like a serious, more professional, or not professional, but just like a more serious look like elegant, serious. That was my inspiration for that. Then on this last one, I played around with scripts more, but maybe just having it for the word sane and then setting back the rest of the other type. And then I pushed this crazy lock up a little bit to break up the space, which I thought was cool. And that allowed me to put, I am down below the Y to just have it fit together like a puzzle a little bit. And that's something that I like to do. I like to think about these compositions and illustrated littering quotes as like an overall shape. In addition to individual elements, I'm thinking about the shape of the like, how it all looks together as opposed to the style of one individual word. That's important to me too. But at this stage, it's like what is the shape of the drawing that we're making? If you haven't already, write down your word, throw some rectangles around it, pick out what the most important word is, and start playing around with some different styles for how that word could look. And then do some thumbnail sketches, filling out the rest of the composition. You don't have to limit it to just one of your treatments for the word. If you want to try some variations, I highly recommend that I only have three sketches here, but oftentimes I'll do more than three. I think that you should do a ton of sketches. The more sketches you do is, the better. And if you're having a hard time picking, share them in the group project area and we can give you some suggestions and feedback. All right, I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Composition Tips: Another way to get started sketching out your composition is to just break your phrase down into the important words and then the secondary words. This is sort of like the visual hierarchy thing we talked about, but just a little bit more broad. Maybe just not focusing on the main point, but the key words that you're going to focus on and just getting those down onto the page and then adding in the other stuff just rather simply and small to go into that composition. This approach can make a, or even just a sort of long quote, feel way more manageable because you're only really focusing on just a few words in that whole thing. And then everything else can just get nice and small and just tossed in there and not worried about so much. So I quickly wrote my phrase out up here, you'll see that I circled sane and crazy, because those are the important words and the ones that we want to focus on. So let's just start real simple. We'll just write sane and crazy, nice and big. I'm not too worried about style or anything right here, because I'm just sort of working on composition and we can address style. After that, we got crazy again, just sort of getting it down on the page, not worried too much about what it looks like. And then what we can do is just simply write in the secondary lettering. So I'm very sane about how crazy and then I am here. You look at this, you immediately get the sane and the crazy. And it kind of makes you want to read more because we've got this focused on these two words, sane and crazy. And just this simple thing already sort of looks like something. This sort of technique of just writing the important words big and then making everything smaller will naturally lead to good results. You can take the same technique and just make it more interesting. Like maybe we'll start with a script for sane. Just make it feel more serious, more sane. And then we can do the other idea where crazy is just like crazy tight, broken onto two lines. Put the Z down here. Again, just playing around, not worried too much about anything else. And then we can come in and just write the other stuff small. So maybe I'll just take advantage of this space up here. All right. I'm very. And then we can put about how in the space that's left over crazy. And then maybe we could put I am there. So the spacing will sort of dictate where things can go and give you ideas for how it can work. And although this is super messy, it's given me some ideas for what this could look like. And if I just come in and do like a quick reworking of this, I can make a pretty interesting composition I think. So just neaten this out a little bit, a little bit. Nicer script there and then maybe fit the m very in a more intentional way. Maybe we can make a rectangle shape for about how, just to make this a little bit neater and now we can just sort of be more intentional with this placement and just, you know, tighten up how we're drawing it. Maybe draw these letters so they use the space a little bit better. Come in here and maybe tuck that tail, the y in. And then I like the way I am just fits right in there. So maybe we can try one more that's sort of a combination of these two where we're using the lettering style for sane and crazy, but making it a little bit more straightforward. Like the first one, the same script but just have it on one line. And then we can do that crazy two line crazy like this, leaving room at the bottom for I am. And then oh, you know, we can take this little tail of the S and maybe pull it in, make it like a little arrow and then put about toe right here. So this sort of playing around and experimentation leads to some, you know, fun ways that you can do this. And then maybe when we do m very, we could have this tail come in and loop into that. And then we've got this whole sort of interesting connection happening there. Another approach you can take is to start with a shape and then work your quote into that shape. Sort of fitting the words into the spaces as well as you can. This technique can be a lot of fun and lead to some really interesting results, but it can be kind of tricky. And I do recommend when you're getting started to try to keep that shape pretty simple. Real complicated shapes can be a handful to get all of your words to fit in there and read properly. One of the benefits to fitting your quote to an overall shape is that it's way more forgiving if you want to incorporate lots of different lettering styles. Because that overall shape will unify everything and make it feel a lot more cohesive. Even if there's a lot of different styles in there. Sometimes I'll just do a wiggly abstract shape or just get something on the page to just get started even if I don't know what I want to do. And then just try to work my lettering into this to see if I can do something with that. So I'll make the shape and then get a new layer or a new sheet of paper. And then sort of just come in here and try to write out the word very simply like this, just to get a feel for the space. And I'm just focusing on those two important words. And seeing like how they can work there. And then I can come up here, see if very fits there. And then about how that fits. This is very crude and quick, but it's helping me to figure out how I can make it work to the shape. With that, as a framework can bring down the opacity. Bring down the opacity of the shape too, because I think It'll be a little easier to see. Now I can sort of stylize this to make it more fun. So maybe I'll make this Sane type a little bit bigger and have it wrap to that shape. I'll often skip to like the outer letters first because I find that doing so gives me a little bit more leeway in the middle and helps me to not have anything look squished. But again, the second part is still very experimental and I'm not really concerned about getting it perfect. I'm playing and just sort of seeing what will work. And then I'm going to skip about how because that's very secondary and I want to make crazy more of a focal point. So thinking, I'm going to have the C come down. Just use this full shape like this and then have it there. And then we can have IAM come right off that tail of the C. We can do the same thing, where we tuck the A on top of the R to relate to the C doing it to the R. Sometimes you're doing some weird stuff with your letters, trying to make it work. And this y getting a little weird here, but we can refine that in the next, in the next iteration. So again, we come back, turn off the previous one, and we're getting closer. That's what it's all about here. We can look for the problem areas like this. Y is a tricky area, so I'm thinking, what if we have the crazy type taking up more space and curve up a little bit, and then we can have the Y use this space, Maybe something like that, where it's, you know, getting really weird, but it's the word crazy. So we can sort of lean into that craziness. We can keep refining. We can also decide that, hey, we made this shape up as an abstract shape. Maybe if we just pulled it over a tiny bit more, we could make this y look way better. And that's a decision that you can make because there's no rules besides the ones the ones that you make up. Tuck that in there, boom, boom, boom, like that. I am, and I keep reiterating this, but stay messy because it's going to help you to create a more interesting composition. The making it look good is what the refining stage is for, and we are not in that stage, all is over. Maybe we can have the Y tucked down into that. And, you know, this looks messy, but we know what it could be. What if we did something more angular, more like kind of explosion? I don't know if that looks explosion, trying to like have explosion vibes, but also a little bit simple because we are trying to fit a phrase into it, so I don't know, we'll do something like this, bring down the opacity a little bit, make a new layer, and let's see if we can words in it. So crazy is the main focal point of this phrase. And the shape has this like center area and I think we should use that to fit crazy in, so I'm just going to rough in the word crazy. I am stylizing it a little bit just because I can't help myself. And I'm just referencing a style that we did before loosely. I say okay, and now we can quickly write in the other stuff. So it seems like it should use that space up. Maybe we need a bar for about how that would go there and then we need Sane to sort of use this space. Maybe we can have, I'm very in like a box there. This is getting a little crammed, but I think we can do it. I think it's going to have like a cool effect up there at the top like that. And then maybe we do this option with I am very big 'cause this is like a different way to think about the phrase. And, you know, this process may make you question how you want the phrase to be read. Like this is an interesting take on it where you're saying crazy. I am like I am crazy. Bring down the opacity and then, you know, just refine it. Figure out where the issues are, for example. This same type is getting a little jammed but about how it could probably be a little bit smaller too. So maybe we will make that area for about how a little bit smaller like that. And then we can focus on making the same type there and just be a little bit more bold. But I'm very, yeah, so even just doing that and then pairing it with that, I think could be quite interesting. You don't have to use abstract shapes. You could use something like a circle. Maybe I'll put some curved lines above in case we want to put some extra type in there. I don't know yet. Put some of the top and bottom could be helpful. So maybe we get the two main focal point words, sane and crazy. And put them in the circle. And then split the circle in half and put about how in there. And then we can put, I'm very, I am in those little arcs blue, so I'm going to do a new layer or a new sheet of paper and try to fit the word sane up here. And I'm just writing it quickly just to have a guide. And then we'll do crazy down here. And this is so that I know where the letters will fit, without worrying about them, without running out of space as I try to add some style. So I'm going to bring down the opacity there. And what I want to do now is make the shape out of these letters. So I'm going to just try to wrap these letters close to the edge and see if I can get them to work in this space and still be readable. Which I think we're going to be able to do quite well. We got saying up there like that. And then we can pick this sea going over here, maybe we'll bring this y down. That, as you can see, I'm skipping around because I want it to be evenly spaced. Cool. Yeah, I think that could work quite well, so we tighten that up and fill those in. We can get a cool result out of that. And then we could just put very up here and then I am down here. And we could play around with the size or scale, but these are some other ways that you can just get started with your phrase and try different ways and experiment. And I really encourage doing as many of these as you can, so that you come up with the best possible composition. 11. Supporting Elements: Something that I really like to do and something that may help you out in planning your own composition or just give you some ideas is to maybe consider incorporating some illustrated element when you're doing this thing. You can think back about what we talked about in the last lesson where we tried to fit type into specific shapes. You can use that technique to wrap your lettering around the illustrated element or work it into the composition in some sort of way. In this illustration of some lyrics by the band Lawn, I decided to incorporate a simple character to help express the phrase, but I wanted the quote to be the main thing. When you look at this, the boldest stuff is the feeling stuff and the acting tough. Remember that visual hierarchy we talked about? Sometimes I like to create an image out of my lettering. For example, in this piece I used the two O's side by side and good to give sort of that kind of mischievous look to sort of express the idea. If you can't be good, be careful. He's just got this wide grin looking over to the side and just making this out of the lettering is a really fun challenge that I like to do. This can be tricky because you don't want to interfere with the legibility too much. But I think this is a good example of a situation that could work well when you're doing this kind of thing. I think it's important to be mindful of making the word read as a whole. Which is why when I colored this, I made sure to make that word feel cohesive so it didn't just get lost in the mix because it's really the most important part of the phrase. And if that was missing, you wouldn't get it at all. And then sometimes I just like to add an illustrated element to be like a secondary, just a little embellishment, almost like a florist or something. In this one, the only perfection is death. I just wanted to have a goofy little skull in there just to tie into the whole death thing. The skulls are dead. In this one, the illustrated element makes up the whole composition and the lettering builds around that. These two hands praying together, begging for you to not kill my vibe. I started with those and then built the type to wrap around those hands. This is similar to what we did in the last exercise where we started with a shape to fit our lettering to. If you did something like this with the hands, you would start with an illustration and then build your type to wrap around that shape. And then in other situations, I don't even necessarily incorporate an actual illustrated element. I'll just sort of make the lettering emulate the thing that I'm talking about. Like for instance, in this one the word is reminiscent of a gut, which is kind of gross. In this one, I've got this little butt character telling us that if we fart around, we might find out I made the letters emulate a part. But also incorporated an illustrated element here where everything wraps around and comes together. I don't really have much to say about this one, I just wanted to put this little butt guy in the mix. 12. Refining Your Sketch: The next step in my process is to blow up my thumbnail sketch to the size of my final illustration, and then just start refining it a little bit at a time. I do this through just lots of revisions on my sketches and just reworking them all a little bit at a time. Just fine tuning things, looking for different ways that the letters can work together. Just finessing the shape, the curves, that stuff, and just doing it through a step by step iterative process. I really like working this way because it allows me to be more flexible and just figure out new ways to make it all work together that maybe I wouldn't have thought of if I immediately locked in on one perfect composition. Once I have an area feeling like it's in a good place, I'll often make grids and just like guidelines to help tighten up that lettering and just make it feel a little bit better because I'm staying so loose in that sketching process. And this allows me to get a much tighter, just nicer script. And this is especially important when you're doing script and you're trying to match your angles and maintain some baseline. But even at this point with these guides, I'm constantly refining and tweaking my letter forms. And I think that this is an important thing to remember as you're working, as you're illustrating. And I think just an illustration in general is that you can always be refining. You don't need to immediately get to that final result. Doing it this way, I keep saying, can lead to some new things that you may have not thought of otherwise. But again, it's all just an iterative refining thing. Making new baseline guides for the letters here, and just figuring out how these two work together. Figuring out the thicks and the thins and the spacing of the letters, and just tweaking it a little bit. Sometimes this comes quickly, sometimes it's a little bit slower when it's an important part of the composition. Like this lettering that says, very sane. Or likely when I get to the crazy part, I'll be spending more time because there's a more important part of the composition. But some of the other supportive type will be a little bit easier. Like this I'm lettering and then this lettering that will go in the box here for about how as you can see, doing this quick writing out the word allowed me to figure out that spacing and then I just hold it back in. Now the crazy lettering is the star of the show here. I will spend quite a bit of time noodling with this, just trying to get these letters to fit together perfectly. Now, as you can see here, I'll skip around. I don't just do this one, I don't go from left to right like I would if I were just writing the word. I'm really working my way around the composition. Sometimes I find starting at the ends and working towards the middle can be helpful when you're trying to get things to fit together nicely. Then I'll take that refined version and then make an even more refined version. Sometimes this is quick, sometimes this is not quick. But again, that's okay. I'll do things here where I will connect letters completely, even if I don't intend them to be connected in that way. The lines will be fluid going through. And then I can just go in and erase what I don't need. But it's just fine tuning these spaces, how the letters wrap around each other, how they fit together, And just trying to get it perfect, perfectly imperfect. Now, this will be my new sketch to work from. I'll do the same thing that I did from the thumbnail, but I'll be using a tighter version to refine even more. Now, I don't do this for all of my pieces, Sometimes it'll only take one in between sketch. But for something like this, you know, I may noodle with it a little bit more. You can take as much or as little time as you need. That's up to you. As you can see, I'm refining this crazy lettering yet again, but I want it to be just right because these letters are like stacked and fitting together and making this shape really want these spaces that the letters connect to just feel perfect. I keep saying perfect, but I don't mean perfect. What I mean is like perfect to what my vision is. And it's an imperfect vision, But I just really want them to fit together. I really want to make that overall shape feel right and the letters to read properly. Sometimes that involves a lot of iterations. Don't feel bad if you have to do things a whole bunch of times and try not to get nauseous watching this in high speed. Now I'm just tightening up the rest of the stuff, getting this same lettering to a good point. I already used the guides and grid in the previous round. At this point I'm just fine tuning the thicks and thins and just getting it to look just right. Feel balanced making minor tweaks to the placement, just finessing the letters a little bit more clearly. I'm having issues with vary, but we'll get there maybe eventually, Sometimes I find myself using the eraser as much as the brush when I'm fine tuning these angles and cleaning things up. Just trying to smooth out these curves, get rid of any weird lumps. I think that's okay. Now we can get in this little lettering, make some guides to straighten that out and then just do a little bit of a tighter version. Then draw in the little three D effect thing. Do the tighter version from this about how lettering and we are ready to move on to the final illustration. All right, I'll see you in the next video for the final finale of illustration making. 13. Final Illustration: I have my tightened up line work all here ready to go. And I just made this quick little thumbnail color study to try to figure out what I want to look like. Sometimes I find it easier to just make something small like this, so I can just see at a distance to get a feel for how it's balanced and what it looks like. But this is what I decided to go with for the overall illustration. And I'll quickly talk through why I made these decisions. I'm thinking that the very sane would be white along with the I. And I like to just sort of have relationships between different parts of the phrase and you just help highlight different things like you know, I'm very sane. And then some of the decisions are just about like spreading, like balancing color. I liked this yellow that I wanted to have sort of pop in. You know, having it over here for the A. But then I, and then I am down here and just sort of having that lead you from here to here. And then doing the same thing with the purple over here. So before I start just filling this all in, what I like to do is make a duplicate copy so that I overdo it. I always have something I can come back to, just a clean line work version. You can live on the wild side and go directly in. But that's what I like to do to be safe. I've got this purple here. I'm just going to come in and start filling in some stuff. Just sort of using the color throughout the composition. Spreading it out, get the white stuff here. And then the eye and also the period I think is going to be good. Let's grab this bright yellow that I picked out here. Adjust my color fill. And then this am. Then let's get this in color. I may decide to adjust these colors once I get the black background in, but from my quick color study, I think these will be okay. So now I can make my background black and check out these colors, see how I feel about them. I think the pink could use a little more robustness, if you will. So I'm just going to give that a little bit more, a little more saturation that I also want to have about how type to be set back. Right now, it's a little too bold, so I want it to get knocked out of the purple. I want that to be set back so that my visual hierarchy is strong. Instead of filing that in black, I'm just going to remove the white. That already bumps the visual hierarchy quite a bit. My choices here were to sort of spread the color out evenly, but also really let the crazy just like pop. And that's why I decided to do it in like all these different colors because I wanted to really enhance that crazy vibe. And then very sane, just white on black, very clean, very bold. It stands out, you know, it has that similar presence to crazy where they're both very bright and loud. And then just sort of like tying. I'm and I am together I think is fun and then like the E and very sane, just like the things that describe it. And about how is like the least important thing, like it's secondary information. So it's like subtle back there, but it's still readable, just knocked out of that shape, but just all sort of comes together nicely. I would like to come in and like add some texture and stuff like that, rough it up a little bit just because that's sort of a vibe that I like to go for, but it could just be like this. One thing that I like to do at this stage is to just sort of fine tune a little bit. Now that it's in color, I'll start to see things that could be tweaked a little bit. So for example down here, this sort of relationship between the C and that Z, I think that could be a little bit nicer. So I might just come in here, grab this blue and just come in, clean up that edge a little bit. I don't want it to be too perfect, but I just think it could have flow together a little bit better there. Just erase a little bit of that excess stuff. Okay, so I think the rest of that is pretty good. As I mentioned, I think a little bit of a texture to just sort of make this loudness a little more subtle, but just it just feels like like these big letters have that like print maky look and I want to embrace that. So I'm going to use some texture brushes. You can use, you know, whatever you have if you want to add some texture. If you're using different software, If you are using Fresco or Photoshop, I think I'm going to be using some brushes by retrosupply co, from their Woodland Wonderland set, which I will link below if you're interested. But this is just a little bit of a texture then I'm just going to sort of paint in over these letters just to give it a little bit of, a little bit of texture, a little bit of grit, a bit of it over everything just to make it a little bit more cohesive. And then I might want to come in and maybe blend this edge with some more texture. Maybe I'll just use the same brush, but like at a smaller size, see what it looks like. If I kind of rough up this edge a little bit. Helps. I like to do this stuff on a separate layer so that I'm free to kind of experiment and play around without the concern of it getting too much, too wild. I tend to overdo things and have to dial it back. Maybe we'll just add in a little bit more with some white just to sort of enhance that print making look where there's just like maybe a little bit of overprint. Just some little details sort of push that analog look. I think I'll use this. This is called the waxy roller from that same set. Just a little bit more dramatic, but I think it gives a kind of a cool ink look. Maybe we could do some on this pink down here and grab some of the red just so it's like, you know, it's not just one in color that's bleeding a little bit. And then what I like to do sometimes is to just like overlay a paper texture over the whole thing. So I think what I'll do is come over here photos and I just have some paper texture saved on here. So I'll just grab one of these. You could place an image overlay on any app you're using. The process would be pretty similar, especially in like procreate or something like that. If you're doing this in real life, you're already using some paper, so you've already got some texture. And then what I like to do is go to the blend mode. You usually just put it on multiply, Now we just got this subtle paper texture over everything. And that, combined with the texture, I think gives a really cool and fun look. And that's it. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I hope you have enjoyed the process. I've had fun. 14. Final Thoughts: I hope this class inspires you to experiment more with hand lettering, whether it's on its own or incorporating it into your other work. Through recap, we learned about typographic fundamentals in different lettering styles, including some script specifics. We planned out our visual hierarchy by choosing which words were most important in our composition, and then we created thumbnail sketches to plan out our composition. Based on that hierarchy. We explored various ways to shape and design our composition using guides and shapes played around with lots of different lettering styles, and brainstormed ways to express meaning through those styles. We then chose one of our thumbnails to create a tightened up sketch from, and then we did several iterations, just fine tuning it as we went. And remember, do this as many times as you want. This process can often lead to unexpected ideas and solutions that you wouldn't have come to without going through the process, we tightened up our illustration, we colored it, and even added a little bit of texture. Fluttering has remained a cornerstone of my work for almost 20 years now. So I know just how much it can add to your portfolio and how much more versatile it can make you as an illustrator, which can lead to all kinds of new opportunities and more commissions. Thanks for hanging out with me and drawing some words. As I mentioned, it's one of my favorite things to do. I'm so excited to see what you create for this class project, so do not forget to share it within the project gallery. Seeing your work will inspire your fellow classmates and myself as well. And I'll be sure to give feedback on each and every one. Good talk.