Moody Letters

1. Introduction to Moody Letters: Hi. My name is Abby Wilson. I'm a teacher in an artist, and I love watercolor and lettering. And in this class, I'm gonna combine the two and we're gonna create some moody letters. I will introduce you to several different lettering styles and give you insight on where you can get inspiration to create a page of letters. And in addition, I will be discussing mood boards and share some with you that I've created to give you color inspiration for this project. And I'm also going Teoh incorporate how you can achieve some fun textures and watercolor as a bonus, I've also included a lesson on art fundamentals that will help you with your design process and when you're creating a piece of art. So I hope that you are interested in making these moody letters with me. I can't wait to see what it is that you make. So let's go ahead and get started 2. Supplies: the supplies for this class are listed here in a general idea for you. If you want to know exactly what I will be using in the class, including brands, etcetera, check the description in the description. You will also find some files that will be helpful for you when making your project. 3. Fundamentals of Art Lesson : all right in this section, I wanted to do a little lesson on the fundamentals of art and give you some basics that will help you to plan and execute your design ideas for this project and for future artwork that you may dio. And if you've never had any type of lesson on any type of fundamentals of art, like the elements of the principles, this will only help you because you may be doing stuff instinctively, which is amazing in itself. But once you actually have the knowledge behind that, it will only help you up your game. So I want to go ahead and go over a few things. The first thing that I want to talk about is that there are three components to a complete work of art. So you have form, subject and content. We're going to focus specifically on form in this lesson, the subject in the content which are the what and the why are more self explanatory. Um, and that's outside of the tools and media. So what we're gonna focus on is how we're working in a certain area and what it is that we're gonna use to create certain things all right with form like I mentioned, it's how the art is made. So it deals with elements of art on principles of organization. And if you've never heard of those terms before, elements are lying shaped value, texture and color. You've probably heard of those, even if you've never really thought about what they are, And then the principles are balanced. Proportion, dominance, movement, economy, harmony and variety again, things you've probably heard of but never really look too much into. So we're gonna talk about a few of these, Not all of them. I'm just gonna pick out the ones that I feel like are important for our project for today and that I feel are important in general when creating. So if you look to the right, here's a bit of a flow. Chart form is the overall concept that were thinking of here. So when we're creating how we're making the art, we're going to use our tools and media, which are paint brushes, pencils, paper or canvas, that type of thing and we're gonna put the elements of art on it. The line, the shape, the value, the texture of the color are all going to be employed according to the principles of organization. So we're gonna take those principles of organisation and kind of use them as rules to make the elements come together. And once they all come together, they're going to create unity. So once you get you're elements working with your principles of organization, you're going to create a cohesive project or cohesive work of art. So now, focusing in on specific elements will start with line. I want to go over line because it's a basic drawing. Fundamental. Um, we're gonna use it today when we're drawing are letters, and I just want to talk about a few types of lines. So Qala graphic lines are lines that contain thick and thin qualities and are generally rhythmical. That's what you think of when you think of calligraphy and any type of connected lettering with those thick and thin qualities. Contour lines are also known as outlines there, the edge lines that define the outermost limits of an object. So if you think of a coloring book, those show contour lines cross contour lines are lines that cross and define the surface undulations between those outermost edges or the outlines and it gives it shape and volume . And then I wanted to talk about hatching and cross hatching because we're gonna use those two techniques to create some value and texture, which I'll talk about here in a second, Um, when we're doing our letter project. So with hatching that is making repeated strokes using an art tool like a pencil, and you create these clustered lines that are usually parallel and again a no creative value and then cross hatching is very similar. It's the lines that you use when you're hatching and then crossing over in a different direction, and that results in an even darker value. I'll share some examples of those visually in the next slide, so you could see these examples. I was mentioning. There's some calligraphic lines, not necessarily lettering, but you can see the thick and thin qualities, and then, with the line drawing techniques to the right, the top right one is hatching in the second on the left is cross hatching. As you can see, there is stippling. There's all types of different ways that you can create some value using just lines, so this might be handy whenever you're trying to create some texture. Later, toe look back and then contour and cross contour lines are shown at the bottom. There's the outside lines, and then you can see the undulations in the second apple with across contour lines. So the next element I want to talk about his texture. Texture is the surface character of a material that can be experienced through touch or the illusion of touch. So textures produced by natural forces, which is an actual texture, which would be like touching the bark of a tree. It looks rough. You touch it, it feels rough. That's the actual texture of the tree. Or you can create texture through an artist manipulation of our elements. So that would be simulated texture. And what that means is, just when you paint a picture of a tree, it looks as if it would be rough to touch. However, it's smooth. We're gonna talk more about texture when we do some fun techniques to create it, using watercolor in a section coming up. All right, so focusing in on color, which is my favorite element. Um, it could be talked about for a long time. I'm going to try to narrow it down to some of the things that I think are relevant to talk about today and some of the important aspects of color. So it's important to know that you can use color and color harmonies to create some type of emotional response from the viewer of the artwork. There's been studies to show that certain colors can create certain emotions, and people feel certain ways when they're surrounded by that color. Still volatile times in an airport or in an airplane, you'll notice it's blue or gray or green. Cool. Common colors. Um, that happens with a lot of things, and it's really need when you start paying attention to it. How often color is used to create some type of emotion, the physical properties of color, three different terms hue, value and intensity. So talking about Hugh, it's just the generic name of the color based on the position it is in the color spectrum. So red, blue green, that's a hue. It's the color name. Value is the lightness and darkness of a color. So it's the lightness and darkness of a hue, and the only pigments that you can mix with a color and not change. The actual Hugh or the color are white, black and gray. So when you add white, it's called a tent, and when you add black, it's called a shade and adding graze called a tone. So again, you can change the value of a color without actually changing the color by adding white, black and gray with intensity. We also can call that saturation. It refers to the quality of light in a color, So if you want to change the intensity, you could place a certain color next to its complement, which will talk about here in a second. And it might heighten the intensity of a color because it has a great contrast. The wave links have a very big contrast, so when they're next to each other, the intensities high. If you want to lower the intensity, you can do that by adding white, gray or black, which again changes its value. So to lower the intensity, you're also going to change the value of the color, which is kind of confusing but also fun to play around with so continuing on with the color wheel. Um, as you can see, the primary colors are red, blue and yellow. If you didn't already know that nothing can be mixed to make red, blue and yellow. Secondary colors are created by mixing these primary colors, so when you mix red with blue, you get violet blue with yellow. You get green and yellow with red, you get orange. Tertiary colors are also known as intermediate colors, and they're created by mixing a primary color with one of the neighbouring secondary colors . So primary color red. You mix it with the neighbouring secondary color, which would be violet and you would get red violet. If you mix red with orange, you're going to get red, orange and so on. Now you could mix those colors together an infinite number of times to create an infinite amount of colors, depending on how much of one color you put in with the next. So if you put more red in with your blue, you're going to get more of a red violet and it can go all the way up to read. So it's amazing the amount of colors that you can create just using red, yellow and blue. And as you can see on this color wheel, it shows the cool colors air on the left. The warm colors are on the right. We're gonna talk about that next. So as you can see again, warm colors are red, orange and yellow. Anything that reminds you a fire heat obviously is gonna be a warm color Cool colors or any colors that contain blue. So green and violator are cool colors. If you look, the line there is dividing them inside of the green and the violet areas. As a general rule of thumb, when you are mixing blue and yellow, you're going to get green. If you ADM or yellow to it, you're gonna have ah, warmer color. If you add more blue than yellow, you're gonna have a cooler color green. Same goes for Violet. If you add more red instead of blue, you're gonna have a warmer violet. If you add more blue instead of read, you're gonna have a cooler violet. So successfully using color can depend on this understanding of these basic relationships. And I'm gonna get into more of those on the next slide. So again, continuing with these color relationships, complementary colors are two colors that are directly opposite each other. on the color wheel. Like I mentioned before, they have a high intensity, so blue and orange would be examples of this. They are directly across from each other on the color wheel. Another would be yellow and violet split. Complimentary color combinations includes a color and then the two colors on either side of its complement. So blue and then yellow, orange and red orange would be a split complementary color scheme. Violet and yellow, green and yellow Orange would be another example. You can see that if you look to the right on the back of a color wheel that you can buy from Dick Blick. I love this color wheel. I used it a lot with my kids and my classroom, and they found it helpful. Um, it also has definitions on the back, so if you zoom in there, you could see those. The next one is a triad, which is three equally space colors, so that would include primary colors, so red, yellow and blue or secondary colors green, violent and orange would be considered triad color schemes. Tetrapods are four equally space color schemes, so ah, primary color and its complement, and then a complementary pair of intermediate. So what that means is, if you look at this over here, it's gonna make, like, a box or square on the color chart. Kind of like an X if you're gonna draw the lines through them So blue. I'm sorry. I want I want to scoot over blue violet, read yellow, orange and green would be an example of a te trat, so they're equally spaced. So if I start with red as my primary, I count down. 1232 Yellow, orange 1232 Green 1232 Blue Violet that gives you that square. If you look at that example there, it's the darker square in the background. That's that darker gray color saying tetrapod. So as you slide that around, if you wanted to do the same thing, you'd have violet and then count 123 and that's actually red orange, and then 123 to yellow. And then 1232 blue green. And that would be another example of a tetrapod. I hope I didn't make that too confusing without being able to point to what I was looking at. Analogous colors are colors that appear next to each other on the color wheel. So an example would be blue, blue, violet, violet or yellow, yellow, green and green, the cool colors and warm colors or examples of analogous color schemes as well. Because they are next to each other on the color wheel. Monochromatic color scheme is using one Hugh, but also its tints and shades and tones. So if you take blue, you can add white, gray and black to it, and then you would create a monochromatic color scheme. A great gray scale color scheme is using just black, white and gray to create like the intensity of black. So you get all the values just using those three three colors now, skipping over to the principles of organisation the 1st 1 I want to talk about his balance . Um, it's a sense of equilibrium achieved through implied wait, not actual weight or attention or attraction by manipulating the visual elements within an artwork to achieve unity. So that's just saying that the visual weight of an entire piece is balanced and even not one side is heavier visually than the other radio balances. The first type of balance I would like to talk about it means that it stems from a central location goes outward like a starfish. Symmetrical balance is the exact duplication of appearances in a mirror like image on both sides of a central access. So it would be like a face. You split it down the middle. It's the same exact on both sides. Approximate symmetry is the use of similar imagery on either side of that central access. However, the visual material on one side may resemble the other, but it's varied slightly, and I'll show you an example of that. In a second, asymmetrical balance is having unlike appearance, so it displays an uneven distribution of parts. Throughout, however, it's still balanced. It's just that it's not at all the same on both sides. Here are some examples of that, So the top left is Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, and it is Cem metrical balanced, symmetrically balanced, same on both sides. Below that is a Pablo Picasso piece that is an example of approximate symmetry. It's very similar on both sides, but has different different things happening. But again, it's a good example of approximate symmetry. The top right is asymmetrical balance. That's Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. If you're not familiar with it, I'm sure most people are that cypress tree in the foreground on the left there is pretty heavy visually. Yet the flow of the background of the story swoops there. Bring your eye over to the moon that yellow and bold compared to that blue. So it has heavyweight because of the color, even if the sizes and as big as that cypress tree in the front, the black there. So it is still balanced nicely. If you were to put that on a teeter totter, one side's not gonna lean more than the other. It's gonna be a fairly balanced piece of artwork, and then the bottom one on the right is unexamined, all of radio balance. You can see it in the from the centre spanning outward. And then the last principal that I want to talk about is movement. Um, so, like I was mentioning with the piece about, um, asymmetrical balance there story night, you're I traveled visually through pathways in that work of art. So the illusion of movement in a piece of artist created by how the artist configures the parts of it. So, like the cypress tree on the left was there. And then that background were the stars and the sky just kind of swooped to the right hand side. And bring your eye over to the moon creates a visual pathway so that your eye goes around the piece. So he did that using color repeating lines and shapes space, the dominance of the color of the top right. It's just a few ways that you can create movement in a piece of art. And when we're making our letters here in a few, we're gonna talk about how we can pick where we're gonna put certain aspects of our certain elements of our artwork to make our eyes move around the whole piece. So it's not just heavy on one side or bold on another. 4. Mood Boards to Inspire Moody Letters: in this section of my class. I want to talk about mood boards and how you can use them as inspiration to fuel your artwork. Okay, a mood board is an arrangement of images, materials, pieces of text and so on. It intended to evoke or project a particular style or concept. They can be made using any kind of medium, including the ones I have listed here. They can be used to convey a general idea or feel about a particular topic. A lot of times brands use them. Companies use them. Designers used them. My personal favorite way to use a mood board is the last example. It can be used as a way to collect different creative information in order to prepare for a new project. So I have created mood boards for the specific purpose. I created color mood boards. I made four mood boards to help you complete the project for the class. I created these mood boards to give you color and texture, inspiration And as we discussed in the art fundamentals lesson since color is so impactful , I feel like coming up with a really cohesive color scheme based on solid color relationships will allow you to create a really cohesive, moody letter project. So in addition to the color choices, I also hope that the mood boards can generate ideas for texture for either your background or for your lettering of the project as well. In this example, I used warm colors to create my mood board. As you can see, there's red or engine yellow and hot pink as well as some of their compliments. So just to throw out hints of Thekla colors inside of that warm color board, I feel like just heightens the intensity of those pretty colors. It reminds me of being somewhere like hot at night with those dark colors in there as well . I don't know. It's like you're at a beach at night. I love it. So as you can see with this, I wanted to also show some textures in there so you can see there's the stones in the center left area, and next to that are those repeating shapes of the flower. There's the repeating circle circular shapes with the tomatoes and with the lime wedges over there with grapefruit as well. And then, if you look to the left, there's those circles in that neon pink area where the neon light iss and that just repeats those circular shape so that your eyes move across it. So, going along with all of the art fundamentals, I tried to set these up to continue that throughout. Also, I want to note down at the bottom of every mood board. Um, I've listed where I collected my photos from, So in most of them they're usually all from unspool ash. However, my friend Katie Maley allowed me to use the two photos of food and drink here, and then Key West pottery allowed me to use several images from their instagram site. Well with pottery in this cool color mood board, I've clearly added a great deal of blue, but also some blue greens and some blue violets, as well as pops of, um, warm colors here and there, especially that orangy pink that is a complementary color to that bluish green. And as you can see, there's also a wide variety of texture for inspiration in this one as well, and this is the grayscale mood board. As you can see, it's using black, white and gray, so all the tents shades and tones. It has repeating patterns as well. You can see the different windows. I've made a triangle with your eye if you look at all three windows and in addition to the texture of, um, nature with the animals, I also included the car and the pottery a swell. And here is a complementary and grayscale mood board. I'm calling it that because it's got these complementary colors popping in with the blues and the oranges and the greens and the pinks. And then it's got the grayscale photos as well to balance it out. So if you want to use black and white and color, you are more than welcome to do that. And I wanted this mood board to inspire that. 5. Creating Watercolor Texture: okay for this section, we are going to work on some texture in ways that you can use your water color to create a texture. You can use this for your backgrounds of the letters, or it could also be used for the letters themselves. But this is just fun experiments that you can do with watercolor if you've never played around with making different types of textures. Very simply so. I have my paper here today. I'm using Be paper. This is 100% caught in paper. It's £140.300 gram. Um, watercolor paper. So I have with me my two jars of water off to the side. Here there's a dirty one in a clean one. Like all my classes, I used two jars of water. When I'm painting, I have my palette here. These are royal telling Eagle Line liquid watercolors, and I have pretty much primary and secondary colors in my palette. Plus, I have this one's a brownish color, and this one's a gray. This is a turquoise e spill back here. If you can see that, and then I also have some rubbing alcohol with me. We're gonna drop some of that on to their later. I also have paper towels not only to dry my brush with, but also have a rolled up one for blotting. And I have a curled up one and then I'll show you how to lift off of here to create some texture as well. So this is just so that when we put our watercolor backgrounds together, they have some visual interest, and it makes it a little bit more fun to look at than just looking at the same ingredient behind each letter. If you choose to do so with my brushes, I have a round sized to smaller one and a larger one Doesn't matter. The brush types be like the equivalent to a size eight round. I'm going to get wet, and I'm just gonna water down a section of paper here clean water. And I'm just making a little square on my paper. I'm not sure if you'll be able to see it all yet, but now I'm gonna just random colors. I'm not even thinking about colors at this moment, But you can try this with different paint because each pigment, maybe a little different, and especially with the alcohol in the salt. Oh, I didn't mention the salt. I also have some table salt. So I'm just working on the edges here, and I'm gonna let the inside fade. You can choose to use any texture or no texture. When you're working with this, we just kind of let that background outside edge be a little darker than the center. Okay. Now, to make my first texture, I I just laid down water with one pigment want you on here? So I have my rounded paper towel, and I'm gonna tap on there going in different directions. But you can see now there's a little bit more visual interest than just that solid blue. If you'd like. Now, you could either leave it how it ISS were to do a second layer to your background. I'm gonna take the same paint color. I mean, adds a more darker edges. I'm going to do the same thing with my paper towel. Gonna find a clean spot this time Gonna crinkle that edge there. So it looks a little bit crinkly and I'm gonna take some off. It almost looks like a sky now behind there. Okay, so there's one way to make some texture. I'm gonna get my clean brush again, making another square on here. This time I'll do some green, the top Just pull it all the way down. I'm gonna leave so you can see I'm gonna try to make it like a greedy int wash back here. So the darkest I mean, the top is darker. Has a darker value in the bottom. Has a later value there. Clean my brush. This is just water going back up there. Okay, Now I have my rolled up paper towel twisty. You could make lines in your work with this. Some paper were really that that color get picked up in some world. This paper I have noticed. I don't know if it's, um why, but it it really soaks in my pigment when I use my equal line paints on it. But you can see now I have some straight the lines through there. You can see better in person than you can through the screen of my iPad at the moment, so hopefully you can see that. Okay, but there's some nice Jaggi lines in there. If you want it to be more prominent That's just a subtle sort of Washington Go back in because you don't want to take away from your letters too much. You just want to kind of have a nice, quiet, interesting background. But the letter that would go on top of this one would have to be a bold one anyway, so that it is it over taken by the background. Do you want the letter to be front and center? I'm just gonna adds more water to that. And then one more time, I'm gonna lift in the same spots that I have already. Okay, so there's a streaky background with some streaks the next I'm gonna get my alcohol ready. I'm just opening the lid now. Okay. Gonna do the same? Same thing I'm wedding. My paper. Just move on down the line, making my square. Now. I just dipped my brush directly into the alcohol, put it in the cap, and I'm tapping it onto there. It almost looks like I'm looking underneath of a microscope. And as that dry, you'll really see those circular shapes and there appear okay. And for them, the next one, I'm gonna get my salt ready, and I just I didn't show you this. In the beginning, it's just table salt. We use some pink Himalayan from the land table salt here, put down my pink, and then I'm gonna Sprinkle. It's a mountain to hand here. I'm just gonna Sprinkle the salt onto there. Let it go everywhere here. Then I'll let that dry, and then I'll wipe the salt off. You can also, once the salt is on there, that's the more paint to it. The dirty one in Christ will let that dry and see how it looks. So that was using, um, the blotted paper towel. This is the rolled up paper towel. This is some alcohol. This is assault. The next ones were going to do with just our paint. Russian paint alone. We used this orange. You got some salt on their move that. Okay, so I'm putting the first part down, clean my brush off, putting the first part down without putting water underneath of it first. So it's stopping right where I touch. I got eraser shavings. Said my paints. No, just like did that earlier. Why moved in around now? I'm just gonna take my water. I'm gonna pull it down. Just water alone. Not tell. You can get a really nice Grady in effect happen so darker on the top later on the bottom. Like I started with that green went up there. And if you want to get it even darker, you can do that. And then the last one, I showed you like a tie dyed look so that if you want to use more than one color, this is just water. I'm gonna use two colors here. Will do a, um, turquoise that spilled up there. Do turquoise, cleaning my brush and then yellow. And I'm just gonna touch it in that wet on wet technique leaves plumes, create some fun effects there. Gonna get a little bit more yellow to the same thing in cases. That's a fun background texture as well. Okay, so once these dry, then we'll get out. I have my gel pen. Um, this is Ah, Tom Bo. Feud Food too, Stinky. I'm not even sure out. Why say that? Correct or not, you can use any type of marker that you have fine point pens. Whatever it is that you have at home to create fine lines. I like the white option in a black option, but you can use color. It doesn't matter. I'm just going to show you examples of how to do it with these two pens here once these dry . 6. Adding Details: Okay, Everything is dry now. You can see it looks like little crystals here. What you want to do with that is just no, make a mess with them. That's what I'm gonna dio. What you want to do with that is just dust them off. I'm just waking them off on the side so that there's no so strong left on it. Okay, once you get all the salt offer there so you can see the six different Nique textures that we have happening here. So, um, now that they're dry, I'll show you those extra techniques with pens and also with a second layer of paint. If you choose to do that, I wouldn't necessarily go over top of any of these. They could be totally just like this in the background with no other embellishments. But this is just for your sake, to show you what else that could be done say, especially with like, one that's more plain. If you wanted a solid background, um, and just wanted to add some hints. So with this gel pen, you can add a couple little little dots here and there just to give it a little bit extra emphasis Now, I wouldn't necessarily do it all over the whole thing, but you could. You could make it kind of like a galaxy in the background with stars. Whatever you want to do that way, another thing that you could do is hatching like I'm mentioned when I did the little lesson on the fundamentals of art. So there's some hatching lines here, and then you can actually do some cross hatching. So if you just wanted to have, like, little stitch marks little hashes to give some visual interest to it, you can do that in your background with your dependent does not have to be one that's a brush pen, because this pen tip is actually flexible. If you had just the bullet tip pen, you do the same thing. Um, this one would give you, Ah, some lines that have the thick and thin easier than other ways. But you could do ah, thin line and then get thicker as you go down. And you could do that the same with a bullet if you just trace your line a second time at the bottom. So if you just this is a bold background, but maybe this letter is just a small little one. And you needed some kind of visual element here on the left hand side of your letter. So you had if you're choosing, like an a se you had an A here, that was just a fine line. This would cause some dramatic interest in the background. Okay, You could also use any of the other types of lines that were on that slide show presentation as well. Like the circular lines to I'll just Adam to this side. Like I said before, this is just so that you can see the different types of textures and little details you can create. I wouldn't necessarily put them all together on the same background, So you could also dio little curved lines and that goes the same for white. You could also do that with white. You could also intermingle your black and you're white as well. You could do swirls back there Now, obviously, as you're looking at this, the white with the orange has way less contrast in the black with orange. So something like this maybe OK, going all over your letter. This are all over your background without taking away from the letter. This who would obviously compete with the letter and you would see this more so than the letter. Okay, so I just have a clean brush and I'm gonna put just water, so it's already over top of my painted background. Now, you couldn't let that stay on there and dry, and you will notice it, which I'll do with that one. And then here's an example. Same thing. I'm just making some lines on there with just water and I'm letting it pull up. So it's kind of it looks bubbly for my view. And I'm gonna take a paper towel and I'm gonna touch it to there, and it actually lifts it up, and you can get lines that aren't quite as, um, amoeba like. There they stand out more, a bit like a zebra. And if you let this dry, it won't be quite as noticeable is thes, but it will have where the edges of the watermarks leave a little bit darker pigment. So I'll let that go. And then over here you might want to put some kind of little hash marks and some wiggle ease. That reminds me of now being under the sea. All right, so there's some different textures and little details that you can add to your backgrounds or to the foreground. You can put it in your letters as well. If your background displaying you might want to decorate your letters, which I'll show you in my example coming up when we do the project together. But for now, this is the different types of textures that you can achieve. 7. Lettering Styles and Inspiration: in this section. I want to go over a few different types of lettering styles and show you examples of those and give you other inspiration to create your letters. So with this 1st 1 it's Sarah. Sarah Typefaces have that projection finishing off the strokes of the letter form. They're called Serifis. You can see that it has some highlighted in the top word Sarah. And at the bottom, there's several different styles that you can use for inspiration or reference to copy. This is an example of San Serif That just means that the typefaces do not have that projection finishing off the stroke so they just stop. As you can see at the top, they end. There's more examples at the bottom for you to see. They're a swell and here's example of script. The's letter forms have flowing loops and flourishes there. Usually connected, they can have thicker down strokes and thinner up strokes. And as you can see, it is the typeface that's based on the fluid strokes of handwriting, so you can have some formal or casual types of script. Um, a lot of times this is what I picture when you hear the word calligraphy, so there's a lot of examples for you there in the last style of littering I wanted to show you is black letter. It is technically a form of script, but as you can see, it stands out from others. It is bold and usually used only in headings, because it's harder to read. If you would put it into a paragraph form, it's very formal. It has strong contrast and strokes as you can see thick and thin lines up there. And the reason it is script is because it is a type of handwritten calligraphy. You're probably most familiar with the old English style of black letter, but if you look at the bottom, you can see these are just some of the many examples that you can use. The next thing I want to show you are some examples of my instagram, which some of you probably found me through at Abbey J. 4433 and these are what I call my hashtag page of letters. I love to come up with different types, so a lot of these I've copied directly from the book that you've seen or from the Internet . However, a lot of them. I just totally make up on my own. And I like to transform animals and fun things like those keys into the letter that they start with, like the G here for goat. So these letters are not exactly the type of letters that I'm going to be doing today as a demonstration for the project of this class. There's a lot that are similar, but I wanted to show you how far outside the box that you can go so you can let your creativity take you wherever you want to take it. Now I want to get out these books and show you more of the style that I'll be creating today. I'm going to go ahead and copy what I do today, and they will look just like the letters that are in this book. But you don't have to do that. You can take this and run with it. Like I said in the page of letters examples. So it's going to be up to you whatever you would like to make. But I'm going to start here, So I got this book back out and I was like, Oh my gosh, the wealth of inspiration inside this books. Amazing. You look at the front cover alone. It's very similar to what I kind of want to do with our project today. It's got different s is on the front of it, and I never even put two and two together that this was very similar until I got the book out to make this video. So that's pretty cool. Anyhow, I'll take this and I would use this as inspiration for whatever letter it is that I do today. Um, I'd also go through here, and, as you can see, like I mentioned, there's some history in here. And then it has a mill young, different. Well, not a 1,000,000 but has a ton of different styles for you. You can take inspiration from them. You could copy them exactly. And if you have anything like this, or if you print anything off the Internet, which I'll talk about here in a second, you can transfer it onto your watercolor paper by either a light pad. If you have one putting it up against the window or the technique that I taught in my watercolor galaxy lettering class where you put pencil marks on the back of your paper, put it onto your watercolor paper and then trace over top. If you don't understand that, I might do a time lapse demonstration. But when I'm drawing my letters on my paper, but you can use those exact letters here or you could like I say, take inspiration from this and totally drug around. It's up to you, but I just wanted to show you the source of a lot of my inspiration for my letter. Again, this is the 22nd edition. This is the 20th edition of the speedball textbook. Love this thing in case you want something like this for your own. If you don't have anything like this, that is not a big deal, because the Internet has this and Mawr. So if you just type in an A and look at the images that come up for the letter A. And they have all different types of styles, so their script there's gonna be more formal stuff. There's less formal stuff. They're stare of Sand Saref. It's gonna give you everything everything that you could think of. So you can either take this and copy exactly or you could like, say, for instance, use this one for reference like That's kind of creepy to look at, but I could see myself making a high heeled shoe and turning it into the letter A now that I'm looking at this or even a little end like Swirled that end up or something. But, um, so that's how you can get inspiration. You don't have to copy exactly. It just gives you a starting point and let your imagination start, so the next step will be drawing are letters on to the paper, and we'll get right to that. 8. Project: Drawing the Letters Process: Okay, So in this section, I'm going to go ahead and show you how I set up my letters. I went ahead and taped my paper down already. Um, you do not have to do this before drawing your lines on two separate where your letters are gonna be if you want to move your paper around. But I like to have my paper stuck down and ready to go. So what I did Waas measured my paper. It's a six by nine inch piece of paper. You could do this any size that you want, so it doesn't have to be these exact measurements at all. I'm just showing you what I dio. So since I have the nine inches here, I'm gonna divide it into three sections. I marked off the three in the sixth at the top, the center and the bottom. And then I drew my two lines to separate into three columns. Next I measure here, we've got six inches and I just wanted a top in the bottom. So I only needed two spaces. Six divided by two was three inches. So I marked the three here. I marked the three here and Mark the three here, and I drew my center line. So I've always learned as a tip for you that you need at least three points to make a straight line. So definitely if you have a larger piece of paper that it matters more than if it's a smaller piece of paper. But as you get bigger, it's harder to keep your line perfectly straight. So if you use three points, you're going to get that straight line. So I always do in ends, a center in an end to give myself a nice straight line. You don't have to make these perfect straight boxes either. You can do different shapes. You could do different angles. It's up to you. You could be totally creative, but I'm just giving you a guide here. So once I have, my space is marked out. This is where I think about my design and the layout of my letters and what I've mentioned before in that fundamentals, little lesson that I did. I went my eye to move around this piece, so I want to make sure that I brought out my elements so that I have that flow. So I'm gonna get my reference pieces. I'll show you as I was playing around before. These are the letters that I was practicing with es for my daughters. My oldest daughter's first name, M is for my youngest daughter's first name. So I was just playing around with these letters to see what they would look like. You can see they're not at all. I didn't use a ruler here. This was just for fun to see what was going on. But as you can tell, I went with bolder letters and then once that weren't quite as bold. We have the more script type letters. We're a little subtle, so I spread them out so that you look throughout the piece rather, rather than having all the bold stuff on one side of your page. You want to spread it out so that again you have that cohesive, balanced piece. So I'm going to do this one within A I didn't want to pick between my two Children here, so I'm going to do a totally different letter. My name starts with an A. So we're gonna go with in a here. My husband's in E. So I already did that as Well, so we'll check out the A for my name, So I'm gonna get out this. I use this a lot for reference. Like I mentioned. Think about the bold letters right now. I know the backs where I think that that lettering iss So there's that s here's a Okay, I'll go with this. Say, I like this one as well. It's a little more tall and narrow. This one's a little fat and bold. I like the fact Bold one. And again, like with these examples that I've already done I know what I have done here, and I like how it flows. So I have bold, bold, bold, bold, bold, bold. So I spread him out thin, like that triangle This one's a regular triangle. This one would be like an upside down triangle if you connect them. So I think I'm gonna keep that same pattern. So I'm gonna do bold, bold, bold And I really like this. This a here. So I'm just going to sketch this. If you want Teoh, I will show a time lapse. I'll cut in a time lapse of how you can trace from a piece of paper onto here you could even either use, um printed off paper or paper that you already have if it's the correct size. So if you don't feel comfortable just sketching your letters on, you can definitely copy them. So I'm gonna go ahead and sketch this a into here, Okay? So I'm fairly happy with that. A, um Now I'm gonna move on. We're gonna I'm gonna pick out my two more bold letters to put down in the bottom corners. I like this one. I like this letter here. I like the slab, Sarah. So I'm gonna think about San Serif and Serif, and I'm gonna throw in at least one of each. Um, my smaller lettering. Maybe it will have San Serif and a similar swirl because I like this a lot. So I'm gonna draw I like this a that's got this nice bun swirl here. It's gonna give it a nice element and the fact that it's gonna be on the right side of my paper. I'm thinking about how this swirl here is gonna, like, bring you back into the paper. So if I swirled out, sometimes it pulls your eye outward, which is also a good thing. You might need that to happen to balance your paper. But I'm thinking that I like the fact that the swoop is going back into the center of my piece rather than pulling right out. So I'm gonna put this a here second A Okay, So I think I like this A to put here And the reason being too. It's got this little foot that's kicking out towards again bringing it into the center. So my three bold letters like this one spreads out nice. This one's gonna bring you in this way, and this a will bring your eye back to the center. So I'm gonna go with this one down here. Okay? So there's my third kind of bold a there. Okay, so I'm gonna draw this one in the center. Okay. So, as you can see, I changed up my flower, and I kind of made this a little fatter than this. A Just to make it, But how? I want toe Look how I want. And as you can see, I'm I'm looking at this, and I don't really like how it looks, so I'm just gonna switch that up to to my liking so that one's all right. We're gonna pick a new letter. I know. I want to do a stand serif letter so these ones have the rounded edges. I don't know if I want a rounded edge. Maybe I'll do one with a rounded edge and then one with the Sarah. Um, this has the roundness here. So I would put a rounded edge over here. And then here's a serif here, so I'm gonna bring a serif over here in that way. Balances out your piece Sometimes. If I am doing this on my own, I don't draw these out. I just kind of do it as I'm going for ones that are going to quite like this. I would always draw out this. I would draw out possibly this depending on what I'm doing. This one I know. I don't always necessarily draw first. These ones I usually don't draw first either, but I'm going Teoh for this case so that you can see my thought process and it it might help you. If you want to draw years out, I'm gonna make one stick lower than the other stick. And that's just penciled in cause I'm going to go over this eventually with either paint or a marker. Okay, so I have my letters drawn out, and I'm ready to get the paint. 9. Project: Background Process: Okay, so in this section, we're gonna go ahead and focus on filling in our backgrounds. In this case, I have mine, too. Paintbrushes that I'll be using are the two round one's a larger one in a smaller one. My two waters air off to the side. These air, my ego line liquid watercolor paints. You can use any paints that you have at home. I have the background little fun thing that we did earlier handy, and I'm setting it up so that I can see it as I paint. That gives you some inspiration as you go. And then I also have the same as when we did that texture. I have the pink salt and I also any salt will work, and I also have the isopropyl alcohol and then off to the side. I have my different paper towels that are wanted up so that I can create some texture on their and I also have my markers handy to the right as well. The other thing that you want to think about when you are planning for your background. If you haven't already chosen, it's time to chose what mood board you liked as inspiration. So are you going to go with the black and white color scheme or the great scale color scheme? A little bit of everything, Which is also fun. The warm colors or the cool colors? I can't help myself My favorite or cool colors. I'm gonna do my A's in the cool colors just because they make me happy. It makes sense that all the colors that I like the best have blue involved in making them. I can't help it. I'm a blue person. So this is what I'm gonna use as reference. So the colors that I'll be using will be might my blue Here, this is the darker blue. I'm going to use both of those. I'll have a hint of purple and then as an accent, I'm going to use this pinky orange salmon color here. And there just is a little accent. Just toe. Give it a little bit of a focal point, Pop. You can see it. How it is in this is well, like I mentioned before. So, um, this is my color scheme, so I'm all set to paint. So once you have that ready, we will start painting. So we're ready to paint. I'm focusing just on the background here, so I'm gonna get these back out again. I don't have detailed fund backgrounds in these. This one we're going to do today is gonna be a little bit more fun than this one. Eso as I'm looking, I got to keep in mind. I'm gonna probably be adding shadows to a good bit of my letters. Not all of them. But we're gonna add some shadows. I'm not worried about it, because if you look in here, I'm not worried about leaving that space. I'm gonna add the shadow right over top of whatever background that I make. So the only thing I'm gonna be worried about when I'm doing a background is in a case like this. For example, this a here, If you're gonna have your background more bold obviously than the foreground, which is your letter, you're gonna wanna go around the outside of the lettering on a case like this. Perhaps here, I'm just gonna paint the entire background, and then I'm gonna put my letter over top of it with the darker color. So I may do this one like a light green with a little bit of blues inside and then a darker blue for my A on top of it. So you'll see as I go here, I'm just gonna paint. You can watch what I do. But think about that as you're setting up yours. Like which one you're gonna want to keep your letter, um, white in instead of painting the entire background so I'll probably paint the entire background of this one and this one and most of this one thes three. I'm gonna go ahead and paint around like I did on this one, This one and this one, this one, this one and this one. So I choose to paint around my bold letters and just go through my letters that aren't quite as bold. I'm just gonna go left to right. So I'm going to start here. I've got some green and it's very light green. I'm not even gonna put water on my paper. It's just a nice light green Now, using what? On what technique? I'm just gonna take a little bit of this blue that I'm also diluting with water. So it's not super rich pigment. It's deluded, and I'm just gonna kind of touch the edges all the way around that. Now I'm gonna take my wanted up piece of paper towel. Make sure it's pretty wrinkly there, and I'm gonna touch it. Okay, so there's my first background, nice and simple for this one. It might be beneficial to get out your smaller brush anywhere that you want to get inside of these lines. Um, you don't have to be super super specific unless you're gonna have a very light color letter with your edge lines because you can kind of touch that up with later steps. Okay, So again to decide what you're going to do here, I'm gonna pull this out again so you can see if I have this greenish color here. I'm gonna gonna wanna pull this greenish color throughout the piece here somewhere either in the lettering or in the background, A hint of it here. They're just like, if you see, I've got the green here, and this green inside kind of goes across your page just like in here. We've got the yellows on this side, the yellows on this side, and I was trying to pull your eye around, so I got my background faded in here. Um, this one, I think I'm gonna dio in a bluer purple and have this a be a little bit lighter, thin the background. So I'm going to start with the bigger brush. I'm gonna do my outside, and then I'm gonna get my smaller brush ready to to go inside of my lettering before it dries much more. I'm going to take my little rolled up as a paper. Take my road a piece of paper and stick it in here. And what's neat about this color, the specific pigment is that when you lift it off of this specific paper, it doesn't do this with my other paper. It actually leaves a little bit of that pink behind, which I like. All right, some We'll let this dry. Just the ted might be a little too wet to do it. Now I'm gonna let this dry, and I'm gonna go into the to the next one. I'm actually going to skip down to here so that I don't spread this one is much. Although maybe I wanted to spread with that one. Not sure. So as you're going, I'm getting this back out for my reference again. I want another color up here, and I wanted to have some green in it. I think I'm gonna go with color. And it's close to this turquoise e to put up in the right hand corner here, these two, we're gonna be more dark. A blue like this, and another salt more solid purple. This one's gonna have a smooth background, like hombre. I'll try and do light to dark here so that I could make the flower stand out. And I'm gonna keep the flower wait for the background purposes. And for this one, I'm gonna get out my alcohol because I want it. That reference picture in the mood board actually has, like, uh, ocean ask feel to it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my alcohol, and I'm gonna drop it in from the top. And now this one is dry enough that I'm gonna go ahead and put those lines through their what? Almost dropped someone. Okay, Now, I'm just gonna take my paper towel on dry that up so that you got those zigzag patterns in the background there. Just gives it a little something. It kind of reminds me of a batik looking material like it. So this one's gonna be the lighter blue and these air gonna have the darker tones. One more blemish, one more purplish. So I'm gonna go with this Navy ish blueberry blue down here for this one. To make that color, I'm taking my lighter blue and mixing it with my darker blue. These don't have actual paint names, but it would be like some type of cobalt blue mixed with, um, an ultra Marine blue. I'm gonna add a little bit of my water here. I didn't clean my brush very thoroughly, but I'm gonna add some water to this one first. I'm thinking my plan for this one will be this blueberry blue color and then gonna blot it with my paper towel. And then I'm going to use my white gel pen and give it some extra details after Dr. So I got my specials there. It's repeating this shape appear of these dots down to the side so hopefully that repetitive shapes gonna pull your eye down as well. Okay, with this a I'm not gonna worry about anywhere except for the flower. When I'm doing my background. So I'm gonna try and make a Grady in effect here with the backgrounds. I'm gonna wet the whole thing with water, and then I'm just gonna put some light blue with the top and pull it down. I'm sorry. Light blue the bottom and pull the white down, or I'll pull the water down to the blue at the bottom. Okay, So, working quickly. I'm just gonna take my room here. That's weight darker than I like it. So okay with clean brush, understand? Four down. And then for that last one again, I'm gonna do a darker I'm gonna go into a purple color. I was gonna give myself a little pinky purple over here. Okay? And I'm gonna take my salt. We're Sprinkle it on there. No, They add a little water to it dry. That leaves a cool little a little bit more here. So when you had your salt to it, you could do it in the beginning, or you could do it Now, I can't believe that I did this, though I'm sure lies I'm not a huge. I'm not super happy with what I did here. But you know, it's OK. It's pointed here. It's pointed here. They didn't on purpose. So you have to dio don't worry about that. Okay? So that's that for the major background while I let this one. Dr. I'm gonna go over here, um, with my white jelly roll pin, and I'm just gonna add some swirls as that's drying. Just because I can do that without getting too much into here. Gotta watch your hand a lot of times. So when I'm adding, here is just swirls and I'm going one direction and then the other, and I'm kind of doing it over top of where I left those white marks, and I just wanted to be subtle, so I don't want it to stand out Robe old. And it's working How? It's like, Okay, make this one a little more pronounced paint. Okay, Now, I'm gonna go up here, move that salt that got everywhere, and I'm gonna try to avoid hitting this with my hand. But I'm gonna just give it some extra little white dots on here, almost like it's bubbles underwater. Okay. And that's that for the majority of my background, I might take when my feud and go over it once I get the letters in there, if I need to, like, correct anything, I still I'm not a huge fan that I did this. I have no patience. If you have more patients than me, that's better. I should have got out my dryer and drive this so this wouldn't have happened. But I'm going to see if I could touch that up. I'm not going to say that this is a total waste. I'm going to keep going. I'm gonna try and take my pro white I can do here selling erasing this. Using my pro white that I just ordered similar to bleed proof white. Just touch this up here. There's a little lesson on patients. You have to be perfect. 10. Project: Painting the Letters Process: okay. In this section, I'm going to go ahead and work on our lettering, the letters themselves. So I have some deal brush pens handy. I still have my watercolors and my paint brushes the same two round brushes I had before, as well as my white jelly roll and my feud. So again, I want to keep this handy so that I can look in here for my color inspiration in this cool , cool mood board. So I want this fun. Easy going by going on. Um, there's some neon pink here. There's some pinkish hues here in this salmon e color. There's pink your pink. Here. I'm gonna definitely add some pink in my flowers like I earned my flowers. I'm sorry. My letters in the center of this flower. I'm gonna add some pink. I'll have some greens that are cooler, like, next to these flowers here, so I'm using that as inspiration. So I'm also going to take some of these darker shades here and add them in here and there, especially for like, a shadow. I really like how this salt one took effect. That pink, like the the pigments in this color separated especially with that salt, it's need to see the two colors that make up that one color that happens with a lot of the pigment. So the more you play around, the more you'll know your pain and what will happen when you do certain things with it. So it's always fun toe to experiment. So what I'm thinking is I've got my color scheme pretty well laid out here. So I'm gonna take this color green, and I'm gonna go ahead and add it down in here to this A. Because I feel like that needs to be pulled. But this color needs to be pulled into the side of the composition to make my eyes flow. So I'm gonna water down my green again, and I'm just gonna add that in here. And if I hit the edges, that's okay. Clean him up with a marker or I'll leave a bleed. I kind of like that. Sometimes before I continue, I'm gonna take my white and I'm gonna touch up the edges with the white rather than a marker. Okay, now I'm running, going with my green that I don't want it to be super smooth. Anyway, I wanted to kind of mimic this ringing up here, lending it out with water, spreading it around. So there's my A any texture that I add to my am going to do with a marker towards the end. For this A I wouldn't pull a dark color like a darker purple purple color. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start with my Tom Bo do brush pen, and I'm going to make my line. And then I'm gonna take a paint brush with water, and I'm gonna go over top of that to water it down, spread it around, make it look more watery rather than just a marker on their. And I want this to be about the same with, um, the line. It's gonna be a similar with all the way around. Okay, so now just some water on top of my brush pin, and I'm putting a good bit of water on there from a little blogger. Just be careful that when you go over top of it a second time, you use a clean spot on your paper towel so that you don't accidentally put the mark from the paper towel onto your paper. we're gonna let that dry. And then I may go over top of that with my weight, Joe pen to give it some accents here to do a shadow with a rush pin and so on. So we're gonna let that dry. I'm gonna move on to this. A I think I'm gonna go ahead and use a blue pants displaying blue. Okay, so there's the A. I'm gonna move on down to this one, and I'm gonna make it a turquoise e color. I'm gonna throw a little salt onto this, too. When less Sprinkle of salt, somebody move onto this guy, appear I'm gonna put a darker turquoise blue turquoise up there using my small brush. And I'm just gonna do my best to keep it a monoline with these syrups here, so All right. I'm with my last day. I'm gonna use a blue a darker blue, too, and draw my letter, and then I'm gonna paint that. Like I said with some pink salt up there, I'm gonna go back over top of this bottom, right? A make a little bit more bold. All right, take the same plead, Proofpoint. I'm gonna start doing some details in places. What? Some kind? Some jagged the lines to this one says the outside edges jacket e some marks on that side of it. Just give this guy a little bit of Ah, I like there's a little highlight there. This one has enough. I'm gonna give it a shadow in a minute. This one needs a shadow as well. But I gotta wait. Collapsed dry. It's not dry yet over there. And this one, we're gonna work around the edges to I may even use black to outline. We'll see. You could If you want this to look more graphic, you could take a black fine liner or monoline of some sort. Trace your lines again and then trace all the outlines, and it really makes it pop like it's Ah, you know, more graphic. I'm gonna leave this one. Subtle, but I'm gonna get out my feud. Uh, I'm gonna go around the edge of this guy by defining the edge. It makes the letter look a little bit better. So thicker on the right side, some imagining. My son is here on the left, shining onto this letter. So the bottom and the right side, which is usually where I always put my shadow. For some reason, um are gonna be a little thicker. And then I'm going to go ahead and trace around this entire letter with just the tip of this marker like this to help it stand out from the background. So that has nice or edges. Then here. Now, I'm taking the end 65 and I'm gonna go around this again just to give it a little more. Okay, Now it's important. Then I'm gonna clean this pretty good, because it could have picked up the watercolor on the background there. You don't want that. I also don't want this a tiny bit of white right here. So see if I can fix that. I'm gonna go to this one. I've got my end 65. I'm gonna do the same shadow without the black this time. So there's a bit of a shadow for it If you need any different tips or tricks on shadows in my galaxy. Watercolor lettering class. I did several different shadows to play around with. Um I'm not going into detail explaining how I do it, but you can just see what I'm doing with this one. I'm using the bullet tip of my end 65 and I'm gonna give it a line. And then with my end 75 which is lighter than the 65 I'm gonna go around the outside. Okay? Think I'm gonna actually give this one extra bit of a shadow as well. And then with the end, 75 I'm gonna go on this one as well. This one needs a old one. So I'm not gonna outlined the whole letter like I did this one. But I'm just gonna put a thin black line on the left. I'm sorry on the right, because the sun's coming from the left. Okay? And then I'm gonna take my We'll start with the 75. Give it a second coat. That does the trick. Better said two coats of them 75 here. Okay, Now I'm gonna go in. I think with this one, I'm just gonna give it a few hash marks with this white cross hatching there. It's a very subtle cross hatching, giving it some visual interest. I think I'm gonna do the same for this one, but not as much. Just hatching. Not cross that. - Okay ? Okay, I'm gonna take my hand. 35. And I think I am gonna go and give this guy a little shadow over here. Nothing crazy. Just a little one. Now that I'm looking at this, I think I do want to give this a little bit more of a bold shadow Just because this one's so dominating over here with this dark color, I'll get my 65 back out and then my 75 so has a double shadow there. I feel like that Pull G over. And this right here coming off to this side actually has some wait. So I feel it's balanced. If it were on a teeter totter, it hold its own. The dark over here with this line coming out balances this one out. So I think I'm pretty much done here. I'm gonna peel the tape gently. And when you do that, be very careful, cause a lot of times it will rip your paper, especially if it's 100% caught in. So pull back to the left back in a way I should say, and slowly. All right, So there's my finished ages in a cool color scheme inspired from the cool colored mood board I made with some texture in there. Some bubbles. Okay, so with this, I'm also going to show you unexamined all of what this looks like. If you decided that you wanted to outline everything with black so that you can decide on your own whether you want it to be that hazy, fuzzy background or if you want it to be more graphic with the black outlining and the way that I do that as I take a picture with my iPad and then I go ahead and add it in in the procreate up in that way, you can decide if you like it before you ruin your actual artwork. So there's a little tip for you. In case you don't want to make a decision and ruin your paper, you can try it out first. 11. Conclusion to Moody Letters: Thank you so much for taking my class. I really hope that you enjoyed it and maybe even learn something. And I can't wait to see all of your moody letters. So please share post them to the class projects so that we can check it out. I'm so excited to see what you make until next time. Have a great day.