Retro Hand Lettering in Procreate

1. Retro Lettering in Procreate: I'm excited to teach retro lettering because it's a style that's fun and fluid and very illustrative style of lettering that I use the most in my own work. Because I'm inspired by the bold colors, fluid shapes, and positive feel-good messages. It's also a super popular design aesthetic, is popping up all over stationary apparel in homeworks. You perfect style to incorporate into your art licensing portfolio or print on demand shop. Hi, I'm Jess Miller, designer and illustrator. I'm so excited to announce my second skill share class all about how to illustrate retro style hand lettering in Procreate. I'll be sharing my step-by-step process and how to illustrate Funky retro lettering inspired by topography from the '60s and '70s. In this course, I'm demonstrating how to illustrate three distinct retro inspired lettering styles of lettering, bubble lettering, and check the script. I'll show step-by-step how I sketch ink, color and add texture and detail to each style. I'm even sharing how I incorporate illustrated elements to tie together the finished piece. And how you can make it uniquely around this class is perfect for all levels and great for artists looking to add a little fun and funky hand lettering to their illustrations. Retro lettering is fluid and forgiving, not as rigid as other lettering styles. So feel free to let loose, break the rules. If you're ready. Let's get to lettering. Meet me in the next lesson and we're all cover the class project, resources and materials. 2. Project Overview: For the class project hand letter, a short quote from one of the three retro inspired lettering styles. Block level, and then checking script, feeling ambitious, illustrate all three styles. I chose this project because I love retro lettering and I incorporate it into a lot of my own work. Style characterized by vibrant colors, bold patterns, distorted letter forms, and feel good messaging. It's fun and expressive and not as rigid as other lettering courses. So feel free to drop the perfectionism, break the rules and listen up. This class is perfect for beginners and intermediate illustrators who want to dabble in hand lettering and start incorporating it into their illustrations. It's also very trendy right now and it's a great style to add to your art licensing portfolio for this course, all you need is a drawing tablet, drawing utensil, and the drawing app Procreate. In the class resource section, you'll find a link to all the downloads for this class, including a retro color palette, lettering, alphabet guide, list of feel-good quotes, stamp brushes, and three free texture brushes from SEO illustration. Join me in the next lesson. We're all sharing samples of vintage and retro art to get you inspired about hand-lettering your project. 3. Research & Inspiration: For this lesson, I'm going to show you some examples of hand lettering styles from the '60s and '70s. I created a Pinterest board 70 style inspiration that shows a mix of vintage art from the '70s as well as new art that is inspired by the era, were the main influences of 1970s lettering was a psychedelic art movement characterized by vibrant colors, bold patterns, distorted letter forms, and feel good messaging. This style of lettering was often used in concert posters, album covers, and other printed materials associated with rock music. I love this poster because the block lettering fits inside her afro. And there's a lot of really cool ornamental elements and it's very symmetrical. This is a really famous Bob Dylan poster. These fluid shapes indicate where his hair is and it's silhouettes nicely against the cutout of his face. There was a use of a lot of really striking colors. This red and blue color combination vibrate. It almost looks like the lines are swirling together. And there is equal weight and balance between the illustration in the lettering. It's almost like they've become one and they're very amorphous. It was also really typical of '70s retro art for the letters to take on a shape. In this case, it says a funky lover inside of lips. Here's an example of lettering that's inside of a circle. And you can tell that the baseline is very wavy and that the letters, they follow the baseline, but they're different heights, heights and widths. Here's an illustration of some iconic '70s fashion with a vest and bell bottoms. Some very 70s colors with an olive green and analogous colors, the yellow, orange, and pink. Analogous basically means three colors next to each other on the color wheel, a lot of really fluid lines within these three posters. Here's a really cool Jefferson Airplane poster where the hair just blends in and becomes this thick block lettering. And again, they have this wavy baseline and it's almost illegible like you can barely read it, which I kinda like it. It just gives it so much character and personality and just makes it so distinctly retro. Here's an example of a really fun script. You can tell that there is a contrast between the thick and thin swashes. You had a lot of fun making these swashes fit in the negative space within the lettering. And here's an example of bubble lettering. You can tell that the top of the letter is very narrow and then it has this bell shape. It's indicative of bell-bottom jeans. The very iconic fashion item of the '70s. Here's another bubble lettering. It's very rounded, no, no sharp edges, hence the name. A lot of Smiley faces, daisies, sons, eyeballs, mushrooms are all very iconic retro art. This is even an example of some bubble lettering. They had a lot of fun with the ascenders and descenders. It just fills up those negative spaces within the letter forms. This is a really fun poster to. It's very symmetrical. And with these block letters, you can tell they have a variety of shape and they follow this distorted baseline. They hold equal weight compared to the illustration. It's almost like these decorative elements just kind of blend in with these letter forms. I also made a second Pinterest board called feel-good quotes. This is just to inspire you. Like the '70s were just a feel-good era and they had a lot of positivity. So I sampled quotes from all over Pinterest and save them here just to kind of inspire the kind of wording that you want to use for your class project. You can maybe take a portion of this quote or make it your own in some way. But they're all very, very positive, very feel-good. And they fit in well with the 70s art style that we're going to create. So before I dive into the next lesson of sketching block lettering, take some time, do some research and inspiration between these Pinterest boards and decide upon a quote that you would like to letter if you're ready, meet me in the next lesson, where I will sketch block lettering. 4. Sketching Block Lettering: Okay, so now that we've taken some time to explore 70s style lettering and illustration, I will show you how to sketch the block lettering style. So let's start off with a canvas of ten by 10300 DPI in Procreate. Just simply touch the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner. I haven't already preloaded, already saved. But if you don't huge because simply just press the plus sign. Select your unit of measurement. I'm using inches, 10 " by 10300 DPI. It gives us a maximum of 70 layers, which I think is plenty for this class. And hit Create. Okay, I'm gonna give you a quick rundown of what we have. We have the 70s color palette that I provided, as well as the retro lettering. I have a studio pen which is pre-loaded in Procreate, so you should already have it if you have the app Procreate. Six B pencil for sketching. I also have a mono line brush for inking, which is also pre-loaded in Procreate. And then I have these three brushes from SC illustration that our spray shader, grainy pencil and filler, which I'll show later on when I color and texture the piece. I also created these fun stamp brushes. They're flowers and dots and stars that you can use for decoration. And they should all be in the class resource section. But for this lesson, I'm going to use the six B pencil to sketch out the piece. I'm going to hit black and test it out to see how thick it is. It's pretty thick. I think that's pretty good. So for the block lettering style, I'm going to draw a giant Daisy. Fit the lettering, quote, grow with the flow inside the center of the flower. You can pick any kind of shape that you want. It could be an eyeball, a heart, or you could just follow along with me here and draw a flower. I'm just going to start roughly sketching in the shape of the flower. I'm going to first start off with the center of the flower center. I drew a circle and then I held my finger down so I can get a perfect circle. And then using my adjust tool, I can adjust it and I hit my snapping. Snapping, it just snaps all of your shapes into place and it shows where the center of the canvas is. Because I want the center of the flower to be in the center of the canvas. Okay, so now I'm going to start drawing in my puddles. It's going to be a giant Daisy. This is a pretty rough sketch. I'll go back and refine it. I just kinda want to lay down a framework. So do the stem. Now I'm going to draw the leaves. Okay? That is a basic sketch of our daisy. And now again, I'm going to fit the quote, grow with the flow inside of the center of the flower. Now I'm going to draw the wavy baseline for our letter forms. And the baseline is just pretty much a guide for our letters. And in a lot of the styles that we looked at, they had a wavy baseline, so I kinda want to mimic that style. It kind of goes along with the quote too. It's very like flowy and fluid. So these are gonna be our guides where I'll start sketching in the words for our quote. I'm going to hit Duplicate. And this is just to give a little bit to account for some spacing in-between the words that I'm going to stack. Want to merge those two down. And then I'm just going to clean up a little bit. Okay? You can even turn down the opacity just so it's very light guidelines, okay? For this style, it's very blocky and I want it to follow the form of this flower. And I'm just going to lightly sketch in the skeleton of the words. So I'll start with grow. Okay, as you can see, this is kinda getting a little tight and flow is getting a little crank gonna be a little cramped down here. I'm actually going to use my selection tool just freehand it. Select width. And then using the free form selection, I'm just kinda adjust. This is totally okay to do in the sketch phase. You never wanna do this with your final art, warp and adjust. But for sketching, you're the only one that's going to see the sketch. So it's totally fine to do this within the that is blending in together. So I'm going to adjust that so that there's a little breathing room between width. Naturally our baseline is adjusting, so I'm going to move it up to account for that. Okay, go back to our sketch layer. And I'm going to draw flow. So again, the L, 0 and W and flow is quite larger than the f. So I'm gonna just kinda adjust. You can also use the distort and warp just to kind of get it to fit inside the center of the flower. Now I want to make my f larger. As you can see, it's very playful. I used a lowercase I in width and a I put the 0 kind of hugging inside the L. So this style, it's very fluid and forgiving. And so you can kind of warp and adjust the letters as needed. It's not as perfect as other styles, which is the reason why I like it so much because you can just have fun with this style. Okay, So now I want to lower the opacity. My sketch and I'm going to start blocking in the letter forms are adding meat to the skeleton. It's an another layer. Still using my sketching pencil. I'm going to just kinda outline the shapes, shape of each letter. If you need help with what shapes the letters are, I supply the alphabet for each lettering styles. So this is, I show each step in the lettering alphabet guidebook that's in the resource section. Okay, so now that we've outlined our letter forms, I'm going to actually turn off the layer with the skeleton sketch because we don't really need it anymore. And now I'm going to fill in each outline. And this is really helpful because you can really see the letter forms in high contrast and black and white when they're blocked out, when they're outlined, you can't sometimes you miss things and so I always fill in the letter forms. This is kind of tedious, but it really does help to visualize your letters. I'm also going to make just some small adjustments with my G. Just to fill in all those little loose spots, little empty areas. You can tweak your are kinda wraps around. I'm kinda adding some little points to this 0 so that it fills in quite nicely. This w is gonna get quite interesting filling up this space. But I still want it to look like a W. I'm also using my eraser tool just to clean it up. This w is, it's just going to, these ascenders going to fill up that space. Okay, Now you can really see our piece is starting to take some shape and coming together nicely. I'm just using the eraser tool just to tweak the letter forms further. I'm just going to kinda go in and refine some areas where I can see some space. I just want to fill in exactly where the letters are so that it fits the circle really nicely. There's no space in between. Also, this is getting kinda big and this H is rather narrow. So what I'm actually going to do is fill it in and kind of find find the space in between the letters there. I think that looks a little bit better. It can also make the tea kinda turned down a little bit, fills up some more of the space in between the letters. Okay, so now you can really tell that our letter forms are following not only like the baseline, but they're also filling in the center of the flower quite nicely. Alright, now I'm going to add a few more details to my flower. Just some lines to the petals, just to indicate that they are puddles. Alright? And then what I like to do is I'm going to use the stamp, the flower center stamp as a guideline to kind of show where the center is going to be. I'm going to make it much larger. Okay? I'm going to, using a uniform selection, find the center. Okay. Then I'm just going to trace around. That way you have some clear definition of where the center of the flower is and where the lettering is. I still wanted it to fit the shape of a circle, but kind of nest inside of this, the center of the flower. I'm just going to delete that. Don't do it anymore. And I'm just going to take some time to erase. Just clean up the inside shape. Okay. That's really kinda coming together. Definitely has like a '70s retro vibe. I'm going to turn off my guides. I don't really need them anymore. And now I'm just going to take some time and add maybe some stars and dots just to fill in the empty space. Okay, So take as much time as you need to tighten up your sketch. The more tight your sketches, the easier it will be to ink. So in our next lesson, I will cover how to ink your drawing with using the mono line brush. 5. Inking Block Lettering: Okay, once your content, your sketch, It's now time to move on to the inking phase. In this lesson, I'm going to cover how to take your time to really clean crisp lines. This is an important step to use an inking brush and fill in the shapes and black and white before jumping into color. It really helps to visualize your piece in high contrast black and white. So before we start, I'm actually going to merge down all of our sketch layers and get rid of the layers that we don't need. So I have it all down into one merge, down into one layer. And I'm going to turn the opacity down to about 30%. Can add another layer. You have a couple options. You could use the studio pen, which has a tapered end. It's more like a hand-drawn feel. Or you could use the mono line brush, which just means that it's the same weight through and through. And it doesn't have any tapered ends. For this inking. I just want really clean, crisp lines. And so I'm going to use my monoline brush to ink this piece and also a great tip. You can adjust your brush. If you just tap on it. You can adjust the amount of streamline as well as the amount of stabilization. And that really helps when you want to ink really clean shapes without having a jittery hand. This, the amount of stabilization that you use really helps and you can just adjust it right within the brush studio and your brushes. So once I'm happy with that, I click Done, have a new layer and then I can adjust the size of my monoline brush. I want a fairly small size brush. I just want to carefully trace each letter form. I'm going to drag and drop and fill each shape. It's just really clean and crisp. So I moved my oh, there, I just did it because it was a little low. And for this style, it's very blocky so that the bottom half is very heavy and chunky. So that's why I moved it. This is a great example of why we incur sketch so that we can make adjustments to our sketch as needed. You can also use the edit ellipse tool to tweak the shape of your ellipse. It's really helpful. I also use the eraser tool to just kinda clean up some of my edges as needed. I know this, this phase probably seems really tedious. And you're like, I just want to jump into color, but it does really help to visualize it. I think if I were just to jump in and color it, I wouldn't make these slight adjustments along the way. And these adjustments really do help make it really clean and crisp and electrical. Okay, you can even turn off your sketch. And this helps to just kind of visualize the way and where some empty spaces are. I see this empty space right here. That kinda bothers me. So I'm just going to come in and fill it up. My I just feels drawn to those empty spaces and I just feel like I need to fill it up. Also, this space seems pretty tight. So I'm just gonna kinda go in with my eraser tool and make some adjustments. Take as much time as you need to. Just clean up and refine. Also, the space seems a little bit big. So I'm gonna kinda go in there and adjust. Okay, I think that's looking pretty good. Turn my sketch layer back on. And now I want to draw the center and the petals and the stem and leaves of my flower. On another layer. I will start drawing the center shape. I could freehand it. I could use my symmetry tool, or I'm going to use the stamp that I made. And then that way I can just tap once and get a perfect shape. I just need to make some adjustments. So that's in the center of our canvas. I'm using my snapping tool. I'm also going to lower the opacity so I can adjust the scale. It's also selected uniform so that I'm not distorting it in any way. Pretty much just want it to fit around our letter forms. I think that's looking pretty good. There's some breathing room in-between the letters and the center of the flower. For even more high contrast, you could fill this all in black, and then you can alpha lock the layer with your letters and fill it in white. Just fill layer. Then that's a really high contrast and you can see how much space is in-between the center of the flower and the letters. It just really helps you visualize it in high contrast. So now I'm going to draw the petals on my flower in black using my monoline inking brush. I'm going to use my symmetry tool in Canvas, drawing guide on Edit guide. Okay? Usually a 2D guy will pop up, but I don't need the 2D guy that actually need the symmetry tool. You have some options. You have vertical, which will trace these two sides. You have horizontal, which will help give you symmetry of these two sides. Quadrants. So whatever you draw in this quadrant will be repeated in these three. And then a radial. I am going to use the vertical option because I just want to draw the petals and then I want the other program to trace the other half. So once you have vertical selected, click done. And I'm gonna make sure I have my layer, a new layer assist is selected, my monoline brush and I'm going to start drawing the petals. I think I'm going to increase the size a bit chunkier, probably around like 39, 40%. As you can see, when I draw this half, the program in procreate is drawing automatically drawing the other half. This is really convenient so that you get a perfectly symmetrical shape and you only have to draw one side. If you wanted a more organic shape, you could totally free hand your flower or whatever shape you're using. I just really loved the symmetry tool and I wanted a perfectly symmetrical daisy flower. So that's why I'm using it to help me in the shape of the petals. You could even fill in the shape if you like UPS. Somewhere, it's disconnected. I see. I'm just going to connect these two petals. You can even fill that in. Let's fill it, make, adjust it so that it's a gray color. Okay. So now I see, I can see my puddles, the center of the flower as well as the letters that are inside of the flower. Now, I want to draw the stem and the leaves. I'm going to, since I already have my symmetry tool setup, I'll have to do is click on the layer and click Drawing Assist. And then I can just start drawing the stem of my flower. Fix that edge. Okay. Now you can see our flower is inked. You could even adjust the opacity of the leaves. Just so you can see each shape that's gonna be a different color, is a different shade of black and white on gray scale. Okay, Now I want to use my stamp brush to fill in some of these empty layers with stars and dots. So I'm gonna make a new layer, go to my brushes. You could fill it in with these flower shapes if you wanted to. You could freehand some shapes. I'm going to use the round star scatter brush and just tap on my screen where I'd like little stars. I also randomize the brush so that it would have different sized stars just randomly whenever I, I tap it, I kinda like having that feature and just makes it really random, but little more organic. I'm also going to toss in some dots, as well as some diamond diamond stamps. Now you can turn off the sketch layer and you can see that we ink dark drawing and really clean, crisp lines. Now, if you're ready to move on to the next lesson, we're going to cover how to color and add texture to this piece. 6. Coloring Block Lettering: Alright, now that we have interface, it's time to add color. And this is probably my favorite part because the piece really comes to life when you add color to it. And as I mentioned before, in our research and brainstorm, that '70s and retro inspired colors, they often use analogous color palettes. So analogous colors is usually when you have one dominant color, a supporting color, and then an accent color. And they're right next to each other on the color wheel. So I'll just show a quick example. If you select red, then yellow and pink are the colors right next to it on the color wheel. And a really quick and easy way to find this is using the harmony tool. So you can pick any color and then find out which, which colors are analogous to that main color. It's just a really cool trick. You can also figure out complimentary colors and split complementary colors. I really go in depth into this in my last Skillshare class, which was handling for illustrators. So if you want to check that out, go ahead. But for this, this lesson, I'm just going to reference the 70s color palette and use an analogous color palette of orange, pink, and yellow. To get us started. I grouped all of our inking elements. I just put them all into a group. And I have our sketch on one layer. So now I'm going to start off with a new layer. I'm going to start out with a background color. I want it to be this very bright and bold gold color. And then I want the daisy color to be like a white creamy color. I'm just going to hit alpha lock. Then I'm going to select the cream color fill layer. I'm going to do the same for the center of the flower color at this brown color. Then for the stem and leaves, I hit alpha lock. I'm going to use this very dark olive color That's looking very '70s to me. So I like it a lot. Okay, now I want to color in my stars. I think I'm actually going to use a really light yellow for those. I just want them to kinda really blending in. So I'm going to use my hue saturation and brightness and just adjust the brightness just a hair. Just a little bit. Because I want them to blend in the background. I really want the petals to be the hero and pop off. Now for the letters, you could color them cream. Or you could color them this nice yellow. I think I might actually alternate colors by word. I'll try that out and see how it looks. I'm going to pick this really light pink and just drag and drop on each letter. I think I'm going to keep this one yellow and BB. The can be this peachy color. Then I think I like maybe a light orange for flow. Okay, I think the orange is kind of blending in. So I'm going to use my selection tool. I'm going to start over. I just want to select flow. Then using the hue saturation and brightness. I'll adjust the brightness. Okay, I think that's really fun. I really liked that and it definitely has this vintage feel to it. The colors are very bold but also kinda muted with the brown. So I'm kinda, I'm liking the direction this is going in. Okay, So now is the fun part to add texture and details. So I really like using brushes by SE illustration to add texture. I'm going to start by adding texture and definition to these leaves. I'm going to add a new layer. I'm gonna make this a clipping mask. Then using a lighter shade of green. Going to go up to my brush pallet. And use this spray shader. Since this is symmetrical, whatever I draw on this leaf, I also want to appear on this leaf. I'm going to turn on the Drawing Assist. Then I'm just going to use the spray shader to add some distressed shading to this. I'm also going to use my hue and saturation to kind of boost how light it is and maybe turn down the saturation. I will also often color this yellow or orange. And then I will turn down the opacity and it gives it this really nice kind of vintage color. I'll often do that in my own work. I actually like that better than the light green because it makes it, it looked really vintage. Now I'm going to turn Alpha Lock off on the petals. But I'm going to keep the drawing assist on. And I'm going to use my eraser tool. I'm going to use the grainy pencil illustration. And I'm just going to boost it up. And I'm just going to erase parts of the petals to give it this really distressed fill. And now I'm going to sample that same cream color. And I'm going to use this filler brush to just really fill back in. I want I want the distressed look to be a little more subtle, not as not as bold as it is right now, but I still want some kind of texture. You can see it's quite subtle, but it really does give it this nice vintage, retro look, which I love. This is how I, I color the majority of my work. I just erase parts of it and then I fill it back in. Okay, And then I'm gonna do the same thing for the center of the flower. I'm actually going to duplicate it and fill it in this golden rod color. Because I want some of that golden color to come in on through the brown. I'm going to turn that alpha layer, alpha lock layer off. Let me use the same process where I use the spray shader brush, brush for my eraser. Just gently erase the center. And then using the filler brush. Just gonna go back in and fill it. Again. It's very, very subtle, but it does add this really cool, vintage retro vibe to it. And now I'm going to make another layer clipping mask. And I think I want even more of this golden color integrated into the center of the flower. So I'm going to take my spray shader brush and just kind of lightly color. You can go in with your eraser and select the same brush and just erase some elements of it. Okay? I think I really like how that's looking. I think I want to add a little more definition into these petals. Select a new layer and turn on my drawing assist. I'm going to sample this really light yellow color and use my six B pencil because I just want to add some sketchy lines inside petal. Alright? And I think I'm going to turn off the Drawing Assist. And I think I'm going to use my studio pen. Just kinda add some random dots and the petal. Just pencil in some gifts, the flower petal, some character. I don't really want it to be symmetrical. So that's why I turned off the Drawing Assist to be a little hand hand done. Now, definitely want to add some texture in the background. So I'm going to hit a new layer. And using the same light yellow color, I'm gonna use my spray shader to just lightly add some distress texture to the background. Again, this is just really subtle. Use my eraser tool, the spray shader and just kinda go back in and erase some of that distress texture. And I'm going to add some lines and definition within the leaves. And a new layer. Use this light green color. And my pencil. And just sketch in. I think I actually, let's use our Symmetry tool, save some time. And then we can fill it in just for some color. I think that looks really nice. I'm going to use my eraser tool and just erase some dots. I'm going to turn off the Drawing Assist. I love to add dots and speckles and my flowers and petals just to give, give them some character. Okay, now I want to add some distress texture to the letter forms. Since everything else kind of has this distress look. So I'm going to turn Alpha Lock off. I'm just going to use the same process I shared before. So I'm going to use the granny pencils or eraser and just start gently erasing some of the letters. Okay, that's pretty distressed. So I'm actually going to just follow the same process and fill it back in using our filler brush. I'm just going to sample the same color. It's pretty big. Turn it down. Just gently, fill back in some of that distress texture. You can fill in as much as you'd like. This is just personal preference. This is just a technique that I use. You don't even have to use this distressed texture technique if you don't like it, you can keep the letter forms really clean and crisp. Okay, now, I really like where this is headed. And even add some more detail. I'm going to make another layer and use the Studio Pen. Use this brown color and just had some dots and speckles inside of the letters. This is something I do very often in my own work. It just really gives the letters personality. If that is too much of a contrast, you could even play around with your blending modes and see if you want maybe a more subtle approach. So it's the same color, but it's just on the screen mode. And it's just a little bit more subtle. Subtle look like I think it's a toss up. Actually. I think I like the high contrast. And I think I want to brighten up the cream colored just a tad using my hue and saturation. There. I think that's looking pretty good. And now hopefully you have sketched, inked and colored and add texture to your piece. If you're content with this part, meet me in the next lesson where I will cover the next lettering style bubble lettering. 7. Sketching Bubble Lettering: In this lesson, I'm going to demonstrate how to sketch the bubble lettering style. Like its name suggests, this style is going to look very bubbly with rounded shapes and rounded letter forms. If you remember from our research, bubble lettering is characterized by high contrast, thick and thin shapes. Usually includes a heavy bottom half or a bell-shape. That's indicative of bell-bottom jeans. So the edges of the letters are very round and not sharp, hence the bubble name. So let's start off with a new Canvas. Hit the plus, and let's go ten by ten. I have it already saved 300 DPI, same size that we use last time. I'm going to use this six B pencil to sketch out my letter forms. And I'm actually going to start off using a drawing guide. This time, I'm going to use the 2D grid. You can go to edit drawing guide 2D grid. And then I'm going to adjust the size of the squares. I'm going to make them fairly large. That's about good. Okay? This way, It's gonna be really easy for me to draw a square frame around my canvas. I'm going to draw this square frame and then draw the lettering inside of the square. I'm just tracing over the guidelines right now. I'm just kinda cleaning up the edges. Okay, since it's our guideline, we can let's actually re-color. It. Can just hit alpha lock. I like to use a light blue fill and then you can just turn down the guide. Okay, so now that that's like a frame, I'm going to use that to fill in as a guide to fill in our letters. So I'm going to fill our letters inside of the square. On a new layer. I'm going to start sketching out the skeleton of our letter forms. Go back to my guide. I'm going to make us some smaller squares. For this piece. I'm going to let her the phrase, You are made of magic. And I think I'm going to stack the words. So it says you are made of magic. So three lines. So now I'm just going to draw some guides for the baselines of my letters. And you can actually just duplicate that straight line. This will just be like a little breathing area between the words. Can duplicate those. I'm going to select these so I can just kinda move them around freely. I'm going to merge my two guidelines. Just kind of clean up a new layer. I'm going to now start lettering the skeleton of my letter forms. And feel free to use your selection tool and make some adjustments since this is the sketch so you can warp it and adjust it as needed. Since this is such a free form, a type of style, I'm going to have a lot of fun with the ascenders and descenders of the letters. So for this one I'm actually going to have the are kind of swoop down and then make the E kind of nest inside that shape. I'm also playing around with lowercase and uppercase letters. This is, this is your piece, so have fun with it. And you can also feel free to reference the lettering guide to while you're shaping your letters. That is in the class resource section. Alright, now we have some very rough skeleton letters. So now I'm going to outline a bubble shape so we can start building or the shape of our letters. So a new layer, just kinda going in and making some adjustments. I definitely want the top part of the letter to be kind of short and compressed and the bottom part to be very thick and chubby. Space is getting kind of big in-between the eye and the Cs. So I'm just going to use the free form selection tool to warp and adjust these letters so that they nest. They nest together and they fit well with each other. Okay, so now we can turn off the skeleton layer. You can kinda see some bubbly letter forms are starting to take shape. So let's go ahead like the previous block style we are going to now fill in our letters to really add body and weight to them. Again, this feels like super tedious, but it really does help. Because then I can just easily go back with my eraser tool and erase and trim the letters that are or too thick and maybe build upon the ones that are a little too thin. It just really does help. You can even drag and drop if it's thick enough. Sometimes with the pencil, it's a little too porous. That one was a little too thin. In this case, it was actually easier for me to fill in the entire letter form and then just erase a small little hole for the E So you can tell the letters are very rounded. There's no sharp edges. So it's looking very bubbly. Okay, and now it's really starting to take some shape. You can also take some time to just really make some adjustments. I'm not thrilled with the shape of this. A, I think it's just very elongated and it's it's looking a little funky. So I'm actually going to remove it and draw an uppercase a. This is your drawings, so feel free to make any adjustments that you want. It's totally okay to warp your sketch. You never wanna do that with your final art, but it's totally okay to do it to your sketch because chances are you are the only one that's going to see the sketch. Unless, of course you share your process. It's totally fine to make adjustments along the way. So now I'm just gonna kinda take some time and fill in some of these gaps. These letter forms are just super organic and just really, they're kind of amorphous so you can have fun with it. They're not perfect by any means. But that's okay. Some character, that's what makes it really fun and unique. So take as much time as you need. For the next lesson. I'm just going to decrease the opacity. And on a new layer, I'm going to ink these letters using my monoline brush. And it's the same inking process that we used for the previous block style. So I'm actually going to skip that lesson if you need a refresher, go ahead and watch that, but it's the exact same process. I'm just going to trace over each letter using my monoline brush. Once you have sketched and ink to your letters, meet me in the next lesson, where I'll show you how I'm going to add color and decoration to this piece. 8. Coloring Bubble Lettering: Hopefully you've taken some time to sketch out the bubble letter forms and ink the letters using a monoline brush or studio pen. To recap bubble lettering is characterized by very rounded shapes and heavy bottoms and these teardrop or bell shapes. Alright, now if you're ready, let's add some funky colors. You can totally do an alpha lock on your ink layer. Then color drop. Or you can follow along. I'm going to show you this different technique. If you remember from our inspiration lesson, a lot of 70 styled art is characterized by fluid wavy lines. For this piece, I'm going to color the letters and add this wavy pattern. I'm actually going to turn the lettering layer off. And on a new layer, I'm just going to draw some wavy organic lines. Let me use my monoline brush for this. I have a pretty thick, heavy size set on the same layer. I'm just going to alternate different colors. Again, I'm not to be too precise with this. I'm just dragging and dropping and filling color. I'm making sure that the colors line up so that I have orange and orange and then I'll fill because otherwise it won't color drop properly. And I'm going to just vary the size and shape a bit. I'm going to make some small, some large. And now you can actually turn on your lettering layer and do a clipping mask. And you can see these core wavy lines. You can, if you like that look, you can leave it as is. Or I'm going to just quickly unclip it. I'm going to actually take it a step further and go to my magic wand, scroll down to liquefy. And you have a bunch of different options where you can play around with. You can select push. I think I'm going to use this push Option and adjust the size of my brush. Can adjust the pressure and the amount of distortion as well as momentum. And like the name describes, you just kinda push the lines. It's very organic and fluid and it just kind of gives it this extra extra liquefied look that I'm not sure I would have been able to get just doing on my own. You can also tap undo if you don't like that. It's very smooth. It's almost like you're touching colored water. Looks like I have a little white mark. I'm just going to push it off the page. But you can push and adjust as much or as little as you'd like. You can also play around with some of these other settings like twirl, right? And that twirls it right. Could twirl left. It's a little too much for me. If you're really not happy with how it looks, you can always reset and it will go back to the way it was. But I'm actually really liking this. I'm just going to Keep adjusting, keep playing around with the make sure the lines are going in different directions. And I think I like that. I'm going to just tap again on my magic wand. Now I'm going to hit the clipping mask. And I can see it really has a lot of body and movement and it looks really dynamic as well as really retro, like, like a lot of the art that we looked at in our inspiration lesson. It had a lot of wavy lines. So this is looking kind of in that same vein of the '60s and '70s art posters. Alright, now I want to add some stars using my black brush. I think I'm going to add some diamonds, stars. This is a scatter brush. So you can actually hold it down and draw along your page. And it creates this nice little star trail. You can use it that way or you can simply just tap the stars. And I randomize the size. So every time you tap, it's a little bit different size and scale. So definitely play around with it. I'm going to add some of the eight point stars. I'm going to click Alpha Lock. Then I'm actually going to color it probably this pink color. And I'm going to want to randomize the color. I don t think I want them all pink. So I'm going to select orange and just drag, drop and fill to recolor. You can actually also use your free selection tool. Just kinda manually adjust the placement as well as the size and scale. These are looking too large. Sometimes you just have to manually go in and adjust. It's looking very magical and I feel like it really fits well with our messaging. You are made of magic and let's pick a background for this on a new layer. If you remember from our inspiration, a lot of '70s color palettes, they use analogous colors as well as a lot of cream. There's very rarely bright white. So I'm going to pick up cream background. And I feel like this might actually look really good with black too. So I might make that as an alternate option. That really pops in black and it looks really good with the stars too. I can't really decide which one I like better. It's black or white. I think I might add both options to my class project and you guys can let me know which color way you prefer. Alright, if you are content with the way that you colored this piece, Meet me in the next lesson we're all cover how to sketch out our 3D lettering style chunky script. 9. Sketching Chunky Script Lettering: Okay, In this lesson I'm going to demonstrate how to sketch out or retro chunky script, a script lettering style. So it's the closest style that's related to cursive handwriting. And it's also very similar in style to the block and bubble in that it has a very high contrast, thick and thins. And this style is characterized by a lot of very fluid swashes extending from the ascenders and descenders. So first let's make a canvas of ten by ten. I'm just going to keep be consistent and stay with the ten by 10 " for this canvas size, 300 DPI, I already have it saved. I'm going to let her the phrase, good vibes. Just going to keep it short and simple with two words. And I want to stack them at a diagonal angle. And the first step is to set up some guidelines for that. So let's go to our drawing guides to help assist us. Let's hit edit drawing guide. And I'm actually going to use this green nodule to rotate the lines, to get a nice diagonal line. I'm just going to estimate. And I want to draw three lines to indicate the cap height, the height of the capital letter, the x-height, which is height of the lowercase x, and the baseline, which is the baseline where all the letters will rest. So first let's draw our cap height. I'm just going to duplicate that. That will be our x-height. Duplicate it again. That will be our baseline. And you can merge all three lines together. I'm going to duplicate those. That will be the second word. So we have guide setup for good and vibes. I'm going to merge these down. I'm going to go back to my guides. Because now that we have our guidelines set up, I'm going to need guides to assist me in the letter forms. We're going to hit Edit guide. This green little note again. I'm going to rotate it to the left. And I'm doing this because script lettering is the style that's closest related to cursive handwriting. And our natural handwriting always slants to the right. It's the way that we draw. So when we hand letter a script, we always want it to slant a little bit to the right, even when it is diagonal and it's going up at an angle, will always slanted a little bit to the right. Again, I'm just, I'm just estimating. Just eyeballing it. That looks about right. Click Done. I'm going to switch over to black. Using my six B pencil. I'm just going to start sketching out the letter forms on a new layer. And I'm actually going to start off drawing an oval for my G. And I'll show you why in a second. You probably have been good. This doesn't look like a word, but this does help me in forming my letters. So I'm going to merge all these down. I'm going to turn this down. Then I'm going to use these circles as a guide to shoot my letters. Okay, so now we have very rough skeleton of these letters. Like I mentioned before, this style has a lot of thick and thin. So we kinda want to start. Outlining these letters, similar to the bubble and the block style, they have very heavy bottoms, even the script. Just a characteristic that's really common in retro lettering. And as I'm drawing the letters, I'm following these vertical diagonal lines. I want my letter forms to follow that same diagonal line. But let's also have fun breaking the rules and draw some fun swashes. Technically, the S should actually look like this since that's more of like a cursive handwriting. But I don't really like that shape of an S. I feel like it's kind of hard to read and I'm just kinda, kinda modernize it and make it look like this shape of S. This is, this is your, your work. So feel free to kinda like break the rules when you want to. I'm not really a stickler for rules. I actually like breaking the rules. I feel like it makes it more interesting. It gives it more character. Okay. Stacy, I can kinda, you can kinda see this loose outline building up. I'm going to just kinda now adjust the spacing in-between the letters. It seems like there's quite a lot of space in-between, good. As well as vibe. So I'm just gonna kinda just nudge these letters a little closer together. I also like to sketch with a really thick pencil. I feel like it really helps just build the letter forms. I think it's my pencil was quite thin. It would just be a lot of a lot of filling in a lot of work. That's just a personal preference. So feel free to use whatever thickness brushes you like. You could even do a fun swash coming off of this D if you wanted to. But I feel like that might be too many swashes going on. Who knows? I might come back to it, but you can also use decorations to fill in those areas, which I'll show you later on. I think I'm actually going to use some flowers to fill in those empty areas. So now that our letters have a loose outline, we're going to go in and fill them With our pencil, just like we did the other styles. Script is probably one most difficult styles to draw. It is a little bit more technical than the other two Henry I demonstrated. But it's still fun. I still very much enjoy script. Took me a long time to get comfortable drawing script. I struggled quite a bit, and I think it was just lots of practice watching tutorials over and over again, lots of Skillshare classes until I got comfortable drawing script. And also just looking at a lot of examples and just seeing how other artists treat. Script lettering helped a lot, helped quite a bit. I think that swash, I kinda wanted to curl over a bit more. Technically, since this is a script, the letters should connect. But again, I'm breaking the rules because this is my class. I can, I can do whatever I want so I am going to not connect them. It's a style choice. You can connect your letters if you'd like. But as a style choice, I decided not to. If you get stuck drawing this letters, don't forget to reference the resource guide. I lettered an entire alphabet. Of uppercase and lowercase letters. So you won't have to guess if you are really struggling because I know that's what I found to be most helpful when I was first learning how to let her I just needed to see examples. And when an instructor was able to provide like an entire alphabet, that was extremely helpful to me. So I wanted to provide the same in this lesson. I'm going to turn off these guides. This space is looking a little tight. Knees these two letters, the G and the V. So I'm going to just select vibes using my free Select tool. And just kinda nudge it down a little bit. Allows for some more breathing room. Just going to adjust. Move the letters over there, centered. Definitely take your time to adjust your letters. Make sure you are happy with the way they look. And I'm just going to show you real quick how to sketch in some flowers to fill up some of this empty space. And if you remember, I have provided a bunch of different flower shapes. Feel free to use these as is, and then you can just color them. Or if you want a more organic feel, you can just use these as a guide and trace over them. So that's what I'm gonna do, is I want this to look a little more organic. So I think I'm just going to use these as just guidelines for where I want some flowers to go. Okay, these will probably change later on, but I'm just using these as a guide so I can sketch in a more organic shape. I'm going to go back to my 6 ft canceled that, just kind of use this as a template. So definitely it takes some time to perfect your sketch. This is a long process. I feel like the more you, the more time you spend on your sketch, the less time you'll take for the inking and the coloring. So definitely take your time to just perfect your letter forms. Go in and tweak them. Make some adjustments along the way. This G, it's looking a little guide. So I'm going to rotate it in so that it flows better. But in doing so, I created this gap, so I'm going to just fill it in. Okay, and in the next lesson, we're going to ink our letters. And I'm not going to show you again just because it's the same process that I use for the block lettering. So if you get stuck, just go ahead and look back at that inking lesson and follow that. I'm just going to use the monoline brush and trace over the letters so that they are in solid black ink. Before I color. 10. Coloring Chunky Script Lettering: Okay, hopefully you have taken some time to wrap up your sketch as well as ink to your piece, and now we're ready to jump into some color. So again, just to recap, I used my mono line brush, just to trace over my sketch, just to get some clean lines. I did that to the letter forums as well as the flowers. Alright, I'm ready to color. I'm going to start off with the background color first. I think I'm going to use this dark green color. I'm just drag, drop and fill the canvas. Use my alpha lock layer on my type. And I'm going to color it cream because I really want the letters to pop off. I'm going to click Alpha Lock on my flowers. I'm going to start coloring them using our 70s color palette. Alright, now I'm going to use this technique that I've seen in a lot of '60s and '70s style lettering where they basically, you duplicate the letters. And then on the bottom layer, you color it a different color. It's kinda like a color blocking technique. And it's almost like a shadow is extending. And they stuck a few different colors. I'm actually going to turn off the layer with my flowers because it's a little distracting. And I'm going to duplicate that orange layer. I want to make it a pink color. Then I just drag it almost like a shadow. You see this a lot with retro style art. But we also need to connect these and fill in some gaps. So I'm going to turn Alpha layer, alpha lock layer off. Using this orange color. My monoline brush. I'm just going to fill in. I think all the oranges connected. Now you want to follow that same process and connect all of the pink. Make sure you're on the pink layer. Turn on Alpha lock, and then start working on connecting the pink layers. Like there's these little marks may try to figure out where they are. Okay. Looks like there's just a little Little hole in my B. Okay. It's looking very retro. I really liked the look of that. Alright, let's turn on our flowers layer. This orange ones getting, it's kinda overpowering. So I'm just going to rearrange the flowers and just kinda scale back and adjust. I want some to overlap, but not be too distracting. When they're a little too big and overpowering, they can just look a little, a little too much. But I think this is looking really cute and very, very retro. I think I need like one more flower. This one is getting a little lost. It's blending in. I think I might have to color it this orange color and bring it to the top. Or just maybe move a completely yeah, it's just kinda blending in. I don't know. I just thought it was a good idea at the time, but it might just might not be working and that's okay. Sometimes things look different in color than they do in black and white and then sketch. And you just can't visualize it until you see it in color. So it's okay to make changes along the way. Alright, I think we still need like one big flower like right here. I think I'm going to make it a pink color. And I'm just going to freehand it. Okay, so now I'm going to draw in the centers of my flowers on another layer. I'm going to use this brown color and just start drawing in the centers. Actually going to use my studio pen for this one. These colors are working really well together. They're, they're bright, but they contrast well against the mutant green background. Alright, now we can even draw in some leaves if you want. You can leave them just kinda floating flowers, whatever, whatever you're feeling this is, this is your piece, so there's no hard rules. I think I'm just going to start free handing some flour or some leaves behind these flowers. Okay, I think this is looking really cute. It's very retro and bright and spring as well. I think I want to definitely add some distressed elements. If that's not your thing, you can go ahead and skip this part. But I love adding distress texture. It's like one of my favorite things to bring my piece together. So I'm going to start with the background first. And I think I want to sample this color, but make it just a little bit darker. And I'm going to use my spray shader brush on a new layer and just kinda lightly make it pretty big. 75% is good. Just lightly spray it gives it like this, this light noise in the background. Just kinda nice. Then I also want to make this white letters distressed. So using our technique that we used with block lettering, I'm going to duplicate it. The one on the bottom, I'm going to color orange. And then the one on top, I'm going to just start erasing the inside of the letters. And then using the same color, green color. I'm going to use my filler one. Just start filling in again. Super subtle, but I just loved this distressed extra fields. These are some of my favorite texture brushes, thereby SE illustration. I use them quite frequently in my own work. And people are always asking him what brushes do you use? Well, I use these texture pack and I'm just sampling these three brushes for this class. But if you're interested in downloading the entire pack of brushes, the link is in the class resource section. And you can go ahead and head over to her Etsy shop and download the whole brush pack if you'd like to purchase it. This is looking really good. I think I want to add some texture to these flowers. And this technique, I use quite a bit. If you head over to your magic wand and click on chromatic abrasion, aberration. I think that's how you say it. You basically want to use your slider tool. You can kinda see there's a shift in the color plates, in the RGB color plates. And this is actually a tool used in photography. But I think it looks really cool and illustrations, and it just kind of makes the flowers that were once flat, really dynamic and kinda pop off the page. So I use, I like to use that in my work. You don't have to use this technique, but I think it lends itself really well to this retro style that I'm teaching for this class. And I forgot this little flower. He's on its own layer. So you just want to click on same thing. And just slide your pencil back and forth to get the amount that you'd like a little bit goes a long way. If you use too much, it might distort it quite a bit. So I always use just a little bit and I just eyeball it to whatever to whatever my leakiness. And I think to tie it altogether, I'm going to add some sparkles. I add. I think we've added sparkles to each one of our pieces. I might actually, okay, you can totally leave this as is, but I just remembered that I kinda want to add some color to these leaves. So on another layer, I'm going to sample, Let's see, I'm going to select an orange color. And in my brushes going to use my spray shader clipping mask on this new layer, It's going to clip over the leaves. Use this spray shader brush. Turn it down a little bit. Just add some color variation to the leaves so they're not so flat. If that's too bright for you, you can just simply use the opacity layer and just kinda turn it down so it's a little little more subtle. You can also play around with your blending modes. You can use. Screen is kinda nice. Overlay, vivid light. Kinda like vivid light looks pretty good. I think the last step I'm going to make another layer clipping mask. I just want to add some lines in the leaves. Just to give it a little more definition. Use my studio pen and make it very small. Test that out. I'm really happy with how this final piece looks. The flowers are very bright. Contrast it against the dark olive green background. It's also looking very retro with the stacked color blocking. If you're ready to move on, Meet me in the final video where I'll recap what we've learned in this course. 11. Conclusion: Congrats on completing this course. I hope you have been following along and hand-lettering the retro inspired block level and script lettering. To recap, we covered how to research and gather inspiration for each lettering style. Sketch out a balanced composition with fluttering and illustrations. Ink RR to achieve clean lines and add color, texture and decoration to each illustration. Retro lettering is a very fluid and loose. So have fun exploring the techniques we covered in your class project. Reference, the resource guide when needed, and take advantage in using the tree texture brushes. If you enjoyed this class, please leave a review and don't forget to share your finished work in the class projects. I'd also love to see your work. Share it on Instagram. Simply use the hashtag, retro inspired lettering in your post so I can see what you create. Thanks so much for taking my course. See you next time.