Make Hand Lettered Fonts Using Procreate!

1. Welcome: Hi. My name is Celeste and I'm a professional illustrator and artists from California. And I'm here today to take you through a course on how to create hand letter fonts using procreate. It's so so easy, so fun, so relaxing. Uhm, you can sell them afterwards. You can use them. You can share them. You can do whatever you want to. Basically, you just use your little apple pencil and your tablets and create hen letter getting digitized and you're ready to go creating professional, um, usable open type and to type phones. So what you're going to need is your pen, so your tablet or iPad pro creates and I'll explain the rest of we go along. So I'm super excited. You can do it. I can do it. So let's go do it. 2. Creating Your Templates: Okay, let's get started making our first font. The very first thing you're gonna need to do is to go to a website called calligrapher dot com, and you're gonna want to create a free account. If you're just doing a basic character, said it's going to be free if you wanted to do something a little more complicated, that is a paid service. But for just getting started. Just a basic full character said they're free account is more than enough, so go ahead. Once you've created your counts, not Gwen log in. It's gonna take you to the first screen, and it was gonna walk you through how to create a template. You're gonna create a template that we're going to import into procreate, to trace out and to design our letters. So create click attempting. And as you can see, it's going to generate the basic characters required for English. Um, made a mistake. Remove all. I'm gonna choose minimal English. It's going to generate 60 characters, upper case, lower case and a few essential punctuation marks. And that's the first good block of characters for your first bond. If you're happy with that, um, go ahead download the template. You want to be sure that the PNG option is clicked instead of not a PdF PNG. I like to increase the size of the template cells so that it's easier to really get detail and to design age character. I like to keep draw helplines ticked as well as characters. It's background. So it reminds me which character I'm working on and the general shape and scale of it within each cell as you'll see as weak as we move forward. Once you have those click on download, it's going to generate a ZIP file right here and click on that, and it's gonna open the zip here. Now you have a dialogue window, and you should already have. If you don't already the application unzip, which is a free application from the APP store for IPADS. At least, um, so if you have that already installed, I will link to it. If you don't, um, go ahead and click on open and unzip and you're gonna see the template lives in there. You can click on that folder and you can see that my template actually generated three pages, because for each character it needs space and size, so we'll be importing these PNG's into pro creates in the next step 3. Import Templates Into Procreate: Okay, great. So we've made our templates on calligrapher dot com and now we need to get those into procreate so that we can design our first character set to go ahead and launch procreate, and you're gonna want to actually go ahead and click on a new canvas by clicking the plus on its top rights. And be sure to select an A four print size, which, if you don't already have it set up, it should be. But if you don't, it's to 10 by 2 97 millimeters. It's an international paper size, and you wanna be sure to make, um, the setting 300 dp I So that's nice, high quality. So click on that. But you have it, and we're gonna go ahead and we're going to import our template by clicking on the toolbar and we're going to on ad. We're going to insert a file, not a photo of file. Click on that. We're gonna navigate on my iPad to my unzipped folder where I stored my templates. And there you can see 123 pages of template to import. I'm gonna import each one, but I have to do them one by one, so it's gonna import looks a little bit smaller. We're gonna resize it. But I'm unclipped that ins amounts, but I don't lose any of it. Because when you re size that, you absolutely have to make sure that you have these, um, boxes in the corner because that's what's gonna help calligrapher when we re import it, read your design. So do not crop those off. Click on uniform and you're scaling it up. Start down in that corner and just drag it kind of size it within the canvas. But again, do not crop those off. You won't be able to make your fun. So there's our first. Our first character said you can rename that if you want. Teoh, I'll just put wind so that it can distinguish because they're they look the same ones. They're small. So I'm gonna do that same process again. I'm gonna add in sort of a file, go to number two, and I'm on a scale that Oppa's well, be sure it's uniform and that we don't lose those corners. Here we go. And I'm gonna name that that layer to and I'm gonna do it one more time because I have three. Depending on how big you scaled your cells when we created the template on calligrapher, you might have more pages or fewer pages. I happened to have three. So let's do the 3rd 1 import against Gaillot uniform, and I'm gonna rename that layer three. Awesome. So that's your basic set up for your templates. And now in the next step, we're gonna go ahead and dig in and start to design our characters. 4. Creating Your Letters: Okay, great. So just to recap what we've done so far, we have created our template on calligrapher dot com. We have exported it to unzip which lives on her iPad. We imported it into an a four size canvas. We've put everything. It's jumping on its own locked layer so that we can work above it. And now we are ready to get started with your amazing, beautiful first fonts. Um, maybe it's your first problem. Maybe it's not. But anyway, this is how we do it on procreate. I love doing an appropriate It just makes it super easy to edit and to refine. So there you go. Um, so I am using you can use any brush you want. I don't know what the look and feel you're after, but I'm gonna go with the technical pen because I like that. It's kind of, um, kind of calligraphy based. This is one of the free brush that's that is included in procreate itself. So you should have this palette of brushes. Eso choose again. Any brush you like if you want something clean or rough Umm, I might use that this sinking one. See how it works Yeah, I'll go with that. I'm left handed. I hope it's not distracting. But there you go. If you're right handed, be my guests and I will leave you guys to go ahead and paint design. Draw your own set as you see fit. But keep in mind that there are guidelines within each character cell and you want to stay within them. I know you, but I wouldn't do big letters like that. But that's not gonna be good. Once. Once we re import this into calligrapher dot com, it really wants you to kind of stay within these safe areas. Otherwise, you're gonna get weird spacing and strange cutoffs, that kind of thing. So kind of, go ahead and try to keep it. You know, relatively within each space as you see here. Don't do not extend. Don't do that. Keep it nice and tight. Um, zoom in. If you feel like you really need to go bigger, change your brush size. Keep it full opacity, though. And just experiment with what? What you like to see in your handmade funds. So I will carry on. I was gonna speed laps this so that you are not completely bored with my drawing 5. Exporting Your Templates from Procreate: Okay, so you've drawn your characters. And now what we need to do is to go ahead and export each sheet of the template as image files so that we can reimport them onto calligrapher dot com, which is going to generate the actual flat file itself. But we need to go ahead and export this. So what you're gonna want to do is make sure that that template that corresponds to these characters is visible and we're going to export these two layers. Remember, we had our template and are drawing layer. We're going to export this by clicking up here in the tool share. And I'm gonna go ahead, just share it as a simple J peg. I'm gonna save it to my camera rule here on my iPad. And I just find that the easiest way to share the files back and forth. So I had 10 3 templates. If you recall, I'm gonna turn off that 3rd 1 Turn on the 2nd 1 Just double check that everything is matching that These are, you know, that you're drawing layer and the character behind are the same. Um, again, make sure that these four corner boxes are visible. Everything looks clean, invisible and did the same thing. Click on the tool here, share a J peg and just save the image to your camera roll. That's later Number two. And now let's go ahead into our third layer and double checking that the corners are visible that my character drawing. Um, flare matches the template below and I can see Oops, I missed a nap. So I'm gonna go ahead and remedy that Trump gone in the right layer is helpful on and everything looks good. So now I'm gonna go ahead, click on the tool again, share J Peg and save it to your camera roll. Awesome. And that's it. So you've exported your your characters, and now we're gonna go ahead back to calligrapher dot com and generate our first font. 6. Building Your TTF:OTF Font Files: Okay, So once you're happy with your character design and you're ready to go, you're gonna go back to your Web browser to calligrapher dot com. And as you can see, it's still in the same template page, and we're gonna build our first font. So click on this my funds here on the top and says, No funds yet we're gonna upload our template. And I kept them on my iPad in my camera roll. So I'm gonna go ahead a navigate to that by choosing the file photo library camera roll. And I had three. Someone upload them one by type one at a time. There's one there's, too, and lastly, the 3rd 1 you may have more or less, depending on the size of your template. But that's what I have. And I'm gonna upload the template and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait as its processing. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes knots. Awesome processing, processing, processing, processing, processing. Still processing, processing. There we go. Voila! There it is. It's great. It's just as I had I'm designed You're not gonna find any surprises. Really. If you're happy with that or you don't want to keep particular ones. Just click on the trash icon. But it's hard to Adam back. So don't do that unless you really sure you want to eliminate the whole character. You could have a look at it. Everything looks good. Go ahead and add characters to your font and voila, it loads in this box. Here, you can see them all digitized. It's taken those from procreate, and now it's ready to build your first fund. So then click on build bonds, go ahead and give it a cheeky name. Um oh, mind. And then I'm queen, too. Get rid of the keyboard. It's not cooperating. Click on building. Meet there, and then it's gonna go ahead and process and make this into a true type font or an open type font. These are your fault files right here. You can go ahead and click on those. It's gonna download them to your iPad. Or you can share them out through Facebook or Dropbox or those types of options by clicking this year button. But really, all you need to do to now use it on your iPad or is to click on these, and it'll download them. You can preview it. Um, And again, just double check that you like. Like it. But usually I find I want export it and test it. Um, so I'll just take the first draft of it, so to speak. If you are ready to go, everything looks good. You're happy. Um, you don't want to make changes. Go ahead and click on your phone file, and it's gonna download it, Um, wherever you see fit. And I like to save it to my files fonts that There we go. And if you want to go back and do this second font type too late, you could do the same thing with that. It's one or the other is to choose which font. Um, on extension, you prefer type of thing. There you go. Now let's a re import that into procreate. We can actually use it as a 7. Testing Your Font: Okay, so we made our font, and we've exported are true type font to our folder and procreate our farm folder. And now all we have to do is find it and use it. It's that simple. So click on the toolbar here, you're going to on the plus sign at text I'm gonna type in, Let's see, just a simple hello. Return them at its style and I'm going to find my font All mine. And there it is. You can see that it actually works as a font so you can scale it up. You can adjust the kern ing. You can adjust the opacity if you had multi lines. Just make all kinds of text based changes to your farm. Just by that, it's a really fun to you. Did it? It was that easy. There you go. And now you can treat it like a font. You can change. Um, what it says all kinds of, you know, change changes that you would to a normal a normal front. You have those, um, abilities to change all these qualities. Yeah, 8. Final Thoughts: Thank you. So so much for watching this course. I hope that you found it useful and that you were able to create and digitize your own hand letter font using these simple tools. Share them, sell them, you know, just to use them. Um, yeah. I hope that you, um, explore more how to create and digitize your own hand lettering and handwriting or things, whatever style that you're into with regards to fonts. So thank you again. And I hope to see you in another course soon.