Seasonal Inspiration: Fall Lettering

1. 1 Intro: Hello, everyone, and welcome to fall Lettering. My name is Jesse, and I am so excited to show you some different ways that you can incorporate the Autumn spirit into your letters, and that includes Halloween. In this class, you're going to learn how to pick or create your ultimate color palette, incorporate designs and patterns into your lettering, and even a specific style of lettering that just oozes Halloween spirit. All you need to get started is a pencil, paper, and some markers. Let's get to it. 2. 2 Color Palettes: One of the easiest ways you can set the stage for fall lettering is by choosing the right color palette. Colors are known to evoke certain feelings and certain imagery when we see them. I created a set of simple autumn color palettes that I'm going to share with you right now. You don't need any fancy supplies on hand. I mostly just used Crayola markers. So whatever you have, you can make work for this. I promise. Up first, we've got a classic color palette. This palette is all the classic colors of autumn in the Northeast, The leaves are changing, the ground is going dormant, and everything around us is slightly more muted than it was during the summer. If you saw any of these colors together anywhere, it would instantly remind you of autumn, even if you didn't realize it. But that's not the only color palette that we have at our disposal. One of my other favorites is joule tones. Joe tones are the deeper versions of the bright summer colors that we all know and love. Instead of the bright blue in the sky or the color of my beach wel, we're going to lean more towards a deeper version of blue, maybe a teal, something darker. Same thing goes for green instead of the bright green that we might see on the grass outside or new leaves on a tree. This is more of a dark, evergreen color and this very color, where we might have been wearing fluorescent pink. The colors deepen as the seasons go on, and that doesn't mean they're dull. They're just a little bit darker and richer now. Another palette is the classic Halloween palette, black and orange. No matter where you see this, no matter what time of year it is, black and orange says to me, Halloween. Those I would say are the top three classic color palettes that might most immediately come to mind for you when you're thinking about autumn. But that's not to say we can't have fun creating our own color palettes for things that we love or things that evoke certain feelings within us. What about this apple picking palette? Love apple picking. I live in New York and it's a very common fall activity here and these three colors together. I feel like I immediately would know that it represents an apple tree. We've got the color of the apple, we've got the color of the tree or maybe the stem, and the leaves, not quite as bright as they were earlier in the year, now a little bit more muted Next, we've got witch's hat. I think this is actually probably becoming a modern classic for Halloween colors. I feel like when I see these colors, I think of Halloween no matter what. We've got the simple black, maybe of the witch's hat. We've got the green, maybe for her skin, that classic witch, even from wicked, and then purple. It's a beautiful contrast to the green. They both pop against each other, and this could be accented in other places, a little ribbon around the hat. And finally, candy corn. One of the major things that follow is known for is Halloween, right? And what's the big deal on Halloween? Getting candy. Seeing these colors together, the yellow, white, and orange, definitely scream candy corn to me. But just in general, they also match the classic color palette. So these are just some palette examples that I came up with. But maybe there are other things that scream autumn and Halloween to you. 3. 3A Hs: Okay, so now you might be wondering like Jesse, we have our color palettes. What are we supposed to do with them? Well, I'm glad you asked. No matter what your handwriting looks like or how good or bad of a drawer you are, just using these colors are going to help you evoke the feeling of fall or Halloween in whatever you're doing. But for right now, let's practice on some block letters. So using a pencil, I'm going to write out for Halloween. Let's say I'm making this H and I want to use some of these classic fall colors that we were just talking about? Maybe I outlined it in red. You're still going to see some of the pencil line through it, that's okay for these purposes. Maybe I want to color it in with some orange alternating stripes. Patterns are wonderful for implementing different color palettes and just adding a basic touch of detail to something that you might not otherwise have it on. What if I alternate those stripes with some narrower stripes in between? Adding two different thicknesses of stripes gives you a little more texture in your letters than you might otherwise have. Look at that. Already, we've got a pretty autumn themed letter. Reminds me of Thanksgiving, and then I'm going to take this dark brown, and I'm just going to add a little shadow to the outside of my letter, just to give it a little depth. But instead of a normal gray that I might use or black, I'm going to keep it within this color palette. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stick with the same letter for every color palette that we use, and you'll see just how clearly they pop against each other. And this time, we're going to use our apple picking colors on it. Maybe I start off with a brown outline. And you don't always have to be so subtle with your decorating either. And the first example, I use stripes, but what about if this one, I did some red circles. They're not fully apples, but they're similar to apples. And what if I fill in the rest with little green leaves? And this also gives you an idea of, if you're not the greatest drawer, it's okay. You can make things work, whatever your skill level, whatever your ability. This might not outright scream apple, but it does give us that fall harvest kind of vibe. So check that out. The exact same letter written in two completely different ways. Next, let's go for the joe tones. I want if I turn my notebook and I do horizontal stripes this time. Again, decoration does not have to be super in depth or advanced for it to be effective. Honestly, the color palette, whose is going to do most of the work for you here. The color palette is what's going to give you the fall vibes, even if you're not drawing literal fall decorations. I'm just going to add this green. I'll do those narrow stripes again. I love wearing joe tones in the fall. I happen to look very good in them. Let's do another H. This time I'm going to do the witchy color palette. What if I just color in entirely in black, and then I add some purple and green outlines to it. Look at that. Look how that bright purple just pops against that black. Then I'm going to add just an extra outline to that with this bright green. Maybe I'll make it narrower. There's some contrast between it and the purple. Boom. And for my final letter, I am going to do a Halloween classic. Candy corn starts off with a little bit of yellow at the bottom, and then it's got a big orange center, and then there's a little bit of white left to the top. Tell me when you look at this, you don't immediately think of candy corn, right? And besides just using orange and yellow together, you can color things in to specifically mimic something else like this candy corn. That gives me an idea for another one, a caramel apple. So what if I outline this a little bit, and then I add my drips of caramel, and I can do that all the way across, and we'll do it a little unevenly because that's how drips would happen. And don't worry if you're not particularly skilled at this. I'm actually going to show you this a little later on in the lesson about slime letters. But for now, look, so just give the idea of that thick gooey caramel dripping down. And then I can make the rest of the letter. The red of the apple. You might prefer green caramel apples. They're actually pretty good when they're green because that sour of the green apple contrasts against the sweetness of the caramel. But for these purposes, I'm already coloring it in. Maybe I'll add a little extra outline here. Jose can see a little more clearly. You wouldn't normally maybe outline caramel, but here we are just to make it pop a little more. So that's it. Now you've seen all these different ways that you can just take the simple color palettes that we pick before and you can adapt them to whatever your skill level is to whatever your design level is. It doesn't matter if you're the best drawer, it doesn't matter if you have super advanced designs or you just do something simple like stripes. The color is going to do the heavy lifting for you. That brings me to one other pattern I want to show you. That's something that really makes me think of fall, and that's plate. 4. 4 Plaid 1: One pattern in particular that really makes me think of fall is plaid. There's just such a cozy association to it, like plaid flannels, plaid sheets, and it's like the quintessential outfit for scarecrows. As you can see right here, I've got a simple plaid pattern that I created using just two different color markers, and I'm going to show you how to make this on your own. I tend to use two colors that are just a shade lighter and a shade darker than each other, but you can also just pick two of your favorite colors and see how that goes. For this example, I'm going to be using two colors. One of them is a slightly darker yellow and the other one is an orange. They compliment each other well, but you can also distinguish them from each other easily, and that is going to be key here. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to add a series of stripes to my paper, and I'm going to leave a little bit of space in between it about the width of a pen. If you're not comfortable doing this, you can simply alternate your markers as you go along. Since this is just for practice purposes, it does not matter how many stripes you do. I think five of each is fine, and I tend to start and end on the exact same color. You can fill in the gaps a little bit if you have any, but again, this is just practice, so it doesn't have to be perfect. Now that we've got our field of stripes. We're going to create a series of stripes going the other way. Instead of putting them right next to each other like we did in the first set, I'm going to do one stripe here and then I'm going to leave a lot more space in between. Then I'm going to go back to my lighter color. You can use the exact same marker you were just using. It really doesn't matter except if it's too light a color that you can't see it over top the others. I'm just going to add this simple thin line in between these thick bars right now. For some contrast in texture, for a little contrast in color. That's it. A super simple plaid pattern that you can use for anything, and you can make it as simple or intricate as you want. I know that a lot of the plaid patterns I see on T shirts are a little more detailed than this. But I think if you look at this, immediately, you know what it is. Now, just for the sake of it, I'm going to show you a plaid in contrasting colors, where we use two completely different colors together and see how it goes. And this is going to be colors, I think look nice together, but who knows how they'll show up in a plaid capacity, right? So I'm going to do a light purple with green. This is just so you can see. You don't have to use the same color palette. I just usually choose to. Now I'm going to do the same thing I did before. I'm going to space them out more than I did in the first section. It actually looks nice because it's just like a little darker shadow over the top. Then maybe I'll keep the purple for the stripes in the middle instead of switching back to the green. That looks nice. But if I wanted a little more contrast, let's see how this goes, I could also maybe change those stripes to dark purple, right? Throw another color into the mix. It's not exact, but you get the idea. There you go. Some different styles that you can use as you attempt a plaid pattern, and you might be wondering, Hey, Jessie, what would I use a plaid pattern for? Well, I'm glad you asked. Same as before. We can use this pattern to decorate our letters. Let's see, which color palette am I going to use? Let's try a new one. I'm going to start with my vertical stripes. You can also do this on a diagonal if you're feeling brave, I only say that because you're just going to have to keep track of what you were doing before. I'm going to do all my letters at once right now. Then I'm going to switch to my other color. This is actually a dark yellow, but it looks very orange, very candy corny. I was not my intention, but here we are. It's not going to be perfect. You can make yours more perfect. Also, one of my favorite things in the world, and outline hides a whole host of sins. If you just tapped this off with a thick black outline after, it wouldn't even matter. All right. Now I've got my vertical stripes and I'm going to switch, and I'm going to put in my horizontal stripes. The yellow is not going to show up over the orange, so I am just going to use the orange for this. And I'm going to try and keep my stripes all across, so it looks like one giant piece of fabric. If you're doing a longer word, this might take longer. You can also physically draw out guidelines if you need them, right? There's no shame in that. I just didn't do it for these purposes. I'll do it one more across the top. Boom. Then I think I'm going to add that dark orange as my stripe across the middle, my little accent stripe. And you know what I've seen somewhere? Why don't I try this? I'm going to use a much thinner pen. I'm going to do a double stripe in the middle here because I know I've seen that. This is going to be a little harder, maybe to. Straight all the way across, but get the idea. You can have fun with this. You can personalize it again. Whatever your favorite color is, you can use that, whatever your favorite plaid or tartan pattern is, you can use that. But no matter what, you're definitely going to get the fall vibes going. When people see these letters showing up. That's it for plaids, and I'm excited to see whatever color combos you come up with. 5. 5 Seasonal Designs: Next, we're going to continue the fall spirit by drawing some simple seasonal designs. The first thing we're going to do is a classic apple shape. When I draw my apples, I start off as if I were drawing a heart, so I go up and around, and then I come around almost fully round, and I do a little lump on the top again as I join the two lines together. I could also use this for a peach, and honestly, this is how I used to draw pumpkins. Then I can add a little stem to it. And maybe even a little leaf, if I want to have that detail. Right? And of course, using the palette from earlier. We can always draw these with color too. So I'm going to start off with my rounded shape, color that in. Add my nice narrow stem. And then add in a little green leaf. That looks like a leaf. Close enough. Now let's try a pumpkin. So you can use the same method I just showed you for an apple. No shame in that. Start off going a little bit upward as you move out to the outside, and I would make mine a little bit wider and flatten out the bottom. I know that pumpkins come in all different shapes and sizes, right? So you could also have tall pumpkins. Can make them slightly uneven on the sides. It doesn't have to be perfect. Nothing in nature is perfect. I think it's we as humans who are focused more on perfectionism, but that's not what today's class is about. Then from there, same thing. I can add a little brown stem. I think really the stems might be like more green or whatever. These stems tend to be a little bit wider on the bottom. And a little more square on the top, but again, doesn't have to be perfect. And look. That's two completely different items of produce that you create using the same shape. But if you want to try a little bit more of a detailed pumpkin drawing, here's how I make that happen. I start off with an oval shape in the middle. Doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be a certain width. Again, pumpkins come in all shapes and sizes, so Then I'm going to add another oval coming off of the side. I wouldn't normally make it bigger like that, but here we are. I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. Try not to get it lower because the resting part is going to be here. Honestly, if anything, the middle part is going to be the longest. Then I'm going to add one more to the side for good luck on either side. I start with a little bit of a lift up. Then I'm going to add my stem. It's going to be a little thicker on the bottom, as I mentioned. Then to give a little extra perspective, I can add these little lumps in the back right here, little like deltoid muscles or shoulder muscles, and it helps make it look like there's a little bit more depth and dimension to the pumpkin. They don't have to fall exactly on that line right there. They can go a little wider, a little narrower, and then I can color it in the same way. I can make it a little darker for the outline parts. If you're good at shading in detail and stuff like that, you'll have a field day trying to shade these in a little more. Realistically, but I'm just going to do a little bit of detail here just so you can see how convincing these can be, right? There goes my stem, I'll color that in, and then I'm going to just add this slightly lighter brighter shade. There's just a little bit of dimension there even because we outlined those ovals in one color and added the orange in another. Look how cool that puma looks. I mean, I'm pretty pleased with myself. You can get crazy with it and you can add those cute little vines curling off it or whatever. Look at that. Anyone who saw this would know it was a pumpkin, Anyone would feel fall vibes, autumn vibes, not quite Halloween, maybe because there's no little Jack lantern face on it, but you could absolutely use this exact same pumpkin to draw a Jack lantern. Let's take a black marker actually now that I said that. Let's make a little classic jack lantern face. We can have our triangle eyes. Classic. We can have our mouth with like the one tooth. Perfect. Colred in. Boom. Jack anon. Look at that. Super simple drawing. Anyone could do it, honestly. I would fight you and say that anyone could do this, no matter your drawing ability, your skill level. Next thing we're going to do is a witch's hat. It's basically a triangle with a brim on it. Just like with the pumpkin, we can make a slightly more detailed version, but we don't have to. We're going to start off. I'm going to use the pencil again. Start off, and I can just make a triangle. I'll make the top two parts of my triangle. Then instead of making the bottom line straight across, I'm going to round it a little bit. It's like a little cone. Then I'm going to make a brim and that's going to go all the way around. I'm going to start here, and I'm going to make an oblong oval shape all the way around, and I'm going to circle it back, so it would look like those two lines would meet in the back. Then for a little more detail, I'm going to add a little stripe here. And I can make it a different color. So I am going to do another one and I'm going to color it in and I'll show you what that looks like. Though you might be already coloring yours in on your own. Who knows? I can't see you. All right, I wouldn't have normally done those so close together. Geez. All right. It doesn't have to be perfect. Getting colored in anyway. So take my black marker. The little ribbon part. I always like that purple ribbon detail a lot of people do on their witches because why not have a little papa color? Again, it's very similar to the color palette that we were talking about before. All right. It's not perfect. It sort of looks like a melted puddle, maybe. But you got the idea. And if you wanted to add a little extra detail, you can make the top of the hat right here pointed as if it's falling over a little bit. Think of like a Santa hat or an elves hat or something. So instead of starting as a straight triangle on the top. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to have a little bit of a triangle point going to the side. And I'm going to take this top line and I'm going to draw that down into the base of the hat right here. And I'm going to take this line here and slightly to the left of it. Not at the end of the line. Well, you could do that too and see how that looks. It looks like a little dinosaur head or something. Slightly to the inside of the line, I'm going to continue my hat down this way too, and I'm going to around that bottom. You could make this totally pointed, that probably would make more sense to be like a witch's hat. I can add that ribbon again around the outside, and then I can add the brim around. The brim doesn't have to be perfect either, but you want a general oval shape. Totally butchering this. That's okay. This is what practice is for, right? So you want that general oval shape going all the way around. This just adds a little more dimension to it. Right? It looks as if the top of the hat was so tall and pointy that it just flopped over a little bit. And you can color it in the same way you did the other. Even just as effective, we'd probably be, outlining the whole thing in thick black and then, leaving the rest of it open. Some of this poor drawing is because I'm not usually practicing my drawing, and some of it is just because of the angle of my paper, which I should have turned. Look at that. There's that hat with a little purple brim, that's the witch's hat. Up next, another simple fall shape. Let's make a little leaf. These are leaves I believe from an oak tree, and I say I believe, but I should be more confident in that because I looked up what oak tree leaves were. Instead of, when I'm doing just like a basic leaf, which you could totally do, I do two curved lines that meet each other in a peak on either end. Then I can add a stem to one end or I can make a stem running all the way through it either way. For these leaves, they have a little more detail to them. So I'm going to do a little curve up, and I'm going to make these finger shapes coming out of it, and there's going to be one on the top and they're going to go all the way around. These lines are going to meet together. Again, they don't have to be perfect. This might not be exactly what a real leaf looks like, but you definitely get a little more visual interest than you would with a basic leaf like that. Same as the other one, I can add a little stem, I could add little veins running through it. And I can color all that in. But even if I just had the outline of the leaf and that little stem part, you would know exactly what this is, even from afar. Another thing you could do for these leaves is you could start off with your rounded leaf shape, and then you could add a little bit of texture like a tooth texture. That just makes the leaves a little more interesting as well, like these tiny little jagged edges. Obviously, you could see both of the pencil outlines, but if I got rid of that original outline and I just really put the focus on the outside one. You have this cute little spiky leaf right there. Now let's try another design for Halloween. And that is going to be our candy corn. I mean, I already mentioned this earlier, classic. Everyone knows what it is. It's like a rounded triangle shape, so sort of like the witch's hat, but a little more rounded all the way around, a little bit of yellow at the bottom, more orange in the middle, and then white up at the top. Super easy to draw, right? And there's other forms of candy that we could draw, too. So I could take a classic wrapped candy. I could do a circle for the middle. And then I could do a little angled line coming out on either side, both on the same side, I could just ruffle that as I make my way from one end to the other, and I'll repeat it on the other side. I have two lines coming off it and I ruffle that. You could also get the more wrapped cinged look by having both the lines come more from the same part. That looks like a warped bat. Never mind. But I thought it might look more like those candies, you know, where the ends are twisted and stuff. But I think generally speaking, if you saw this and it was brightly colored, you'd know that it was a little candy thing. Then I'm going to show you how to do a quick coffin. Not the cheeriest of things that you could be drawing, but coffins are very reminiscent of Halloween. So all you have to do for a coffin is you're going to do two lines coming down to a base, but the lines are going to be slightly angled outward. So if we could start with that base, and it's going to be narrow, but then these lines are going to come up and out more on a straight line than what I'm doing. It's going to be pretty tall. I don't have enough room here, but generally, it would be pretty tall, and then we have the top of it. It's going to be a straight line that's parallel to the one on the bottom. Then we're going to just join these two lines together so there's a little bit of an angle at the top. Then you could write something on there RIP or something if you want. You could easily color it in with brown tones to mimic wood. I think that's probably the most effective way to color them in. Obviously, there's different shapes and sizes of coffins, but this gets the idea across for sure. Finally, on that note, we've got a tombstone, No maybe the happiest of things, but just a super simple shape. We just have this oval that goes a half oval that goes up and over. You can add a little bit of grass down at the bottom to. If we're trying to create a full scene, and we've got the little R P written in it. Now that you know how to draw all these simple fall and Halloween shapes, let's go to the next lesson and see what you can use them for. 6. 6 design implement: One way that you could use those little designs that you just learned how to draw is by incorporating them into words themselves. An apple is round and it could take the place of an O and award. Same thing with a pumpkin, and the letter A is pointy, and so is a witch's hat, but also so is candycorn. Let's start with that. I'm going to write out the word candy. Instead of a letter A, I'm going to substitute candycorn. It's close enough to the letter A that within the context of the word, you're going to know that that's standing for an A. Then just like we learned before, we can color all of our letters in the same way. I can start off with a little bit of yellow on the bottom for every single one of my letters. Then we're going to add that orange. I'm rushing through this a little bit more than you probably would because I'm not going for a masterpiece right now, going to show an example. It doesn't matter your lettering style. It doesn't matter your technique for lettering, even when I write it sloppy. Look at that. I'm going to add a little more here. There you go. But look at that. You know exactly what this word says, and you know exactly what that's supposed to be. Then adding that same coloring to all the rest of your letters is just really driving the point home. This is a great trick you can use if you're writing out invites or flyers or posters. But here's another way to incorporate fun designs into your lettering. As you can see, I've already written out the word fall on my piece of paper, and instead of swapping out an entire letter like we did previously, or instead of putting our letters inside different shapes, we're just going to incorporate subtle details into these letters that help highlight the season. So for the F example, I'm going to show you how to incorporate a little spider and spider web into this design. First thing you need to know is how to draw a spider web. The first thing you need to know for drawing a spider web is that it's going to start from one central point. And then it's got lines radiating outwards from the middle. And you could definitely just cross them all the way through like this. But for letters, we're probably not going to see the full circle of the web because it's hard to fit all that detail into such a small space. In between each of these lines, we've got more web, and that's just going to be a simple U shape that connects the two lines next to each other. Then you're going to do the same thing from the next section, you're going to start from the end of this first line, and you're going to work your way over with a little curve to the following one. You work your way all the way around And then you start on a lower layer. There's no specific number of layers you need to use, but on a small space like a letter, you're probably not going to be able to fit too much detail. If you were just drawing it on your own, you add a little spider coming down. Don't forget all eight legs. And you're all set. Now we're going to add that web to our letter F. You can start the spider web right from the dead center of it, or you could start it from a lower place just to add a little more dimension. I think in this case, I'm going to start from the top left corner right here as that's a nice focal point. I can symbolically add in my point right there. I'm going to use pencil to start and then I'm going to go over it again later with pen. I'm going to start with just one straight line. Here. I'm going to add another one here. I don't want to just go across the exact outline of the letter because that's boring. I'm just going to add one more line going down this way. Again, the letter is pretty big, but I'm not going to want to add so much teeny, tiny detail to it. It really is just to create more of an effect. Now, let's start from the inside of the web and work our way out, since we can't really see where these lines end. Same as we did before, I'm going to pick two points, since this is a partial line, I'm going to start here since I have a full line, and I'm going to just do this like inverted U shape. Give it a little bit of a curve, have it join on both of these lines. I'm going to start from where this line ends here, and I'm going to do the same thing to the line next to it for the line next to it. It's only half of the line that we see, so that'll disappear. Same thing for the other side. Now we're going to move a little bit up. There's no specific spacing you have to do. You could do more lines close together if you want, but I don't want to spend my time on that much detail. Here is roughly the point of the line that we see here, and we're going to imaginary draw it here, and then for real draw it there. If it helps you, you can just very lightly sketch in the full line because you're going to erase all the pencil later anyway. I'll add in this one over here too and to the other side as well. Finally here, do my curved line arching over here. Again, if it's easier for you, you can do a ghost outline of the spider web so that it only crosses the part where you need it to and you'll erase everything else later. Since this line's a little longer, maybe a tiny bit more peeks out at the top of it. Even without adding pen, I can just erase these two lines here. And boom. We've got a little spider web detail. On top of that, why not add a cute little spider dangling from the bottom of the letter? It just adds that tiny extra bit of detail. Again, we're going to add all those eight little legs. Boom, look at that. You could color this in however you want, and then you could add the spider web maybe in a white gel pen, or you could just add it with a thin black pen over the top. Next for the letter A, we went over those little witches hats before. Now instead of incorporating one of them as an entire letter, why don't we just make one sitting on top of the A? We could do it dead center on top, like it's wearing a hat, or you could do like a little French Bret style on the end. I say, just to make this easy, let's make it dead centered right on top. We're going to start with our little peek. I think I'm going to do the little floppy top. And then that brim is going to come around and it's going to cover the top of the letter. Oh, I forgot to do my little thing here. Now, I can add that same detail I had before. I'm going to outline this in pen so you guys can just see it more clearly. Then what you would do is you would obviously just erase the rest of the letter A, so you can't see it through the hat. I erase the rest of the letter, but look, I can still totally tell. I just flung my pen. I can still totally tell that it's an A. Wearing a hat. Up next for letter L. We're going to add a little pattern to the inside. So we're just going to add a little pattern detail. I like to consider these highlights. So I'm going to pick a shape that I want to do. Maybe I'll do a little apple for this one. So I can write out my little apple shape, and I can add my little stem and a little leaf to it. And then I can just add a simple straight line on either end of it. So now if I wave my magic wand and color this in, I've got this nice crisp letter and acute little apple detail just decorating it right in the middle. You could also take the idea of a pattern and repeat it within the letter. So what if I wanted to make those little oak leaves that we drew before? I can repeat them in different directions throughout the letter. It's totally okay if some of them are making their way outside the lines. Once again, I'm going to magically color this in Vo. That's another way that you can incorporate cute little designs into your letters. 7. 7 Bunting: So for today, we're just going to be doing a drawing, but bunting is actually a banner that you can hang. Instead of one long sheet of paper, you can have individual designs hanging, like how this example has pumpkins on it. Notice I put one letter on each pumpkin. You could also do it just with a design if you didn't want to write a message on it. Let me show you how it's done. So first, I'm just going to start off with my string. Imagine this was hanging up on a wall somewhere, I might be taped up on either end, and it would sag a little bit in the middle just to give it that natural curve. Now let's figure out what message you're going to write, if anything. In this case, I'm going to use the word spooky. It seems seasonal. Now I count how many letters are in my word. It's got six. Why am I counting the letters? Well, because if I want everything to be evenly spaced along the banner and I want it to be centered in the middle, it's going to take a little bit of planning. I could definitely wing it, but if you're like me, I usually start from the left and I go to the right, and there's a chance that I run out of six letters here, and then the whole right side of my banner is empty. So I know this has six letters, and I'm going to want to center my message on the line. Since it's an even number, there's no letter that's going to fall right in the dead center. Instead, we're going to put the two middle letters, which are going to be the O's, one on either side of dead center. Then there's two more letters on either side. I'm going to add two more lines to the side as evenly spaced as I can. It does not have to be perfect. We're just practicing here. But generally, I'm going to want them to be evenly spaced, and I'm going to do the same thing for the other side. This is also going to depend on how big a design you're doing. It's going to depend on how many letters your word has. In this case, I could add a bunch of blank lines over on the edges just to fill out this banner a little more. But for practice purposes, we're just going to go at the six. Now, same as before, I am going to do my design. So I think in this case, I'm going to do a little ghost. Here's going to be like my super basic little ghost shape, like the ghost that you might see in a classic arcade game, Packman. And I'm just going to have the ghost hanging like at the tops of their heads. I'm going to show you another option afterwards, just in case you want to add a little more variety to your banners. So I'm going to start with the ghost that's closest to center. I'm going to add his little ruffles at the bottom. Then I'm going to do the second center ghost right next to that. I'm going to try and make them about the same with the same height. They're not perfect. Again, it's okay, they don't have to be. I do the next one. Again, roughly the same size. I definitely recommend that you do this with pencil first just so in case you need to change anything you can. Now I'm going to go to the other side. If you prefer, you could alternate, start in the middle and then do outside outside. That's going to be your comfort level, but the main thing is that we want to set up our two center ones first. Now here, I'm going to add another ghost. Wow, Miss the mark there to the outside, I do some ruffles, and I'll do my final ghost. From here, I can just add my letters, but honestly, these don't entirely look like ghosts at this point. I'm going to add little faces to them. I'll add some of that little design. I want to add the design first so that I know how much room that's going to take up, and that will help me figure out how big my litters are going to be. Now, I can write out f, P, O, O, Y. I know this is looking a little weird, even as I'm sitting here looking at this, let's see if this helps. Perfect. Now, there's another option for the way that you can hang your shapes off the line? I'm just going to use the same example of a ghost, but I'm going to do a slightly different drawing. Here, I'm going to start up with my hanging string. Again, you could make one of these in real life. You could cut out life size ghost shapes and just write the letters on and you could attach them by a string and hang them on your wall as decoration. For now, we're just going to focus on drawing. In this case, instead of just hanging all the flags off the bottom of the line like this, what if I wanted the line to go in the middle of them? In this case, what if I drew a little ghost, but he had little arms coming off him. Maybe he's going for a full scare effect. So I'm going to attach my ghost this time from the arms instead of from the top of their heads. I'm going to do my ghost instead of hanging off at the bottom. Maybe I start his head up here, and then I make sure that my arms are centered along the line, and then I'll add his little skirt. Then I can do the next one right next to it. Again, if you're writing out a word or you need a certain amount of them, you're definitely going to want to start from the center and work your way outwards. I'm just going to do three as an example because this little guy is in the way anyway. You can leave a little space between them. They don't have to be touching right by their hands, but you can make them do that as well. I'm just going to leave a little space, so there's room for the string, not as much room as I thought actually. I might as well go ahead and just attach them. You could have them all links like that just touching each other, or on the other side, I can have him with his hands and then there's a little bit of string in between. Again, my ultimate goal would try and make them roughly the same size, even though this guy is way bigger. But since we did this in pencil first, then when we go and outline it with a pen, we can just skip the part that goes through the ghost. These two holding hands right there. Then I would add my string in between afterwards. I would extend my string outside and that's the great part about pencil is I'll have a guideline to follow, and I don't have to worry about drawing the line that goes in the middle of the. Then if I wanted to actually add messages to these two, I can easily just write those in afterwards. Also, if you were trying to write a message that was too long for one line, you could totally split it up into multiple banners. That's bunting. 8. 8 slime: And finally, it's time for slime letters. We're going to do a little exercise first to help us better prepare for it. I want you to take your pencil, and I want you to just draw a straight line across your paper. It doesn't have to go all the way across, and it doesn't have to be perfectly straight. We just need something that resembles a flat surface. When you see slime dripping off something, usually it's because it's dripping over a solid surface, and the law of gravity is what pulls it downward. We're going to practice making drip marks. Imagine you had slime and you poured it right over the top of whatever this surface is. Imagine how it might like ooze over the edge. Maybe it would just come down in one long blob. Gravity would pull it more down in the center of the blob, and then up at the edges, it would still be closer to the top of the table. Maybe it pours down more evenly in the middle. It might also just be a simple little drip mark. Just like that one long string that's dangling lower than the rest of them? You could even take that to the next level and you could have it dripping lower and have that final little droplet that separated from it. What if it started dripping a little bit on one side, and then it really came down? On the other. See what I mean? Now that you've given that a try, we're ready to practice on letters. As you can see here, I've appropriately written out the word slime. So now, let's play around with how the slime would ooze from each of these letters based on how they're shaped, and there is no right or wrong way to do this. The first one we're going to start with is S. In S, we've got a couple different surfaces that the slime could be dripping from. We've got the baseline right here, which would be the edge of the table, the bottom most part. Let's add a little drip a slime here. I'm going to use my pencil to start. Then when we color it in, we can do the outline and erase that extra part right there. But look, the top of the S is also curved down. Isn't there a chance that there might be a little bit of slime starting to slide down here. Letter L is going to be similar to the S. But of course, we don't want to do the exact same slime pattern. Maybe this is a good opportunity I'm going to do just on this side to have one of those long skinny drip marks. Next is going to be I. Why since I did the L on that side, why don't I start the I from the other side? Why don't I start with a longer drip on one side and then have it get skinnier as it goes up to the top. I do like a little bit of wavy stuff with the pen just to have it look more organic. Here on the M, we've got three surfaces that we can drip slime from. If you want, you can drip it from all three of them or you could limit yourself just so as not to overdo the effect. I think I'm going to do a long drip maybe from the middle of the M. Elongate that a little more. Maybe I add that extra little droplet falling away from it down there. I think in this case, I'm just going to add another little drip to the left hand side since we did the right hand side on the eye. And I'm going to do one of these like centered drips. Just for a little bit of variety. No two of these look exactly the same, even though these are the same shape, they're not exactly the same, mostly because we're drawing them by hand and it's hard to make them exactly the same. Finally, the E. I've got my bottom surface right here, of course, and I can make things drip off it. But once again, we've got this little overhang. I mean even here too on the middle arm, but we've got this great opportunity to have something drip down from the top of the overhang right here. I think I'm going to do something centered on the bottom of the E and then there's going to be a drip on the top right to balance it out. So I'm going to have this drip maybe from the left side down first, and then it's going to get narrower as it goes up to the top. So this is like long, this is most of the surface. And then here once again, I'm going to just do like a longer kind of droplet, so it's dripping off the edge. So here's what the entire word looks like so far, and I'm going to snap my fingers and it's colored in. So there you have some slimy letters. Notice how the outlines completely disappeared when I erase them, so it just looks like the letters themselves are dripping with slime. Pretty cool, huh? And if you want to add more of a slime effect to it, you could even add some little drip marks into the letters. Using the same pen I used for the outline, I'm going to add this subtle green detail to the inside of the letters. I'll use that same technique I used before to make the drip marks on the outline. You know, we can make a nice long one. You don't have to do them evenly spaced or consistently. It's supposed to look natural. But look how this looks like an extra layer slime is now pouring over the top of these letters. And this technique can also be used to make blood or, you know, anything that drips really. 9. 9 Final Thoughts: That's it for today's lesson, which means it's time for your final project. I want you to write out the same word in three different styles using some of the techniques that you learned in today's class. Maybe you come up with your own color palette or you show me different ways you incorporate your favorite designs into your letters. Or maybe you want to write out three separate words to show off more of the skills that you learned today. Then make sure to upload it to Skillshare so I can see. Thank you for taking the time to join me today for some fall lettering. Before you go, I would love for you to leave a review of this class. It lets me know what you enjoyed and it'll let other students know what to expect. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.