Unique Lettering with Watercolors I

1. Trailer: Unique Lettering with Watercolors: Welcome to unique lettering with watercolors, part one. My name is Anna and I will be your instructor. I'm extremely excited to bring this new watercolor class discussion, this is not your typical lettering or calligraphy class. Think of this classes as a workshop with photo, lessons and activities to help you work out a personal lettering style. My goal is for you to create something that is yours and only yours. A signature hand painted letter style that will differentiate you from other artists and help you really stand out. We will prepare using simple warm-up activities, go over and practice with a variety of funds. Observe and review the art of some of my favorite illustrators. Explore possibilities of our own personal handwriting and create a final project with what we've learned. 2. Supplies: To get started, we're going to talk a little bit about Supplies. Number 1 is watercolor paper as always. For this class, I'm going to be using the Strathmore pad. I really like these little spiral pads, especially for classes because we can flip through, and use different sheets of paper as we go along without having to rip out the sheet. There is a very large variety of paper, I've talked about paper in my past classes, and in this case I'm going to use cold press. So that means this is going to have a little bit of texture to it. This texture is interesting. It's more lined like that. But that's just the specific paper that I'm going to use today. You can use whatever watercolor paper you have or you prefer. Actually, on a side note, I've been really into hot press paper lately, a little bit less texture. So whatever you have works, and this has 12 sheets, and it's 9 by 12 inches, which I think is a really good size for this practice activity that we're going to be doing. Number 1, paper. So this is a notebook that I have, it's a notebook that I made. Actually, you can find it in my Etsy shop, but you can use whatever notebook you want. This is just a regular notebook. It's not watercolor paper, it's just regular blank sheets. We're going to use this at some point when we do a little bit of testing with handwriting. Whatever notebook that you have in your studio or in your house is going to work great. Just have something extra so you don't have to use up your watercolor paper when we do a little testing. For reference, we won't be using this to paint. It's just right, we're going to use pens here. So obviously we're going to have our watercolors. This is my Schmincke set. I've used these pen sets before in classes, and they're my absolute favorite paints. Again, if you've taken my other classes, you'll notice that I don't really clean up my palette because I like for you guys to see how it looks usually. Every artist is different, but I like to keep it this way because I have my little areas here. Right here I use my browns and my blues and some greens. Also, just for reference, I have a few little dabs of paint that are not in my pads right here. This is just the way that I like to use watercolors, for example, this is a little bit of Holbein Lavender here, which is a weird color that doesn't usually come with pen sets. I like to make my own palette up, I do a little bit of mixing and matching. If you want to know more about different supplies in colors, and especially paints, make sure to go check out my watercolor paint guide. I do an entire class just explaining all that paints that I like to use. Because I know you guys are really curious about that and obviously I get it, I am too. I actually made the whole of their class for that. So these are, I mean, my Schmincke pen sets. This is a little bit of Holbein pen I have here. I actually put in these little pens of primer metalics that I like to carry around now. These are really cool. You can check those out of my cay 2. I just wanted to show you what my palette we use usually look like. You know when we use watercolors, we can really take advantage of this dry paint and reactivate it with just a little bit of water. Watercolors go a really long way, that's one of my favorite things about this medium in general. These are my paints, we have our paper and I'm going to show you what else I have here that we're going to use in this class. I also brought this black doctor Paige Martin's radiant concentrated watercolor. This is also watercolor just like this is, except it comes in a different form. If you don't have this, don't worry about it. I just really like using this as my black, a black that I like. But if you don't have this, you can also mix in some ink, or you can also just use your black paint, which I almost finished in my Schmincke pen set. But black paint will be good for a lot of the practice activities that we're going to do, so it's nice to have this. What else do we have? I have some brushes here. For this class, we're going to focus a little bit more on thinner brushes. I have a little variety here of the brushes that I've been using lately. Let me see, there's a few different brands which I'll talk about a bit. Number 1, these two red brushes are Winsor Newton University series. So these brushes are actually not specifically for watercolor, at the art supply store, it says for acrylics. I actually do like these, especially when we're doing lettering, because the bristle is a little bit rough, a little bit harder. I personally like this better because when I do lettering, I like to have a little bit more control. You guys will see as we go on and obviously everyone has their own style and that's what I want you guys to develop here. But I like these brushes that are too soft for lettering. So this is a size 2 and a size 0.These are nice, smaller brushes that we can use. What else do I have here? This is an Artist's Loft Vienna. It's a round brush, it's a number 1. This one is a little bit softer, but as you'll see, we're going to try these all out, and it's really all about you finding what you feel most comfortable with. Our brush is going be a really big deal in this class here. So if you have a variety of smaller brushes, just keep in mind that we might need to try a few out before you find which brush is going to be the best for you. Then there is a Princeton number 2, this one is a watercolor brush, is a little bit softer as well. This is the largest brush I brought here and it's a number 5. This is Cumberbatch. Well these are two different brands. Also a size 2 and a size 5. As you can see, most of these brushes are pretty small and fine. They're round, which is what I like to use for for lettering. You might think that they look really similar, but as we start developing our lettering style, you'll start to feel that the brush has a lot to do with how it looks in the end. Just keep in mind that you might need to try out a few different sizes before you find what's going to really work for you personally. So these are my brushes, and then you're going to need a pencil. I recently discovered these Blackwing pencils. You can use whatever pencil you have. But just like a side note, these pencils are really good. They are so smooth and they help you just write. I don't know, they're really nice and there's a few different types of these. I really like this white one, the pearl. It's not too rough. Then I have this ruler. This a T ruler is really nice, because I'm going to do a few lines. But you can also use whatever ruler you have. Just, this one is what I'm into right now. I have an eraser. You've seen me use this before. It's a fabric castle dust free eraser. Obviously you can use whatever eraser you have too, but I'm really into this because it does not create dust. It re-erase and it just clumps up into one little fine, it's not dust, but a little piece of the eraser just floats off like that. It's really cleans. It keeps your illustrations really clean and not dirty and no dust and it's just a good one. Then here, a pencil sharpener. I have this little pen too. Whatever pen you have, works fine. I'm going to use this for a little bit of practice stuff that we'll see later on. I like to keep all this stuff in here, in this little pouch I made a few years ago. It's a little embroidered pouch, but whatever pencil case you have works fine. The last thing that I want to show you, oh wait, obviously I'm forgetting water. Glass of water. Some people like to have two glasses of water, two little jars. One for clean paint, and one to wipe off your brushes. For me it's enough to use one, I'm not too picky with that. But if you're the kind of person that gets stressed out about seeing dirty water, use two. One to clean the brush and one to grab freshwater. But for me this is enough. I'm not that, stressed about using dirtier water. Then always it's nice to have either a rag or cloth or also kitchen towels. Kitchen paper towels like this work really well. Especially in this lettering class where we might have some excess water or paint on our brush, we always need to just to have handy in case we need to wipe off some extra paint. There is one more thing that I wanted to show you, which I have in here. For our final activity, we're going to be doing some really cool name cards. This is just something that I really like bindings these Fabriano. They're little cards that are cut like this. I really like the edges. They're manually cut, so it looks really rustic and I really like these and you can fold them like that. This is a fun little watercolor trick that I like. But if you don't have, or you can't find these cards, you can obviously just grab a larger sheet of paper, and cut it into smaller pieces and then fold it. So yeah, these are really handy, but if you don't have these totally, fine, don't worry about it. Just cutting your own paper will work perfectly. That's basically it. As always paper, brushes, paint and in this case we're going to use a ruler which we haven't used in other classes. That's it. We're ready to get started. 3. Artists to Admire: Before we get started with the actual workshop part of this class, I'm going to show you a little slideshow here that I think you're going to enjoy, so sit back, relax, all you have to do right now is observe and listen. I'm going to show you five different artists here with totally different styles, which is the main focus of this class. We are trying to develop a personal lettering styles, something that's totally unique to yourself, and these five different artists do that we four and myself, we really do that. I just wanted to show you a little bit of what it looks like and some inspiration so that you can see how it can really work differently. We're going to start with Becca Cahan, Lucille Prache, Lisa Congdon, Katie Daisy, and then some artwork by myself. Not because I think I'm the best artists in the world or anything like that. But because in this class, I'm going to sort of show you the behind the scenes of how to develop your personal style and obviously, I'm using myself as an example, so I think it's really relevant so that you can see some of my other work just to check it out to see what it looks like. We're going to start out right here with Becca Cahan. Becca is an amazing watercolor artist, whom I met in New York at a trade show. A few years ago, we met at Surtax and I had already seen her art before and I thought it was amazing. Becca has a really good style that is totally hers, it's very unique. When you see her art, you can tell it's her's which in my opinion, is the ultimate goal when you're a branded artist or an artist's that does licensing if you really want to have a signature style. So Becca has this really cool thing that she does where she mixes and matches different, I'm going to call them fonts right now, just so that you can have this in context. Because later on we're going to do some activities where we'll be doing these different fonts and turning them into lettering. We are going to call them fonts or letter styles. If you notice, the word you are the greatest adventure, they're all in different styles. But what she does do is she keeps a color palette cohesive, and that really gives the whole illustration, this look that creates this impact and a very cool style which is very displayed. It's very precise, and I can tell that Becca does really careful pencil markings and fills them in, so I think that her drawing actually has a lot to do with the final look of the illustration. That's something to keep in mind. This specific artists really does that she really takes care of a drawing and then it's a very clean, precise, crisp look. She also does a lot of these shadowing activity exercises that you'll see later on. I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but I am showing all of you this for a reason. This is a really cool piece of art by Becca, she does a great job with color palettes. She does that here too mixing the gold, the pinks, and purples and it all looks really cohesive. Another thing that she does that I really admire is that she keeps them direct. She really plays around with the movement and direction of each letter, so it looks playful, although it's very precise. Again, she has this shadowing here for example, in very light pink with surround and blue with yourself. A little banner with width and a very light lilacs for positivity. As I showed you more of her work you'll see what I mean in how the drawing is very important. There's a lot of, I mean, I'm not that good, and I didn't see her process, but I can pretty much sure that she has a little bit of guides here with pencils and tries to keep it very geometrical. I think it's a really cool logo and its very very Becca, and here's her shop Website. For every artist I'm going to put the shop links here. You guys know, I'm a sucker for anything that's space oriented, and that's why I really wanted to include this one too. But what Becca did here is so interesting. She has the word, lights and home, in this very simple bulb block letter style and what she did was have it be a little bit darker than the actual starry night background. If you took my very first class of transparencies, that would mean that this is a little bit more opaque and the background is a little bit more [inaudible] and then waits for that to dry, and then paints the constellations over this display font, which I think is so interesting and so clever. If you just did the regular constellations, maybe you wouldn't see the letters be as bold. But with this background here, it really helps out. Again, she has a very precise color palette which is very important especially this type of art. She stays true to it, and I think this is a really cool example of mixing and matching as well. Then the cold plane, which is the actual site in the quote. The reference of the author is in cursive lettering style, which again is a lot of playfulness here, mixing and matching different letter styles and lastly, the last one here for Becca is this very sunny, very happy, cheerful piece of art and what I wanted to show you here is look at all the different letters style that she used here. Becca is really good at mixing. Again, she stayed true to her color palette and has some shadowing here. I really like what she did with the word Spring, where she has a lighter tone of watercolor for the shadowing. I also really like what she did with the word flowers. You can see every little stick is in a different tone. A little bit more concentrated, a little bit more diluted, there's so much going on here, but at the same time it looks very clean, very crisp. Becca has a very unique style, she's a really good watercolor artists too, because she plays around with transparencies, a whole bunch. Another thing to observe here is composition and direction. Her composition is there's, in the background there is this floral design and then there's this rounded rectangle, which is going to encapsulate the actual letters. She also plays around with, if you see the word Spring, the P goes around the S, it curves around there, and then there's a flower sprouting right out of that P, which keeps the composition cohesive. She's sort of bringing an element from the background to the first layer, and these are really interesting tricks that you can take into your own art, obviously using your own style. I'm really going to be a little strict about that. Please do not copy other artists. This is also that you can see a wide range of different types of art. One other thing that I wanted to say before moving on from Becca is that, she does a really good job of direction. You can see here how it all sort of at this inclination, sort of slightly diagonal, but there's a little bit of a curve to it. When we do, we are going to have this quote, " Lesson towards the end of the class." I'm going to show you a little bit about layout and how to spread out your words so that it looks nice and organized. Becca is a fantastic artist checkout her Etsy shop, Becca con. Again, I'm going to put more links in the discussion board and the message boards, so that you can not only buy their art, if you like it, you can also follow them and check out what they're up to. Becca has a very unique style, fantastic, very clean, very crisp, very precise, but very cheerful, colorful, and color loaded too which I really like. Now moving on to something totally different is Lucille Prache. I actually discovered Lucille years ago on Etsy, I think even before Instagram existed, and I got one of her prince because it's so fun, so different. She has this very loose lettering style. I'll show you some more examples here. But what I wanted to show you about this specific images is look at the imperfections. Look at the for example, in the packaging of the sugar of a flower how it's the quality that watercolor has. For example, my art isn't as loose as this, but I really admire it and I really like it. Lucille is a great example of how you can be true to your personal handwriting. Which is what we're really going to concentrate on in this class. For example, here she has the word canon mill, is in watercolor. It's like her block style. Her cap style. Then all the smaller words that are in black which I think might be ink and pen. It might be a brush, but it looks like an ink and pen. It's just very playful. Not just going with the flow. It doesn't look like there's much, for example, with Becca. It looks like there's a lot more like geometry and grid to it. Here it just seems a lot more like free and loose. Then, here's another example that I wanted to show you from Lucille because I was reading her about section, and how she has so much inspiration from just random stuff like packaging and labels. Just like she did here with the beer, the tomato, a little ketchup on with the cranberry sauce. It's just so cool to see her replicate these labels, but have them be in her own letter style. She has a lot of lettering in this specific print here. It's a recipe. The banner at the very top is interesting too because it's a watercolor wash. Obviously you do your first layer, you wait for it to dry and then you can draw over that or paint over that. I thought this was a cool image to take a look at. Again, here she has her different lettering styles mixed up, which you'll see is something very repetitive in different artists, where you mix and match your different lettering styles and that's actually something we're really going to concentrate on in this class. I want to show you this one from Lucille too because, there's actually a close up of a larger illustration. I do actually believe it's a menu she painted. In traditional calligraphy, there's a lot of rules, and one of the rules, well the basic rule, which I will show you, it can be a really good tip for especially if you're doing script lettering, is that when you do your down strokes, you have a thicker line and when you do your upstrokes, so you have a thinner line. Lucille doesn't necessarily go with this rule. You can tell it it's just very much hers, her own lettering style. It's a brush. It's very instinctive and not really paying attention to what it should look like but more what her natural handwriting would be. What I want to say is that it's really more important to have an authentic style then try to emulate what you see in other calligraphy styles. I thought this close-up was a really good illustration of that. Then we're moving on here to Lisa Congdon. Lisa Congdon is an amazing artist. Side-note here, this is not necessarily watercolor. I think it looks more like a wash and sometimes even digital. But, what I want to show you here is her lettering style. We're not concentrating on the technique that much here, more on her style. I absolutely love Lisa's work. I discovered her through Tiffany Han's podcasts and learned that she is an author and has these amazing books and no wonder she's such a great artist. Again, you have the shop links here, but I'll put the Instagram links in the discussion board cause you need to be falling. She's Fantastic. She has a totally different style than what we just saw. She has very bold lettering style. You can see how she even removes a lot of the, for example, in the W, it's just two triangles. It's very illustrative. I really like how in the word heart she replaced the A with a hand. That's a really fun trick that we can do with illustration is trying to integrate our art, with actual letters, which we can do here. Yeah, I think that she's a really good example of this. Then here, what I thought was really interesting about this specific piece of art is look what she did with the word always. The Y and the S. How they merge together and it doesn't look like a rule. It just looks like something instinctive that she did in that moment and I think that's really fun and just those little tiny quirky details like in the I, really make the whole piece of art be interesting. Here she's not really mixing different styles of letters as we've observed with the past artist. She's keeping to one style. But at the same time, every single letter is a little bit different than the last and she has this little composition of rocks here. Then she's playing around with the size of the letters to fit in with the rocks, which is also something interesting that you can do when mixing and matching illustration with lettering. Here's another example of that. You see the word way. How she integrates the tiger's tail into the A and the Y. That's really interesting to do too. I don't really paint animals, but I do paint a lot of plants. I like to intertwine little branches, and my leaves with my letters. That's something that's really cool about mixing your painting style with your letters. Another note here is that she has this really good display style. Look at that little quirk she did with the O's. I think that's really really interesting and that just there's no rules, it just makes the illustration look way more interesting. Then here she has Be Your Own Valentine. Another example of how she integrated the illustration with the lettering, by having it be inside the mouth. She also did something really cute here, which is that little heart on the eye, to dot the eye. This one is a little bit different than her other block styles, this has a more of a serif finish to it, but you can still totally tell it's her artwork. She does play around with this style, the two N's in valentine are the little soil here is inverted. You can just tell that she just has fun with the letters. I think her style is fantastic. It's very bold, very bright, very Lisa Congdon. Now we're moving on to Katie Daisy. Which is a totally different style of art too. She has a really cool overall style which is very inspired in my country, in prairie, in nature, very colorful and, Katie also does something really interesting here where she mixes and matches different letter styles. For example, stay heart on the same style, and then wild heart are also a similar style. Katie's letters really remind me of, it's a little bit decomposed now because she has all these deconstructed I mean, sorry. All the colors and the elements that she integrates into here. You forget that it's like a Western fund. Those wanted posters in the wild wild West or like circle fonts. You'll notice later on when we do our alphabet activities, I'll show you a few examples of that. But, this style of font is very Western. But the way that she does it with the colors and the details and all the nature in it, you even forget where it comes from. Oh, and speaking of details. I really like this example here. Stay curious because if you notice, Katie does a really really good job at actually decorating letters and having the letters actually be the final piece of art. What I mean here is if you took away all the nature elements here, it would say stay curious, but in a very bold and simple way. The letters aren't very complicated here, but what is interesting is how there's all this different layering in nature. For example, the two S's have wood grain and plants over them and then all the other letters are totally different and inspiring different spots of nature. But she has a lot of texture. I just think that it's a great example of how she actually decorates the letters, and having that be final piece of art. Here's another example by Katie Daisy, mixing different styles of lettering. For example, Becca really does this too, but in totally different way. This is where it really matters to have your specific, your unique take on this. Here for example, if you follow Katie Daisy on Instagram, you might have seen her upload a to-do list or something with her handwriting. You can really tell that her personal handwriting looks a lot like the word plant or that, and then the smaller words which say cosmos, sunflowers those little smaller detailed words. It's basically playing up what her personal handwriting would be and making it more embellished and actually turning it into a piece of art. Then she has the word garden and bees. That is also a take on this western style of font. I really like what she does with her shadowing as well. If you take a close look, there's a lot of detail which within each word and she has a very unique style to that, is immediately recognizable and that is the greatest quality in an artist. Then lastly, this ampersand she did is also very interesting because it's another example of how the actual piece of art turns into the letter. Here she did that though the ampersand itself is not anything too specific or it's a regular ampersand but what is really cool is all the work that she did over it. It looks very like Masie and it looks like a piece of maybe wood that has stuff growing on it and it's another example of how you can turn the actual letter into the piece of art. Then now we're moving onto my artwork here. The reason that I want to show you my art is because in this class, I'm deconstructing how to work out your unique style and I thought it would be relevant for you to see more examples of what I do and why. It's just going to be relevant for the rest of the class. For example here, this illustration here is actually one that I painted last year. You probably have seen it maybe as a greeting card or notebooks. I've used this on first stone piece of art quite a bit. What's interesting here is that, it's a really pretty much black water color for the lettering. But what I want to point out is how you'll notice I have this repetitive way of combining my caps with my cursive. That's my signature. It's not complicated at all. It's just mixing the two different styles and different ways. You can see how the words, the months like May, March, November, are all in caps as well as your, especially your own way. Then the actual names of the bird stones are in my cursive or script lettering. Another thing that's important to note here is that for this, this is a chart. It's a chart that shows you different stones and their qualities. For each one, I had to play around with movement so that they would all stay in their individual little sections. If it would have been boring, if I kept it all in straight lines, what I wanted to do here is have some playfulness to it, so each letter is moving in a different direction. That's also something that's just interesting to point out. Then I use the little arrows to help me out and in this chart manner. That's just something basic that I wanted to show you, a lot of letters and just how I mix and match my caps with my script. On this another example, if you took my watercolor and mixed media class, there was an exercise where we did negative painting. That means that you paint everywhere except for a specific shape. In this case, I drew the letters. I just need some space with my pencil and then painted all around that. The reason I did this was because this is the specific look I was going for to have my letters be super bold white, which is actually my paper. Then I painted all around it. It has a little bit more contrast to it and I just like the look of it. That's what I was going for here. In this specific class. I'm calling this the Part 1 of this unique lettering class because I feel that there's a lot of work to be done before we get into more complicated exercises. I think I will film a Part 2 where we do more activities and I'll do some negative space. But for this one, we're not going to do this specifically but I just wanted to show you what it would look like. Again, I just mixed my caps with my script. The words I and need or in caps and just some space are in script. Here's another example of a different way to do that, which is I actually did use white ink here over my watercolors. Again, if you took the class, watercolors and mixed medium, we do a section where we paint over water colors with whiting. It's just a different look. I wanted to show you an example of what this would look like too. I also really like playing around with colors. Again, it's very simple. It's just my caps in my script are mixed together. But even though my lettering style is quite simple, it is also varying important part of my art brand, for example, I do a lot of art licensing work for companies like the Pirates or Hallmark, and they actually ask for my hand lettering to be in the interior of cards because it just gives like this whole cohesive work to the piece of art. Even if your lettering style is quite simple, it's still important to have something that's very uniquely yours. We're really going to work hard in this class to make that happen. Then this last example, again, I've already mentioned, this is the third time I'm going to mention the water color and mixed media class, coincidentally I do this on purpose. I'd rarely use masking fluid, but I did do with this. What I did was I drew the words power to the people, and I masked that. Then I painted the whole, the pink center, the peace sign with flowers over that, waited for it to dry, removed the masking fluid. Then if you take a close look, I have very light blue shadow here, very transparent watercolor, just to help the illustration pop a little bit. Again, all I did here, I have 2D styles. This is a very bold cap style. It's not complicated at all, but it's my style, it's what I've worked out and it has helped me really with having a recognizable look to my art. That's all the art that I'm going to show you today. There's a billion amazing artists out there with all different styles. I showed you artists that I admire, that I think do a really good job with having their authentic lettering style, and just a couple of things I want to say before we leave here, if you're trying to work out your own art brand, your own art style, the Number 1 most important thing is really be authentic. I see so much lettering out there that, I'm sorry to say this, but it looks exactly the same and what I wouldn't do in this class is remove ourselves from what we think lettering should look like and actually develop something that's very unique, very your own. Be authentic. Again, I hope this goes without saying, but I have to say, avoid copying other artists styles. All the art that I showed you right now, these artists work very hard. They make a living off of this. It's their style. They've worked to develop their sales for years. It's really a shame when you see someone else copying the style and showing it as their own. We could have coffee and talk about those for five hours. But right now I'm just trusting you to not copy other artists. This whole class is about developing your personal style. I hope that you can really stick to it and try to work out something that's completely your own. On that note, The best way to support artists you admire is by buying their art. If you like the art that you just saw, you have their artsy shops there, the best thing you can do for artists is supporting and supporting them by buying their art. Most artists have artsy shops. They can also have classes. You might see their art licensed onto products and you can buy their art there too. That is a true way to actually support an artist that you admire. Lastly, which I think we're encapsulating this in the whole class is finding your voice. All these different artists have a different style to them and I want you to find your own voice. Find what inspires you, find what you can do to make your personal handwriting interesting. I think I'm going to leave it at that because we have a lot to get to with our lessons. I just wanted to show you a little bit of inspiration before we get started. Take out your supplies and we are ready to begin. 4. Warm Up: Alright guys. We're about to start with our warm-up activities, and if you know my classes, sometimes, these warm-up activities are actually super fun, and we're not doing anything too hard right now. I really like to do simpler stuff when we start out just so you guys start to feel comfortable, and get the hang. It's really the hang of the hand movements that were going to be doing. Again, I see my Skillshare classes as a larger program, so that's why I'll reference sometimes past classes, because everything just ties in together really nicely. In this case, what we're going to do is the poles and precision stuff, that you guys did way back in my first class is going to be pretty important here. So if you think that your handwork needs a little bit more, needs to be steadier, you'd like to have finer lines and stuff, please go back to my original class, the modern watercolor techniques, and do those very first exercises. I promise they'll really help you out here. Having said that, I'm supposing that you guys have done a little bit of water coloring before, and might find this to be easier after that. So number one, we're going to do a little grid here. I'm going to do little half-inch marks on my paper. Again, this kind of T-square is really good for this, because it makes it faster. So what I'm going to do first, is just do these little markings here every half inch. We're going to do this a few times actually. I've marked up little half inches here and now, I'm going to grab my T ruler, and also, if you don't have a ruler that looks like this, you can do little half-inch markings on the other side of the paper and then just level it out like that. But in this case, this here is really going to help me out. Then, I'm just going to go from the top and start marking my paper like that. Try not to make these too dark. It's just a little guide for us. It's really going to help us go in straight lines when we do our practice activities. Okay. This is what your paper should look like. I'd like to do half inches, because we're going to play around a little bit with sizes and sometimes, we might double it up and use a whole inch, and sometimes, we're going to just use a half inch here, which you'll start to see as we continue. Just a side note, you might want to just go ahead and do a few of these already. I marked up a few pages with his breadth before we started and we're going to do this a few times. Different activities, but we're going to use the same style of grid. So maybe do over on five or six of these little grids with half inches. So this is what you're going to need to get started. Now, starting out with our warm-ups, I'm just going to put this to the side. We won't need it anymore. I'm going to start out. I have a little bit of indigo paint that's left over here. I really like to show you guys the way I actually work. Which is, I don't usually have like a crisp clean palette to start out with. I really like to mix and match, and I do feel that not being too picky about your colors gives you this really nice organic feel. So what I'm going to do here is, just add a little bit of black into this indigo mix that I have here. This little section in my palette is going to be like my base for all this warm-up stuff that we're going to be doing, so you don't really need to pay much attention to the rest of my pallet for now. Right now, we're going to do a lot more brushwork. Again, you guys know by now I have a class for everything, and if you're interested in mixing colors, and really working on color combinations, go ahead and take the water color mixing class. Right now, I have this little blue section with some black in there, and I'm just going to mix it up a little bit. My clean water, and I'm just going to add a little bit. Just like preparing the water here. There we go. So for this activity, you want to have a medium wash, not too diluted, and not too concentrated. I'm just adding some water to my mix, and having enough paint where I can play around and have nice smooth lines. This class is really about finding your personal style, right? Through these movements, were going to discover what feels best for you, so for each warm-up activity, I'm going to try out a few different methods and brush strokes so that you can start to feel what comes naturally to you. Also as I said, I'm going to try a few different brushes. I think I'm going to start out with this guy, which always works well for me. It's a size zero. This is really good. It's just really nice. I love this kind of bristle. It's not too soft. I might try out another one just so you guys see the difference. I'll have these two handy here. Starting out, we're going to start out with something super, super basic. Please do these warm-up exercises. It's not enough to just watch them. I think you will find the value in actually doing all of this once you get to more advanced activities. Just getting a little bit of paint here. Almost ready to start. Number one is something very, very basic. We're going to start by making little sticks like this. I have just a few little rectangles here, little sticks that I made. If you noticed, I did it pretty precise where each edge is boxed in perfectly. Then I want you to try something else with these little sticks, which is have appear a little bit more loose and casual so that you just press down with your brush like that. Here you can see the angle of my brush is at the more I press down, the thicker it'll be. If I leave it as like a 45 angle like that, we'll get something a little bit thinner. Super, super basic warm ups here. This very first part is very simple, but what I want you to do is to start to feel what your brush can do for you. Then just for fun, I might try out a different brush so you guys can see the difference, just to brush makes and this is a size one, it's not very different in size. But again, I'm going to do these really precise little rectangles like that. This is a little bit geeky, but I think that if you guys are here with me, it's because you're really into watercolors. But even now, like at this moment, I can start to see how this brush is working differently because the bristle is softer and it picks up more paint. What this means is that maybe if I want to do longer lines, a brush like this might work better for me. It's really about like these warm-up activities are really about working with different brushes too, and finding the one that really feels right for you. Now let's do this uneven, not perfect ones, so see how much more paint it picks up. I have a big puddle here and it gives me these little bit more uneven look. As you will see with this class, it really is all about personal style and also this brush gives me different shapes. If I press down I get thicker lines or uneven edges, so very simple to start out with. All we did is have like the perfect rectangles here and here and then all of these are imperfect, that's the only difference. I really want you guys to do this because some people are very precise and like really crisp lines, just like the artists that I showed you, it all really depends on your personal handwork and that's what we're really going to discover in this class. Know what kind of person are you, maybe it's really difficult for you to get those super, super fine and precise lines and maybe more loose and casual look of lettering works even better for you, so try out being super precise and try out being really loose, like really casual like this. Super basic number one. Now we're going to do thinner lines right here. Again, I'm going to try and be really careful here and do these super fine lines. Again, this part may be reminding you of my very first class, which was the modern watercolor techniques where we did pull some precision, this is similar to that where we are just doing lines at this point. Here I'm trying to be pretty straight, pretty neat. Then try being a little bit more loose like that, and maybe a little bit faster, and maybe a little bit more uneven. Again, this is really neat and this is a little bit more loose, so neat and loose. Very, very simple, just you can already see how it looks different. It's super basic, just really thin lines but when we really pay close attention and try to make our lines very straight and very neat and then when we're a little bit looser and a little bit more of this casual brush stroke. Let's just keep going. We're going to keep going with these activities. Right now I'm going to do these little wave bars here because we need to start doing curves, getting these round shapes. Bear with me these activities don't look like lettering right now, but in the end you'll see how you'll benefit from having practiced. There we go. This little wave here, it looks really simple, but I want you to keep a few things in mind, try to make the whole length here and here pretty even. We're going to do another one right underneath and this will also remind you a little bit of the precision stuff we did but with a different shape. Again I'm trying to keep the width of this little snake wave guy here the same, it just really starts to help us practice being consistent with our lines and really mindful. I'm trying to get really, really close to the little wave that's on top but I don't want them to touch and bleed into each other either. We'll do one more, I'll do it a little bit more water down so you guys can start to play with transparencies too. As you can see here, my brush is pretty much at a 90 degree angle here, I'm not really laying it down like that, I'm trying to be really, really precise where I paint and the best way to do that is just using the tip of your brush and having that either guide. You just added some more water there, and, again, I'm trying to make the width of this little wave the same as the ones on top. Now, we're going to do the same thing but in the really loose style here. Even notice how the paint starts to run out at the end, but this is what I'm going for. Just having that really casual loose brush stroke style. I need a little bit more water here again. This is totally different from this and I personally, I'm more inclined to this style. My artwork is little bit more neat but this looks really cool too. If that's more your thing, definitely try this out. It's just a style. It looks a lot more like that brush calligraphy that's a little bit messier and it looks cool too, so I really want you guys to explore and figure out what goes best with your personality and I know I might get into a little bit more art talk here, as in my other classes, I was a little bit more technical, but I feel with lettering, what's really important here and what I really want to achieve in this class is for you to find a personal style. I'm not trying to show you how to do letters like other people necessarily, I really want you do your own thing. Again, this is a neat and then this is the loose example. Again, we've done this a few times with little sticks and little waves and now we're going to start trying out just a little different thing here. What I'm going to do now is do a little half circle and it'll go up like that. A little half circle, so I just noticed I was using the other brush and that I like this one better. This is something that you're going to be discovering too, what brush really works for you? We'll just really lightly, this'll look like little ovals, obviously this would end up being an o or a q but again, exactly the same thing, doing it really neat, really precise. Even for example, if this loose isn't for you, try to do it just to get out of your comfort zone and then I'm going to do it here like really. Here we have the loose, so again we have the neat and here the loose. We're going to do triangle shapes. There we go, same thing. We've got our little neat one and our loose messier one here. As you notice now we have a little pattern going on, which is doing a few different variations on just changing the way you use your brush using the same shape. We're going to do a different one now, which is look like a little railroad, so what it is is having too little sticks like this. I'm going to spread out like that and then here we go with a little bit of that pulse activity which is trying to connect these lines here. It's going to look a little bit like a railroad. We're going to do an inverted railroad like this. We have just a bit longer part here. Right now I've just been using my black and indigo mix that I have here, but also if you guys are feeling you want to start experimenting and adding some color in, you can also use this warm-up part to do that. I'm going to have a little bit of pink here and just try out doing my little bars in pink. You can start to play around with color with that too. Maybe I'll do the loose version like that, so I'm just grabbing a little bit of pink that I had on my palette, then some black. It's also for you to see how your paint starts to bleed into each other and that can be a really cool look too when we finally do our lettering. I just did this here to show you guys that you can also start to experiment with color with these warm ups if you're feeling bad or if you just want to concentrate on shapes and moving your hand, you can also do that. For our next little practice round, what I'm going to do is something, it's a little trick that I learned in college with our topography professor. What our professor used to do with us was have us write out paragraphs using only triangles, circles and squares. The fun trick behind this is for you to start feeling out the rhythm of words without using actual letters. Here what we're going to do is start to do that ourselves and these warm-ups are meant to be very therapeutic. Don't think too much about it, just get into the painting flow. I also want you guys to start to feel comfortable. What we're going to do here is start doing triangles. I'm going to try to be more neat here because that is the style that I usually use. I'm going to do a triangle, another triangle. Then here it's where you're random intuition is going to start to play in. This might sound weird, but it's like you're going to start to imagine that these are words instead of just shapes. Right now. Then I'm going to leave a little space here because I'm imagining that I'm doing a little paragraph with my little shapes. What we did right now, I do want to talk about this a little bit because it may not look like something that would usually go into lettering class. But I want to explain to you why we just did this and what it's all about. In our subconscious right now, we're starting to feel out the spacing between words and letters which is super important when we do lettering, especially when we're trying to fit in you know specific words into an area. The other thing we just did here was start playing with rhythm, and also precision and a little bit of transparencies. Let me elaborate a little bit more on this. As you can see right now, looking back seeing it from up here, it looks like a little sentence here if you can imagine that they're words. Using our imagination, thinking that these little shapes are words, you can see that in each line of this sentence, quote unquote, I have three words. This is one, this is two, and this is three, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. What I really paid attention to here was playing around with these words, with the spacing so that it looks interesting. It's not just one block, two block, three. Were playing around a little bit with composition, with spacing. Obviously right now here on the ones that are words, we're trying to keep them at a certain distance while we keep a larger distance for the one next to them, usually it's like two or three times more. This may seem like a very abstract activity right now, but really try it out. I mean, it's simple, it's squares, it's triangles and circles, and also like side note, try not to copy exactly what I did. Don't look at the camera right now. Don't look at the screen, I mean right now, look at your paper and just use your triangles, your circles or squares and try to fill something out on your own. For me, I didn't come into this intention of doing three words for each line, but that's just how it happened to be. Just try it out. I'm serious. These little activities really help out later on, and you'll see why as we actually start doing letters. Right now we're just doing these random shapes and strokes. Buy try this little paragraph activity out using just shapes. Again I used black, but I did use a little bit of transparencies here. You can see some of the shapes are a bit lighter. You can also start to play around with that. It's also really good practice to get these smaller shapes with really precise and fine lines. Definitely do this right now. Now I'm just going to start to play around with a little bit of different strokes, and I'm going to start to get a little bit more curvy with my lines. Our little warm up session is we're doing it in three parts. Our first part here was strokes. Just a little recap here where we tried out different new ways to use our brushes, and then here we have a little bit of rhythm, which is a little bit about spacing, about just using shapes. Now we're actually going to work a little bit more on shapes and upstrokes and downstrokes. If you guys have taken a calligraphy class or maybe a more conventional lettering class, you might have done this stuff before, and really is about working with the shapes. The one trick that I'm going to use and tell you about that we know about more unconventional lettering and script is that, usually our upstroke are going to be thinner and our downstrokes are going to be thicker. We're going to start playing around here. Right now I'm going to use the full inch, and I'm going to go up like this and then down like that, up like this. And then down like that, thicker. As you can see a few things are going on here. The most important one is the way that I'm holding my brush. When I go up and I want a thinner line, it's like a 90 degrees angle, and then when I go down, I'm putting a lot more pressure into my brush and I can get those thicker lines. Then also you can play around here with how you want to get your brush strokes to look. Here I'm going to do a really precise shape where I'm actually going back in while my watercolor is still wet, and really making these edges very perfect and fine. See how it looks a little bit different. This looks a little bit different, then this one has a little bit more rough edges, like what we did up here. Again, make sure that this warm-up activity is very experimental for you. You know it doesn't all have to look like a perfect loop, or it doesn't all have to look the same. I really want you guys to test things out and start moving your hands in different ways. Now we'll do the same shape which looks like an L. But what I want to do is play around with sizes here. This would be a capital letter. You see they don't all look the same. I'm really just playing around here. You can also start to do the same shape but maybe right now I tilted my paper a little bit, so what it's going to happen here is that I'm going to get a different inclination. A little trick here is you know. I feel our big lesson here is also moving your paper around, moving your hand, seeing how you're holding your brush. All of this really defines the look of our final letters. That's part of these shapes exploration right now. Right now we're practicing a little bit more curvy stuff just because that's usually a bit tougher. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to do is shape that's more like an infinity shape. Let's see what this will look like, doing something more like this. It actually ends up looking like a big S. Again the purpose of this warm up is you don't necessarily want to get everything super perfect. It's really about testing things out for yourself. Right now, for example, I see here that I still have some wet paint, and maybe I want to fix these edges here, which is something really cool about watercolor. You can go in and fix things a little bit if it didn't turn out exactly like you wanted. This is more the style that I usually use of lettering. I really like to go back and make things perfect. That's just my personal style, but there's so many different ways to do it and I encourage you to try out different things here. Now let's try out something just to play around a little bit, I'm going to grab a bigger brush. I've been using my zero size brush here, but now I'm going to use my five, it's going to look a little bit different. It has this really fine tip here and it's actually a little bit slanted, but we're going to see what happens here. As we go up it's going to be thinner, and as we go down it's going to be thicker, and as we go up it's going to be thinner and as we go down it's going to be thicker. Up thin, down thick. Up thin, down thick. Maybe I'll do these ones in the lowercase here. Again this warm-up part is also about trying out different brushes. Something really cool here is that, maybe if I'm going to do more like dainty, smaller detailed lettering, this brush might not work as much, but maybe if I'm going to do a display lettering and I want to get these nice cool washes within my watercolor texture, you can see it here how it starts to dry and it has this cool texture in it already. A little cool tip here is that maybe, let's say here where it's still wet, you can add a little bit more paint. Play around with that or even using our little, I think here maybe we can add a little bit in here. Again I'm just playing around. I'm not getting too precise. I'm not worrying too much. I'm just trying out different shapes, different brushes, different styles. I might use just a little bit of pink and I'm going to do, these look like Os right now. See how I go down thick, then here it's still wet so I can come in and make it really perfect, which is like I like it. It's always about playing around with this little puddle of weary you have here. Then up thin. Then we'll try out down thick and then maybe just have it be up thin like that. It's really important here to observe the way that I'm holding the brush. We're having these really good close ups so that you can really check that out. It all depends on inclination and pressure. Here I've got it at a 45 degrees angle and then I'm pressing down. Then I'm lifting it up and it's becoming lighter and more like at a 90 degrees angle. Each one is different here. Again what happens if I move my paper like this and if I want to get something more slanted, like an italic, I can do that here. Whereas if I had my paper straight like this and I tried to get something more slanted, look how weird my hand is going to get and look my hand isn't going to be steady. Really don't be afraid to move your paper around. Sometimes all it takes is to have your hand in the right position with your paper and it'll give you a different look. I have these and these are reminding me of ts. I'm going to grab a different pink just to play around and how about we start crossing our ts or if these are big is maybe. This concludes our warm up section. We're going to be playing a lot in this class. There's going to be a lot of experimenting. There's going to be a lot of you doing your thing and me guiding you towards really making your lettering look the best that it can be without losing your essence and your unique style. This may not look like the conventional calligraphy, calligraphy class activities and it is a little bit different. Please do these activities. They're very useful in the end, especially if you want to practice all your pulse and precision stuff, these activities are really good to just do over and over. I even do these things sometimes before I start doing this larger illustration because I just like for my hand to feel steady. It'll just give you the confidence you need to start doing more complex figures, which is letters in general, which is what we're going to do next. We're going to start playing around with some alphabets. I'm going to show you some worksheets for inspiration and we'll work on that. Play around with your strokes, with your rhythm and with your shapes here. As always I love seeing what you guys come up with. If you do something that looks like this show me, if you ended up wanting to experiment with different shapes, show me too. I really want to see what you guys make. Again I used just black and pink here. But if you guys want to make a rainbow out of this, that's totally fine too. Play around, experiment, have fun with this, and I'll see you in our next lesson, which is going to be painting alphabets. 5. Alphabet Worksheets 1: All right, guys. This lesson is called alphabets, and it's one of my favorite activities, I do this in all of my in-person lettering workshops. It's really interesting, it's really different approach to lettering, and it consists of observing different styles of fonts, in general, and experimenting a bit and seeing if there's anything that you can pick up on these different styles of fonts and using your own personal styles, so before we even start, I just want you to know that I fully encourage exploration, experimenting, never copying, always trying to do something that's completely your own. What we're going do here is we're going to observe letters and through working our hands or hand working through these different shapes, and we're going to do these alphabets, but in the end, what I really want you to do is work out something that completely your own. I just wanted to say that before we got into this exercise, just how important it is for you guys to make something be yours. But at the same time, all of these different fonts will really work as inspiration, and for you guys to get cool ideas on what kind of letters you want to paint. Before we get started with the actual painting part, I want to talk with you a little bit about these different fonts, and all these fonts are fonts that I've collected throughout the years of teaching, and some of them I've purchased through websites like Creative Market or there's a cool website from this woman, Angie Makes, which we'll see in a bit, which I bought a few of her fonts too, and I like to really get good quality fonts for this., and then, some other fonts are just free of copyright fonts. Something that you need to remember too is that fonts have a creator behind them, and it's important to be responsible about how you use these fonts. Just also a little side note there. I'm going to show you a few different styles here, and in the end I want you to pick about maybe three or four different fonts for you to recreate with watercolors, which is going to be really fun. A few different styles here, this one here is called Very Very. I bought this font for a few wedding invitations that I made, and I think it's a cool font for practicing calligraphy or script lettering, and it also has these cool variations here which I put on this bottom part, so this one is called Very Very. You're wondering, I know you're probably thinking about, "oh" where am I going to find these? I'll put up a bunch of different fonts in the project section and in our message board so that you can download these and use them as inspiration as well, or you can look for your own fonts or purchase your own if you're into that. This is one style, it's calligraphy scripts style, and then this one here is totally different, it's more of an illustrative style with maybe like a movie poster or something like that. This is a style that I would not use myself, but it reminds me of Lisa Cordon's art. As you see these different fonts, you'll see different styles that I talked about in our little slideshow of different artists. Again, this class is not necessarily for you guys to paint the same way I do, or for you guys to use the lettering style that I do, is for you to find whatever it is that excites you as artists. I have a little activity that we just did right now back here, because I want to start making some comparisons. A font like this where the lines are very straight, it's very detailed, it's a little bit square and rigid, this style here, where we do the really neat little bars, is going to really help out if this is the style that we're looking for and especially this one here where we did the little curved waves. For example, this A here is a little mix of this and this. Just for you guys to start seeing why we did all of this and how it's going to help you out as we move along. Another example here, this is more of a display font. Same thing here, if we were to paint this with watercolor, we would have our A in the middle and then paint around this to have that blank space or then go over it with some white ink. It's just for us to start observing different type forms and seeing what you could do with watercolor. I love Bega Kahn's art and it reminds me she does a lot of this different work within her larger letters. Let's see, what else do we have here? This is from this website, Angie Makes, I recommend this website. I've purchased a bunch of her fonts, specifically for this class, because I thought you guys might think they're interesting, and this font reminded me a little bit of the lettering that I do when I do caps, except she has that little space here, but thinking in watercolor terms, you can maybe even fill these in and have different colors. This is a cool style, but more playful, not as rigid. Here's another calligraphy style font. This one it's a little bit thinner, not too much emphasis on the thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes, it's a little bit different style. Here's more of a classic font with serif here, because I would not necessarily myself paint like this, but maybe that's what you're into, maybe you're into a more classic style or this reminds me more like a magazine covers style. This one here is like a funner calligraphy lettering style, it's called Adrian, I've used this before, I purchased this one when I had made some wedding invitations, it's pretty fun for that. The letters are nice and not classic, but they're not too out there, but at the same time they have these one swirls, which we'll do more later, but this is a cool font to try out. This one here is super thin, this may work better if your style is a white background with maybe just gray lettering or gold or something like that. This reminds me of something a little bit Morclean and Chris. This might be a fun one to try out if that's your style. This is another one that is from Angie Makes, and this reminds me of something nautical, and if you see, for example here, when we did our initial strokes up here. These lines here are a little bit more wobbly, not too perfect, not too straight, so maybe if I was doing this kind of font, this style seems a little bit more imperfect to me, and that's cool. It's like a look too, one is not better than the other, it's just a different look. Then this one is a disco font, again, this is not necessarily a style that I would use, but I've seen students do really cool stuff with this. Going back here, these little neat lines. If you did my beginner class where we did all the pulse activities, think about that with this full-blown million little lines, and you can play around with this and do different colors, and I've seen it done before, and it's really cool. Just a few extra fonts here that are different style of calligraphy. This one here I thought was interesting because this one would look really cool with different shades of water color. Also, it reminds me of what we did here. If you notice that it's like an outline with these little shadow lines in here and that might be a cool, interesting look to. Definitely worth trying out. Again, really experimenting and have a bunch of different calligraphy styles here, more script lettering, this one is a Western these two are Westerns actually. If you notice, I showed you some of Katie Daisy's works, which is an awesome artist. She mixes in this more Western style, which is totally her. It's really signature style that she has and it has a lot to do with the kind of lettering she uses, which is beautiful. This reminded me a little bit of that, now that I see it. Here's a more classic Western style, which these can look really fun to. Then here, oh, this font here doesn't have a variation in strokes with the upstroke and down strokes, it's all equal. You can see how there's no real change. That's why we did this kind of activity here, because sometimes you might want a really straight line that doesn't change too much in width. You want it to look more of the same stroke throughout the font. Another Western style, another classic style like this. These can look really cool. I think this one is called Elsie or Elise. Something that I found interesting in this font is just how some of the letters connect here. Sometimes that's just fun to observe in general. Just as ideas, as something that we can do with our different lettering styles. I have a bunch of these here. This one, right now looking at it, I can imagine it's like in a bunch of different tones, with like watery watercolor. Imagine that with all these faded out pastel tones. I think it would look really cool, just totally different calligraphy style. I think this one's a repeat. This is called princess, it's like very story; storytelling. This one is a little bit more like, as if it was done with a marker. I mean, there's so many. Here's another example of how, this type of letter, this style is a lot more loose and wobbly. It's not a super straight line. This is a look which might be your look to. We would use this kind of brush stroke instead of this perfect kind of brush stroke. If you notice, the edges aren't perfect, there's a little bit of roughness around them. Nothing is good or bad is just finding your personal style. Again, I think these might be, not sure if I'm repeating a little bit here. Yeah, these are different calligraphies which I showed you. Yeah, [inaudible]. I'll post a bunch of these to our classroom so that you guys can try them out. But if there's a certain fonts out there that you've been trying to experiment with, I would definitely use that for this activity. It's a great way to practice how to actually write letters without thinking too much of how to do it. Sometimes when we copy a shape that we see, it just turns out being so much better that way. Just so much easier and simpler and we don't really have to think too much, we just go for it. That's what we're going to do right now. Let's get started. Out of all the lettering options that we have, all the font options that we have, I choose four right now, to recreate with water colors. You try to do the same. Do at least four alphabets. I promise this will really pay off. It's going to help so much with just getting the hang of actually writing some cool letters. Sometimes it might be something that will be out of your comfort zone or not necessarily like a style that you usually do, but try different things out. For example, here out of my four fonts that I chose, the first one is a display font. This means that these letters might be bigger for some sort of title or maybe it might be for one word. These kind of letters are maybe not something for a longer text, maybe something bigger and shorter. I chose this sort of block with a little shadow one here. I think it's fun and we can use it in different ways. Then the second font that I chose is this script fonts. If you know my artwork, you'll know that I do the script lettering, but it looks totally different from this but that's why I wanted to try it out. Just to do something different and new. These lines are very thin, so that might be a little bit of a challenge for me. I usually do a little bit bolder sort of script lettering. Then here's another styled script lettering that is really different from this past one it's a little bit thicker. It does have going up thin, going down thicker strokes. It does play around with different wave of strokes. I just thought that, I really like these caps here. It's really interesting, these swirls. It just seems like something fun for me. Here I'm going to try out this Serif one, which is it's called Seafair the one that I said looks like peachy. This font seems interesting to me and also playing around with the different style. A little bit more rough strokes here. These are the four alphabets that I chose to recreate with water colors. Go to the discussion page where I might upload them to on PDFs. I'll make them available for you in the classroom. Choose at least four and feel free to venture out if there's a font that you've purchased that you really like and play around with that. For the amount of fonts that we've chosen we're going to do our little grid here. Remember I like to do half inches. If I have a cap, I may use the full inch and for the rest, I'll just use the half inch. It's not too technical, it's nothing too precise. It's just experimenting and playing around and trying out different styles. Do a few grids like this and I will be back with you in a few moments to actually start painting. The first alphabet that I chose is Adrian. I purchased this one on Creative Market. This font is fun because it's script lettering, and it's a little bit different than what I would usually do. For example, the type of end that I think doesn't look like this and I don't know. It just looks like something different and fun for me to try out. I'm going to start by doing this. I am just going to lay under here to have it close by. By now you have your grid here. We going to start out by just doing some very light pencil markings trying my best to copy these, each letter form. Remember, a lot in art is about observing and replicating. Just the same way that you would look at an apple right here and try to paint an apple with its shadows and stuff. We're going to take a close look at how each letter is formed, and we're going to try our best to make our version in water color. Here I'm going to do these Ariandne get the whole inch for each cap here. I'm just going to start out and you guys can do this with me. If you notice here, this is my very first drawing of a letter and I'm not getting too detailed, and I'm not going over and tracing a bunch of times. I'm just trying to get a very clean, first drawing here and I'm not really drawing the thickness of each line either, that'll come later with the watercolors. Right now I'm just kind of like doing a very soft guide for each letter, and then the brush will do the rest of the detailed work. So I'm just continuing here to just take a close look, try to sort of get the right inclination. Really observe how the letter is formed. So I just finished doing my pencil drawing here and as you can see, I did a very sort of broad outline of each letter. I didn't get too into details. One thing I am noticing like now that I look back on it, you can see the very first A, it feels kind of unattached to the rest of the letters, so I'm going to just erase that and do that one over. This has a lot to do with practicing spacing as well. Here, for example, each capital letter is spaced out a little bit more, and here I'll try to do this, you know, the cursives to be attached. So it looks more like when I'm writing text, just little things like that. Right now what I'm going to do is just re-do this A that felt a little bit off for me. As I was drawing these letters, I started to learn some things. This might not be the way that I personally do my lettering, but I did pick up some things that I think might be interesting to apply to my lettering. So for example, just something random here is this Q, the way I will usually do a Q in a capital cursive would be more, kind of like doing something like this with sort of like an O, and then I would usually do something like this, like crossing it like that. Whereas here I thought this looks kind of cool and I've never really done a Q that way. See even my instinct makes me do it the other way but here what they did is sort of like a little hoop around. I don't know, this looks kind of cool. It's interesting. It's maybe a new way that I can explore painting a Q. Those are the kind of things that I look for in this exercise. If you already have your style of lettering, it's really fun to just do something that's totally different from your instincts, and you start to pick up some things that can really make your overall style a lot more interesting. Now we're going to move on to the actual painting part, where we start using our brush to fill in all of these letters. It's going to look pretty cool, I think. Now we're actually going to start painting in our letters and here's where we're going to do a lot more of the detailed work, especially with the thickness of each line. As I told you before, whenever we go down, so downstrokes are going to be thicker, and up strokes are going to be a little bit thinner. It really depends on the style of the calligraphy, but this is pretty much a given rule in off-script lettering. Its not always, but that's pretty much how it goes and it really makes letters just look so much more beautiful and professional. I'm just going to start here and as you can see, as I go down, it's a little bit thicker even with the small guys here. As I go up a little bit thinner and as I go down a little bit thicker. It's really important to note the variety of strokes that I'm using here. That's what really is going to make a difference in your final style. Then again here down, it's going to get thicker. I personally, my style was a little bit more maybe precise, and I do like to go in and fix up. For example here, it's a little bit around the edges and I like to go in and fix that up a little bit. While our watercolor is still wet, we can really play around with these edges, and depending on your style. For me I really like to make it perfect like that. I'm going back each time to each letter. This is all about observation. Don't think too much. Obviously you can observe the shapes and refine your technique, but it really is about observing and trying your best to make this look just like this. I just finished painting the uppercase letters, numbers and lowercase. Just as a quick reference, again I used a full inch for the uppercase, and just a half an inch for the lowercase and I gave myself this extra room to have enough movement, not be squished in. Also, I started out with just pure black paint, and then you can see this is a cool color exercise too, where you can start gradually adding in a different color of paint into your little, I like to call it my little puddle, where I'm working. I had just pure black here and I just started adding in a little bit of brown and then some ocher. Just to start playing with color and different combinations. That's an extra, an added fun part about doing lettering with watercolor, is that you can just keep adding in color and change it around like that. Right now it already dried and I'm just going to start erasing here. It's going to start to look really clean and really nice. Just try to make them as minimal as possible. Also another thing about watercolor is that if you paint over the pencil, it's going to be really hard to erase that later. As long as you have a pretty clean pencil drawing before, see how nice that starts to look. This is my first font example. I'm going to do three more with you guys and you should do the same. I've seen some students get a little bit frustrated and maybe only do a couple of letters and maybe only do the uppercases, but I really want to encourage you to do the whole alphabet. It's just therapeutic. It's really going to help you get a hang of it, and just your hand in general is going to get so used to drawing letters, that by the time you create your own, you'll just be a pro by then. Here I'm just erasing these. Then finally, what I do want to do is after each alphabet, you might have a little bit of extra room here, and I want you to try just painting a word using no pencil, just going straight for the watercolor. Don't be too scared here. Remember all of these are just practice exercises. I'd rather you go crazy and experimenting stuff then keep it safe. Here what I'm going to do is I'm going to write the word happy. I have a full inch here and I'm going to do this capital H and reference. Now I'm just looking at my own lettering that I created with this font. Which is kind of looking back through trying to imitate what it did before. The reason that I like you guys to do this is, because we also start playing around with spacing and rhythm, and just going crazy with no pencil, and then going back here, I'm going to do is integrate this capital letter with this lowercase. This is going back to that. So just playing around a little bit with what I can do with these new letters that I know how to make. After each alphabet, just try writing something, maybe it's her name, maybe it's a word, but it's just cool to finish off with actually using the letters that you now know how to paint. So that's it for our very first one, which is I think it's Adrian, and again, feel free to choose whatever script lettering you want. I do encourage doing four different styles. My next style, I might go with something more like a display font, which we'll do in a second. I'm just going to wait for this to dry and then I'll be back with you in a few moments. Now for something completely different, I decided to choose this display font. It's a very simple block font with a little bit of shadow here, and it's all caps. So I'm just going to do this guy here. I wanted to do this one because I think we can play around a little bit with this font and just a little bit of color. Basically the real challenge here is going to be getting the proportions right, and just getting like the width of each letter to be exactly the same. So that's what I'm going to really look out for in my drawing part. Again, the middle part, I'm going to do it one inch high, and then this middle line here is going to help us a lot with keeping, here's a middle, here is a middle, keeping it in proportion. So that's a good use of this middle line here. Again, try to keep your pencil at a minimal. I'm just going to start drawing. I'll talk a little bit more once I have the outline for my letters, and then we'll start painting them in. [Music] 6. Alphabet Worksheets 2: Hey, I've just finished up drawing this display font and now I'm just doing a little bit of extra cleaning up. Remember it's super important to clean up your pencil markings before you start painting. Once we paint over a pencil, it's really hard to erase. Practically impossible. I always like to keep my drawings very clean. I do the pencil drawing a little bit darker than I usually would just for purposes of the video, but I always like to keep it at a minimal. That's a good tip for watercolors in general. This wave font looks kind of easy, you might think that the script ones a little bit more complicated, but this one has its trick too. The thing here is to keep the thickness of each line exactly the same. You can see that there's really no variation here. Each trace is exactly the same, which is what I tried to do here, something like this could've happened if I don't pay attention, I could get thinner lines here, thicker lines here. Basically just a lot of observing and trying to get it as straight and similar to each other as possible. That's just a little trickier. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to begin to have a little bit of fun with color and texture and just playing around with the letters in general. What I think I'll do now is just start painting and have all the letters be a little bit different in style. Then I'll come back to you once I've advanced in this painting a little bit and talk to you about different things that you can do with these letters. We're definitely going to play around with color and transparencies and maybe adding a little bit of texture to the letters. This can be the reason I call this display font 2s that maybe you can have one word where each letter is a little bit more complex instead of having the more cursive style where you're writing text. So you'll see what I mean by the time we're done. But for sure try out yourself a display font. It doesn't have to be this one necessarily. But you can try out and display font where the letters are big and bold and we have some room to play around it. So I'm just going to start painting right now and I'll talk to you in a bit once I've done a little bit of color work in here. So we can share some ideas and you can start to imagine what you're going to do with your own alphabet. I'm about halfway through with this colorful alphabet right now, and I just wanted to stop before I continue painting and talk about a couple of things that I've been doing. Number one, again, guys this alphabet section is really about experimenting. I just went crazy and wanted to do a bunch of different styles with this one font. I'm just on a whim deciding to do each letter differently, and repeating some here. A little tip that I do want to give you that concerns drawing and watercolors in general is, I really like to do two things when I work with pencils and watercolors, which if you do an illustration style watercolor, you'll be doing this a lot with for example, these big loose floral paintings that you might see don't necessarily have pencils, but this style does. We just really have to be mindful of not getting our washes to look dirty. We really want a clean crisp image, especially for example, where we have more translucent washes like this with this A. If I had these big pencil markings underneath it wouldn't look as clean, it wouldn't look as just fresh and this beautiful look that watercolor gives us. That's just a little tip in general. As you can see now, I still have a lot of pencil markings around here. For example, let's take this Q, and observe it. What I did here was paint just right next to the pencil. I didn't paint over it, and I did that with most of these. I already even erased a little bit along the way. So it's just a little tip where if you've done for example, all the precision work, this is great help for that. Painting right next to the pencil and not over it, just a general tip. Watercolors, I did that here too and now, for example, in this T, you can see the pencil is right on the outer edge and I'm just going to erase that, and it looks super clean now. For example, here with this Q I'm going to erase, this doesn't serve me anymore. I'm just leaving very light markings. I mean it might even be really hard to see, but just super light. I don't want it to interfere with the rest of my painting. I usually like to erase as I go when I paint. If you do this too and I do suggest it, especially if you want nice clean looks, just really make sure that everything's completely dry. Because if you don't have that patience you might mess up your whole painting and we don't want that to happen. But just so you see how it starts to look when we begin to erase, things just really start getting beautiful. Here for example. Right now I'm not using a specific formula, I am just really going with it and having fun with this bold lettering style, and I'm going to keep on going for a little bit. I still have this F to make a few shadows. I'll come back with you and do some little details just to talk about what we just did, and different ways you can do this bolder style lettering. I just finished filling in the last of my alphabet. Now, again we're just having fun, just experimenting. Every word is different. What I am going to do though is adding a few extra details just to try it out and maybe I'll discover something that I really like in observing these blank ones. I thought it might be cool to add some texture to these and maybe have some fun, little tiny polka dots in here. Just adding some texture. Again, I don't mean to reference all my past classes so much, but if you guys took the watercolor textures class, imagine how fun it would be to apply those texture swatches into lettering like this, that could be something really cool and really different. I'm thinking right now of maybe, let's see, a mermaid texture maybe it might be fun or let's see if we can do that somewhere. I'm just going to flip the paper because this paint is still wet, but I want to do it here. Let's just try something out and see how it goes. I'm just doing a little mermaid texture here. Just having fun, just playing around. Just seeing what comes out of these warm-up exercises. We can usually get some really fun ideas with just experimenting and not really thinking about it too much. That looks fun too. Really I'm just playing around here. Also the thing I like about doing all these different letters and not really having a color combination in mind or anything is that I can start to decide what looks cool to me, for example, I really like how this very light pink looks with a darker red. Red and pink is a combo that I really like. Then also I made these a little bit more earthy, like ochres and brick colors, and that might be really cool for a specific project with this theme. I mean I'm just really letting my mind go right now. I'm wondering if you guys can hear that crazy bird. That's part of the setting here. We're right near the sea and there's a lot of birds playing around. Let's see what else we can do. For example, let's try this out here. Maybe we can do a little bit of extra work. Something like that. Seriously, I am just playing around right now. I came into this. I'm with you on this. I'm just looking at letters and seeing something simple and just trying to play around with it. Trying to really for example, I'm a pretty colorful person in my art. Maybe you like more muted tones. I can imagine this activity being really cool, and I don't know, maybe pastels. I had a student once that only used deep blue, brown, and black. I loved her palette, and it was so cool, so different from mine. But that's what I really want you guys to start to discover, what your individual color palettes are going to look like, and that goes for lettering too. What's your style here. The best way to do that is really playing around and experimenting right now. Maybe just playing around with some dots and lines, nothing too complicated, just playing around. I do want to show you, I just used this font here. It's a very generic font with caps and it's like a display font. But we ended up doing something way different. As in all my classes, I don't necessarily look for you guys to do exactly what I'm doing, but do your own version of this. I'm going to post a bunch of different fonts to the class. I have a few here and I just thought it might be interesting to show you a few ones that I think that might look cool doing this playful activity. One of them is this one right here. Imagine doing the darker part in a really light, maybe lavender and then doing this middle line here that goes in between each letter. Maybe like in a darker blue or something. I really want you guys to just play around. Here's a fun one too. I imagine every letter being little tiny ingredient. I have a Western one that I've seen students do before, in-person workshops where they did a lot of color. Here it is. I might even have a picture somewhere and I'll try to post that in the project gallery. But this is a really cool example of something you can do playing around with a font. For example, here, you can play around number 1 with shadows and then the details inside the outlines. You can replace these little diamonds that each letter has with other shapes. I've tried that out with doing with little hearts or something like that. Really, get creative and take a font as inspiration so that you don't have to think too much about the shape. But start exploring. Start feeling what style you feel looks right for you and just what you have fun with too. That's really what it's about. Art in general is about enjoying what you're doing not struggling too much. Obviously there is a point where you can get really good at something and you have a nice technique, but this lettering class is about really finding your identity in writing words. For example, if you really like fairy tales and more storytelling or enchanted. A student of mine once did this font here, it's called princesa and she replaced all these little details inside. Instead of having little swirls, she did flowers and vegetation and it just looked so cool. What I mean here in this part,when you ever do a display font, try and really play around with it and have fun. I'm going to do a couple more which I already started out but I'm going to finish up with you guys so you can see how I paint them. Also, obviously when I finish a painting, I need to erase all of these pencil markings. I'm just trying to see if there's any wet paint left over here so that I don't mess it all up. But I think it's pretty much dry except for these little dots. I'm just going to erase this and I'll be back with you in one moment to start off our next font. We just finished our display font here, we did a script lettering, which is Adrian. Now, I'm going to move onto another style of script lettering. I want to try something, a style that I don't usually use in my cursive. Just to play around to do something different and maybe pick up some tips. I'm going to try this one, it's called movelistica. I purchased this on Creative Market. I like this because it has a bunch of hoops and loops and it's very thin, which I want to usually do and I feel like that would be like a fun challenge for me. If you guys do scripts, make sure you grab two that might just be different. Try not to get too similar here. The idea is for us to test different things out. Then you might find that you really like something. So let's go over here. I started this one out but I saved a few words, a few letters down here. When you purchase a font like this, sometimes you'll get what you call glyphs. They're just additional forms of each letter. Sometimes an H can have a little extra loop here or a little swash or something like that. We'll talk a little bit more about that. But I'm just going to paint these final guys with you here just so you see how I use my brush. I really found this to be quite therapeutic. I enjoyed painting a cursive that when I usually paint. I just grabbed some black watercolor and decided to do this all in black. It felt that way to me a lot more crisp, clean and elegant. I decided to go with just pure black. I'm just grabbing some water, some black paint and always having something to observe here. I'm only using my brush here really for the different width of down-strokes. Whenever I go down, it's going to be a little bit thicker like this, when I go up, it's going to be thinner. It's all about how much pressure and the angle that you hold your brush in. This font for me seems very airy, very elegant. I can imagine a lot of separation distance between each letter. It just feels very flowy to me and I like that. It's not what I would usually do but I do like to play around with with this in my personal lettering. I'm just going to continue here. Really the only trick is going down and a little bit more pressure and going up and lifting your brush a little bit. If you are struggling a little bit with your hand being shaky or not getting those really precise lines, I highly recommend going back to the pulse and precision exercises we did in my very first skill share class modern watercolor techniques. I've been saying this a lot, but it's the only way to get it right is just practicing a whole bunch. Those are the tips that I can give you if you're struggling with this. Also, it's not really even that hard. It's just about gaining confidence in your brush stroke and you'll find everything to be easier once you're not really scared of what it's going to look like. That's another thing I really love about these practice sheets. It's just about going for it. Now here I'm going to do these glyphs here, which are just variations of the original letters. You can see this b has a little extra hoop and loop here, whereas the original finishes up here. It just has a few little differences which are really fun and then gives you future ideas of what things you can do with your own lettering. I'm just going to continue painting here and I'll show you what it looks like when I'm done. A tip I do want to share is that sometimes I think an idea about lettering is that we have to do it all in one stroke and that's not necessarily true. For example, here I'm going to do this little B here, and my downstroke here is going to be thicker like that. Then I'm going to grab some more paint and then right where I finish here, I'm going to just loop around like that. Then I'm going to grab some more paint and it goes up thin and down thicker. It's not like I started here and did this and went thick. You don't necessarily have to do it that way. The cool thing about watercolors and especially brushes, is that your paint will be moist for a little bit and it'll allow you to start and finish in different places. That's really cool especially with these kind of script and cursive lettering. Another example, here I'm going to start at the top with this D here. Just me holding the brush would be super hard for me to go all around like that so I'm just going to grab some more paint. It's always easier to start left to right, especially if you're right-handed. Thin line here and then we just attach it to where we left off last. Floating around and finishing it off right here. Same with the E, I'm doing the downstroke, thiker and I'm attaching where I left off here. It is also about finding how your hand feels comfortable, that's the most important part when we do steady hand work like this. Just finishing up with Molestica and also the best feeling is when it's completely dry, you can finally erase all your guides like this, it really changes. Sometimes you have a drawing like I did here and when you're painting, your instinct corrects itself a little bit in and you start to draw and feel out the letter and sometimes it won't be exactly like the drawing was, but they're all guides. I also left my pencil markings here so you guys can see what it looked like and obviously these are ones that I painted just now with you. Another cool thing about watercolor, especially something we can notice in this style here is that I just used one color. I used black watercolor and actually here I just used a little bit from this pen set some black there. I love how we get different shades within every line. For example here, sometimes your paint dries up quicker and it'll get more transparent here and then we'll have little darker shades and here you'll have a little bit more concentrated paint. It's just stuff that I'm not necessarily really concentrating on, looking for, but it just happens because watercolor is beautiful that way. It really gives us these interesting textures. There's not much we have to do except let it be and let it dry and it'll give us all these nice different transparencies and it really pulled loose look to it. Make sure your paint is completely dry. I actually painted this a couple of days ago in preparation for the class. I just want to see that this is really dry before I erase it, because I don't want to ruin this painting. I'm into this this style right now. My personal calligraphy lettering, it's a little bit more rounded. I don't know, but I feel like I did learn some things here. For example, this Q, I would never do a Q like this, but it's a tip that I picked up little mannerisms almost of how a letter looks. That is exactly why I think doing this exercise is so important and so interesting too. We just pick up things that we want to do naturally, it's just fun to be able to find the beauty in all these different types of letters. Then eventually what we're going to do is create our own lettering and we'll see all these different influences that we have. I really enjoyed doing this style, and especially these bottom ones right here just to see how a G can look very different in the same style. The cool thing about lettering too is that it's not a font in the end and when you paint a text or something or quote or whatever it is you're doing you have this freedom and this ability to play around with each letter looking a little bit different. That's a really important thing to keep in mind. This was really fun, it's very different from the first one I did which is back here. I think it's Adrian or something it's called, I'll post all of these. As you can see, it's a beautiful style of cursive, but it's totally different from this. This feels a lot more elegant, more classic. I would use this for some sort of event, maybe place cards, something like that and then this style might be more for let's say a print with a quote. I don't know, I'm just fantasizing right now and beginning to think of what all these different styles can look like in applied to one's personal lettering. I'm going to do one more here and actually did start this one out as well and I left a little word here so that we can play around together. This one is script, serif. Here we go. This is a fun metallic Serif one that's not too elegant. It's not too formal. For me, it looks a little bit nautical. So I went towards blues and purples instead of the classic black or maybe an ocher. I'll post a bunch of different styles but obviously serif fonts are very popular. There's a million out there and there are a lot that are free of copyright to like Bodoni or Didot, they are there like very classic. Garamond is another example. This one I thought was fun. I bought it on Angie Makes, she has a really cool website with some fun lettering styles that you might have fun trying out in watercolor. These are already dry and I'm actually going to erase this here. All I did was use a little bit of this mob turned into like an eggplant color and some blue. Every time I did a word, I picked up a little bit of a different color and I'll show you what that looks like with I left word here, hello. Almost portal. Just finishing off erasing here. Again, the very first exercise we did together was having our lines be very neat, and then having them be a little bit more free, and maybe a little bit more messy. This is a cool style, and I tried to do it super neat, having a little bit of freedom with my brush. What I'm going to do now is just grab a little bit of some blues. I'm actually going to switch this over so you guys can see. I'm mixing color better, a little bit blue here, and I did have some little purple here too. Just cleaning up my drawing a little bit. Again, I really like to have my drawings be as clean as possible. I'm just erasing this middle line of the half inch, and just these tiny little details are what really helps our work look better in the end. Right now I'm just going down like this. When you do these styles of lettering, it's really nice to keep them pretty moist so that you can continue to paint within this letter. Think of it as a shape like any other. We're just painting within this drawing that we already have and we're trying to get also a little bit of play with color in here. Now, I'm going to put in a little bit of purple that I have and then just adding some water in the end. Actually, I think I'm going to try out this larger brush. This is a number 2. Just because I felt like it was taking me a little too long to fill in these spaces, and this type of font might be able to take something a bit larger. Yes, I was right and this just makes it easy. Sometimes if you feel a little bit frustrated with how long the letter might be taking, it may be that you need a larger brush, so a little tip there as well. With watercolor in general, sometimes changing the brush is all we need to do. Here we have a little. Again, I have this puddle, the whole letter is still pretty wet, and that gives me the opportunity to add in a little bit, maybe a different color, or like right now, I'll put some more purple in here. Then right now, I just grabbed just plain water because I want to have maybe this one be a little bit more translucent here. I'm just letting watercolor do its thing. Then when we observe these letters sometimes, like I've never done this style before, but I noticed that I do my O's in a similar way. One of my styles of lettering is doing caps. I like to do cap letters, and I always do my O like this, where the left curve is thicker than the right one. That's cool to do it in the style that I would usually do it, and that's it. Here we have very different style of lettering as well. As you saw in a lot of the examples that I showed you, a lot of artists including myself, really like to combine different styles of lettering within our artwork. I personally what I do is I have a couple of signature styles and I usually mix and match those within my work, and sometimes I'll use something in caps or in a boulder lettering like the display to have one of the words in quote be more significant than the others. It's just really playing around with shapes and words. This is a cool example of something that can be a display font. Again, you guys are to make up your own, but this is really good practice for that. I really like to have you guys do one of these alphabets using two colors. If you can do that, that would be great too. In this case, I was reminded of something not equal of the sea. So I decided to go with these deep ocean Hughes, but you guys do whatever you want with color. If you want to know about color, obviously, I have this whole class on creating your personal color palette. Yeah, one of your fonts, make sure to try out the duo thing of colors. That's basically it for this alphabet font activity. It's super, super important that you do this. Try not to skip this activity. It's where the real handwork happens, the practice, the spacing, the drawing. You guys are going to have to draw a lot when you do lettering. It's just super great practice, a great way to try out different styles, something that you would normally do, and also just experiment, have fun, do at least four if you can, and maybe even more like you can do a whole month of these. If you really want to get good at lettering, practicing these typefaces is just going help you out so much in the end. I'll try to post as many as I can on our message board, and you can also feel free to find a million cool fonts out there. Some of them are free of copyrights, some of them you can purchase to practice, and try be ethical with this. In the end, this class is really about doing your own style of lettering, but practicing with these fonts is a great practice. Now, we're actually going to go onto the next lesson where we are going to experiment with your personal handwriting. On to the next lesson. 7. Personal Handwriting to Lettering Development: Alright guys, so now it's time to begin with the real personal work here. This lesson here is all about developing your very own personal unique, something that's only yours lettering style. I think this is the key to, for example, if you want to create a unique style of your own as an artist or have a signature look. Doing this for yourself, I think will be very important. It's just a way to really dive deep into what it is about your handwriting that makes you so different. Right now I just have a super basic notebook is a notebook that I made. You can use any kind of notebook or sketchbook. Right now all we're going to do is just draw. We're not going to paint right now. We're just going to work something out with a pen and paper. I have just this basic blank notebook, which speaking of lettering, I have all these different styles in here, but more on that later. Here I'm just opening up a notebook totally blank, free to do whatever we want here. Don't think about it too much. I'm going to give you a few challenges here. Let me see. Clamp this here. Here's the thing, when we write, our handwriting, usually has a few different phases and we use a different style of handwriting for different things in life. For example, I think personally, I have about four variations of my personal handwriting that I do in day-to-day life, and I asked around on Instagram if you guys have this too before filming this class, and a lot of you said yes, so I'm hoping that you guys can follow me on this and if you don't, I'll talk you through it so that you can see what I mean. I'm just going to start writing words. Usually, I'll have a type of lettering that's like to-do lists lettering, I'm not going to call it lettering. Right now I'm going to call it handwriting. Let's just say, TO DO. I tend to writing caps, so when I write in caps really fast, I can see how he starts to connect letters. Then the other handwriting style I have, is when I write a grocery list, I usually do something really quick like that. Something that looks like that handwriting that only you would understand. Groceries. Sometime I don't even finish a word. It's like you're super quick handwriting when it's something just for yourself that only you need to understand, if that makes any sense. Right now, I even feel a little bit weird writing it because I wouldn't usually show anyone this, and every time it looks a little bit different. I'm not really paying attention, I'm not trying to make it super nice or anything, so here's my to-do, here's my groceries. Then I have an official handwriting where, let's say I have to fill out a passport form or something and personally, I usually use caps for that. For some reason maybe it's because my dad writes in all caps, I feel like that's the way it should be or something, but try to think of that type of handwriting you do when you want it to be super legible, like someone has to be able to read this and understand it. I'm going to write here official. That's my official handwriting. Then I have a style of handwriting that is my lower cap handwriting. This would be the handwriting I used to do when I was in school, because if you're in school right now, I'm not sure if you still write all stuff by hand, but I used to. I went to school from the 80's to 2002 and then college until 2008, so I did a lot of writing by hand. This is the words that I would like taking notes, I would call it. It starts with a cap, Taking Notes. I really put a lot of thought into this and I really looked into like, how is it that I usually write? What does it look like when I write? I came up with these. It's to-do list, grocery list, official, and taking notes. I want you guys to really observe the way you write. Maybe even look back if you haven't taken the time to notice that you guys do this, because you probably do. Even if you don't have Forum, absolutely sure that you have one style of handwriting, which is when you write super quick, something like this, and maybe you have another style of handwriting when it's something like this where you really need your handwriting to be understood by, not just yourself here. We're going to take these four different styles and work with them and actually do something with these style because that's what's inside of me. It's just the natural way that I use my handwriting is right here. What I'm going to do actually is, I'm going to even just tear this piece of paper out. I'm going to keep it here. I am going to call this, make it better. Make it better. If you see this my taking notes, handwriting. Make it better. I am now going to take each different style of my personal handwriting and improve it. Let's get started with this. I think you guys are going to have a lot of fun with this part of the class. Again, I'm just using a pencil and a pen right now. Supplies are not a big deal in this, as long as you have a pen, pencil, and paper, you're fine. First of all, I'm going to do, TO DO list. Again, I'm trying to see how I wrote it, and I'm going to add the word, LIST. Now I'm going to go with my pen here and take a few tips that I think might be useful to make this look even better. How about I use the trick of making what would be a downstroke thicker and an upstroke thinner, playing around with strokes here, which means the thickness of each line. I'm just playing around with that and really having fun here and just playing with my personal lettering. Again, I'm just making some of these. For example, this here, I had never in my life notice that I do this when I connect letters. But it looks cool. I feel like this could be something that I could put into an actual piece of lettering, and if I didn't write it, might even look good. It might be a nice thing to add to my lettering style. I'm going to go down here and make this line thicker, playing with the idea of the calligraphy downstroke, upstroke and then here. Making this thicker then this thinner. Already, this looks way cooler than this, right? What are we doing? We're just making it better. We're paying attention to the way we use words. What I just did now was basically rewrite these words, observing how I did it and just putting him into this new page here. I just did the to do list, which I took the same idea of making the downstrokes thicker and upstroke thinner and I'm going to do that here with my grocery list lettering. I like this style of handwriting and now that I look at it I noticed that it looks a lot like the cursive that I use in my personal water colors with my artwork except I try to make it a lot nicer and more cohesive. It's a cool way to see your roots also, where you get your artistic handwriting from. Now I'm just going to start drawing over this and I'm doing the same thing here. Maybe just feeling a little bit of here and here. This even starts to look like actual lettering by now and now I'm going to do my official one and I feel like doing something a bit different here so I'm just going to write the word first. This is the type of handwriting I would do when I want to fill in a form or something and it needs to be something that everyone can read and instead of filling in maybe spaces, I'm going to get the left edges and do something like this. Then here my taking notes I might just do this and what happens if I add a little of serif here? I'm going to obviously always erase pencil drawings around over there. What did I do here? I just basically made it better. I took my to do list lettering, I took my grocery lettering, I took my official lettering. I'm calling it lettering but it's actually handwriting, and then my taking notes style. I think that this activity is really important because it begins to show us how much of a big deal it is to actually observe the way you do things naturally and just try to improve that and work upon that instead of necessarily trying to see how others do it and then you try to imitate that. A cool lesson here is that we did all these which is my core handwriting, this is how I write every day, it's just what comes naturally. But then I did pick up tips that I saw in different fonts and by observing and I applied them here. Obviously I would never do serif in real life here when I'm taking notes, but this might end up being a cool lettering style and maybe here my official handwriting right now I'm noticing that this looks like what I usually do when I do a cover here, like a full illustration and I'm also noticing that my grocery list handwriting style does look like the cursive I use, but obviously it's just done way better. We're just going to take this maybe to the next level and turn these into watercolor lettering activities. I'm just going to do the exact same thing using my brush and paint. so let me just change this little scene here for you and we'll begin doing that. Once you have your make it better handwritings, if you have four or more now, try to pick out two. Two that you feel like they can really go somewhere, that are at the core of the style that you would like to develop, or if you already do lettering where you feel that your inspiration is coming from. For me, it's in my groceries and in my official handwriting and what I'm going to do here is I'm going to redo it, but now I'm going to do it with actual technique with a brush and paint. What I'm going to do is rewrite groceries and rewrite official and then do a little bit of variation here. I'm going to adjust it here. It's weird to observe your lettering and redo it. But I notice a few things. I noticed that I have a lot of likes spacing here. I tend to go all out there when I write really quickly. I think this is normal when we write quick, we use up a lot of space. Then I'm going to write, maybe I'll try overwriting different words in this style and me maybe paying attention and making it a little bit more refined. I'm going to write hello. Then I'm going to write, maybe I'll play around with, hello. But making it a little bit more mindful, maybe. I'm going to write hello. See how I went from this to this to this. Now this looks like something really fun that I could actually work with. This could be a fun lettering style too, but this looks more like me, something that I could develop. Now we're going to write official here. Then I'm going to write hello. It's a very simple word. I might write, maybe making it a little bit more interesting. What did I do here? I just played around with the position of my letters and I made the little L stick shorter and just playing around a little bit, not doing too much, but just taking my personal handwriting and just working through it, just developing it. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to watercolor over this now. Stay with me here and you can just observe what I'm doing as I'm painting. We'll come back and talk to this. When I'm done. A little recap here on how I came to develop my personal lettering style, which is what I want you guys to do in your own version. Eventually all of this led me to this guy and this guy here. These two, I would say are the two styles of lettering that I use the most. Obviously like right now it's just in plain black, but there are a bunch of variations and things you can do with this, which will look into later on, especially what we'll even do a part two of this lettering class because I really wanted to do like going back to the core thing here, which is, I think the best way to really find out what's, your style. Again, just from here we started with our basic quick for styles that I write in. You guys should do the same. Then I made it a little bit better here. Then I transferred it onto paint and just played around a little bit here. Eventually so I tried out a different couple of brushes and then here's a thicker brush, a little bit more loose style. It's not really my thing here. I like to do it a little bit more precise like this, better, cleaner lines and stuff. Then here with my official, I ended up going with this. This is the type of lettering style that I really like to use. But again, I can also use something similar to this. Sometimes you can play around mix and match, but in doing this playing around, forcing yourself to do, okay, let's grab one version of this and then try it out in a few different ways. I think really, really goes a long way and it really helps us to develop this personal lettering style that we're trying to achieve in this class. This lesson was really about you working out your personal handwriting and trying to make that look really cool. Now we're going to go onto a quote, something a little bit more complex, but also just like having this at the core. Always in this class I really want you to try and dig deep into what your handwriting is and how to make that better and apply it to art, to lettering, to brushes, to using paint. That's basically how I came from this to these two, which are my, basic lettering styles. It's a good thing that I have this notebook here that I'm using because you can even see it in my artwork. This is a notebook that I made with a print that I have, in this print has been licensed onto be greeting cards and just a whole bunch of different things. Even though it's a simple style of lettering, your audience will, if, that is what you want to do, like maybe you make a living off of your art or you want to have people that buy your art or whatever it might be or you just are for personal growth or are looking to develop a style, having your own lettering style, even if it's something as simple as mine, I don't do too complicated. I'm not too complicated lettering, but you can still tell it's mine. It's because it's my handwork. It's personal, it's just mine. I think that's what really makes you as an artist stand out. Just again, here you can see this is my script lettering and then this very symbol cap styles would I use a lot to write and I like to mix and match. That's what we're going to do next. We're going to paint a quote. We're going to start practicing with a little bit of looseness, washes, spacing, structuring words composition. This is it for our personal handwriting and lettering lesson. I can't wait to see what you guys do. Do the work, really work through this, do your own. You guys, I've seen a million different types of handwriting and I'm sure you guys can really come up with something unique. Onto the next lesson. 8. Quotes: Swashes, Spacing and Lay Out: This is the last lesson we're going to do before our final project. I thought it would be cool to paint a quote. The reason I want to paint a quote with you is because I want to show you a little bit of the process and a few tips that you can do to make your composition really work well for you. We're doing a few things. With lettering and with this watercolor style, we want to think of a cool composition, and it doesn't have to be too complicated, or maybe it does. It really depends on what you guys want to do. For this class, I'm going to keep it pretty simple just so I can explain the basics, but please feel free to go crazy and go wild with this quote activity. Number one, pick a quote. I'm going to do a classic Rumi quote, which is what you seek is seeking you. I'm just going to write. I always before writing a quote on actual watercolor paper. I always start out by just writing it on a notebook. What you seek is seeking you. This is just a very quick way to write it. But then I can see that maybe I want to grab a little bit of rhythm and maybe emphasize a couple of words. Here I'm going to say, I want to make the word seek bigger and bolder and then you, I want to make bigger and bolder too. Just thinking about a composition and also try to mix and match a little bit of fonts here. If you still feel a little bit insecure with your personal lettering, you can go ahead and maybe use one of the fonts that you like as an example, or just maybe do a caps in a cursive, which is what I'm going to do, maybe use these bigger words as display fonts. I'm going to go ahead and start drawing here so you guys can see what I mean. The reason I like doing this is because you really get to see what the words are going to look like once it's on your watercolor paper. It's always cool to sketch a little bit before on a blank piece of paper, and here I also can understand that my composition is going to be. The word seek and the word you are going to be bolder and bigger. For me, it means I'm going to do my cap lettering. But if it's for you, if you like to do western fonts, maybe these words can be more detailed, more like a display font or maybe something like what we did here with our practice fonts, which is like one of these. Maybe the word seek can be in some of these with like different colors and hue or in my case, I'm just going to use my cap style that I'm going to use for this word and for this word. Then I'll use my cursive for these words here. What I want you to do here is pick a quote where you can use two or three different styles of lettering and just play around with that. I did a super, super quick sketch just to understand that. What do I want to do? I want to use two different styles of lettering and I want to have it centered. I just noticed that by writing this, the length of what you and is seeking is pretty similar, so I can keep it here in a nice composition. The word seek and you are pretty similar in length. It's going to look nice visually. Before writing a quote in a big watercolor paper, it's always cool to do a little quick sketch like this. Now that I have this, I'm going to go ahead and do my version here on my watercolor pad. Brand new sheet here. Just as a tip, I always, always, always like to do a line straight in the middle. This watercolor paper is nine inches, so I'm going to measure four and a half and then just do a line just very lightly like that. This is just really going to help me get everything close together in the center. Now I need one, two, three, four. I'm going to work out a little bit of a grid here just to know where my spacing is going to be. This part is really important because I've seen this happen so many times, especially in-person classes where you think you have so much room and then you start writing something and you're like, what? It's huge and then you is a tiny little word here. It's really important to have a little bit of a guidance here with just a small grid. You don't have to go crazy. But I do like to always have this line in the center so I don't go crazy with sizing and words. I'm going to start. What I'm going to do now is draw a line here in the center which will separate, I have four lines here one, two, three, four. I'm going to draw a longer line that'll go here. Then I will know where to go from there. I want to do it centered. I'm going to go ahead and do that. I'm finishing up my grid here. It's very simple. If your style is a little bit more free, you don't necessarily have to do this. But I really like to give myself a very simple guide, like where my center is. Here I did a bit of spacing. It's an inch, an inch and a half, an inch, an inch and a half because I have four lines here. Not too complicated, but just a little bit of guidance so that when I start writing my words, I've just seen it so many times, especially in in-person classes that I know what the issue here is and a lot of times we start writing, we just don't know how much space we have. Especially having this center line really helps us out. In here for example, if my center is here, I know that the T is going to be just across the center. It's a very simple guide for us to keep it in proportion. Composition is important when we do quotes like this. I'm going to start drawing and using the same word, the word seek is a four-letter word. Obviously between the two E's is where my middle is going to be. I'm going to start drawing and I'll be back with you in a second before we actually start painting. Friends, I'm just finishing up with my drawing here and right now it looks pretty simple. I'm not going to do too much artwork here although you can. I might just do just a couple of little flowers around the edges. Again, you can make this as complex or simple as you like but for me, the really important part here is for you to work out your composition area here. What I do want to show you is that I actually left the edges of each word very simple, the beginning and endings. But I do want to show you a few little tricks that we can do here. I recently bought a few fonts on Creole Market and [inaudible] and it came with these really cool swash variations. Swashes are these terminations when you finish and start a word here. I think these are cool to show you guys so that you can see that there's a lot of different things you can do with words. Here I left this simple on purpose just for us to try some of these out. For example, here, this when you finish a word and you can do a little curve like that, something like this. It might be cool to end this word you and do that here, I'm going to even go crazy here and go have it between the, the little plant and just like playing around with the letter and the drawing a little bit, it's a cool way to integrate it. Then I personally do like a little bit more curly and sometimes I will end my words this way too. I think it's been like, my name Ana and have the swash here. Something really long like that, I think that's fun too. I just wanted to show you this so that you can see all the different variations, these are short ones too. Let's say you have your name and you can finish it up like that too. This is a really fun swash, especially if you're into botanicals, you can actually begin to even add a little bit of plants into your words. There's a bunch of different things you can do. Again, this class is all about experimenting and I did want to show you this so that you can see all the different options that you do have with each word. I'm actually going to go ahead and do a little bit more curl work. Also you guys, maybe I've been noticing that I've been holding my pad diagonally a lot. For me, that's the most comfortable way that I can write words. I really encourage you also to move your paper around until you feel where your hand flows best. It's just a little tip too that might help you out. Then here, I did it, I went up on the you like that and maybe here on the W, I'm just going to go the opposite direction and play around here a little bit. That just gives me a little bit of balance with the lettering, makes it a little bit more elegant. Then here, I'm going to do the same with seeking. I left is and seeking open so that I can play around with swashes a little bit. Here, if I have the word seeking, I'm actually going to move in here a little bit. I'm just playing around right now. I'm just thinking that maybe I can do something like that, it doesn't look too weird. This is what my regular process would look like. I'll just playing around a little bit. I feel like maybe my G can be extended a little bit so I can have a little bit more room with this spacing here. I'm actually going to take my pen there and that just felt more natural for me. Again, it just came out from a place of intuition and that's totally something you can do. Then here maybe the is I feel that I'm going to draw a little flower here so maybe it doesn't need as much weight here and maybe I can do a shorter swash, something like this where the I would just be something like that or maybe a little bit of curl, maybe a little bit of something like this, but maybe not as crazy and outgoing like that. Again, it's the same process that I'm going through with you here that I usually wanted to quote. Here, I'm just maybe doing something like that. Oh, I have an idea with this O. Sometimes I like to to fill in the full O, it's just like a fun different thing to do. Again, it's all about experimenting, I like to take you guys on this personal process with me and just see how ideas start coming up. I'm just going to finish this off with a little flower down here and I will begin paintings. I'm going to keep the colors very simple here. I'm just going do a little bit of, maybe more earthy tones, just black. I don't want to make it a very complicated painting because I want to focus on this, but again, if you guys want to go crazy you can do a quote with whatever theme you want. You can do like under the sea quote, you can do a space quote, this is more of like a botanical sweet quote. You could just really do whatever you're feeling but now I'm going to keep it simple maybe some lavender. I'll use like a light black to make a gray lettering here. I'm just going to begin painting and I'll be back with you when we start to do a little bit more of finishing touches so that we can talk a little bit about our quote but remember the important thing here is to keep a nice distribution of your words. Be mindful of spacing, be mindful of choosing a couple of different lettering styles and mixing and matching here. Also I will post a few different examples of swashes so that you guys can check out. It just ideas of how to finish your words off, just fun details that you can add. Also feel free to grab some inspiration from our alphabets that we did a while back in the past lessons. This can help you out a lot here if you still feel that you haven't really gotten to that place where you have your personal lettering style yet but try it out and pick a quote, try not to make it like too long, something like this where it's like a sentence really works well. I'm going to start painting and I'll just be back with you in a few moments. I've just been painting this quote and I'm just finishing up some final details here. Just a couple of details in the plants and I also waited for it to dry completely and then I erased all the pencil. Now you can see it looks super crisp and super clean, which is really important. I'm just finishing up before we have a little final check on this quote. In our final activity that's coming up next, I'll talk a little bit more about concepts, and color, and how to actually do a bigger project where we need a theme. Here I just went with something really sweet, some really pretty pink flowers here, and I had some black ink, some black water color with a little bit of leftover purple or mauve that I had here and it just gave these really pretty tones. You can see here how the watercolor's working really nicely. It gives us these beautiful textures. I'm just finishing up right here. I actually just realized that I have these metallics here that are, I showed you these in our color mixing class. Well, it was actually the paints, and brands class where I showed you all the different types of watercolors I like to use, and brands and styles, and types and these are my Kremer pigment iridescence. I just keep these here in my regular palette nox, I love using them so much. I'm just going to use them to finish off the little flower buds here, little dots in the middle. I'll just give it something a little bit extra. You can see here, if you have questions about this, make sure to check out the paints and brands, and I even have a lesson only for metallics, that you can check out all of the metallics that I like to use. But right now it's these Kremer's all what I have. We're basically done. Just to recap a little bit, what we did here was, before doing this quote, this quote is in my specific style. I want you guys to play around with your style. Again, you can use some of the fonts I support if you're really confused and really don't know what to do. But I highly suggest that you go over the making your own handwriting the best it can be. This is how you're going to get a really personal look. So again, my lettering isn't like the most glamorous lettering and we're not really talking about technique that much in this class. I really, I'm just trying to help out and have everyone get their own personal unique style, which is what I think makes an artist be who they are. Again, having me do my lettering the way that I would usually do it, is going to give my art this recognition and it'll be quicker to distinguish between other artists, just going with the way that I write letters. This quote is a really good exercise for you guys to start developing your personal lettering style like in an actual piece of art. It's also a good way for you guys to start thinking about layouts, and proportion, composition, really important to try to keep your words together. Maybe your composition is going to be more, you want it to be diagonal or rounded, whatever it is that you want to do. Make sure to make a quote that has at least a couple of different lettering styles. You can play around with this, and have some words pop out a little bit more. I'm really looking forward to see what you guys do. The theme is like totally free. You guys can do whatever you want from something really simple to something super complex. But please make a quote, and try to make it your own. Try to have the different styles of lettering and now we're just going to finish off with one more final project that I have for you concerning this whole personal lettering style. I will see you in the next lesson. 9. Final Project: Lettering Name Collection: For our final project, I want to challenge you to a real life event that you're going to do. What I want you to do is to actually put your lettering practice into a project that you're going to do in real life. What I mean by this is we're going to think of a concept and a theme and make name cards with that concept and theme in mind. The only thing that you're going to need extra for this class is smaller pieces of watercolor paper. I have these pieces here. I believe these are five by seven and you can fold them in half. You can either buy these cards already cut in the shape or you can also cut this in half and then fold it or buy a larger sheet. There's a bunch of different ways to do it. But the thing here is to have a smaller piece of watercolor paper. We're going to do a bunch of individual different names. In my case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to write all the name cards for the women who are attending an upcoming retreat that I'm teaching. This retreat is going to be in Sicily. It's really cool because we have this very specific color theme in mind, and I'm going to just work that out with you before we start going into the project. Think about something that you want to do, an event maybe. Maybe you can invite all your friends over for a brunch or maybe it's part of a Christmas gift. Whatever it is. Try to actually make something that you're going to use in real life, and you're going to repeat this activity a few times with different names. Also it can be a really cool, like let's say one of your friends is getting married, you can give her some name cards as a gift or they can be thank you cards, whatever it is, I want you to try and actually use it in real life. Right now what I'm going to do is just before we actually start making our name cards, I'm going to show you quickly just how I would work out a project before I actually start making it. I always like to start out with just a blank piece of paper and just always starting out with color, that's something that I really like to do. We're thinking of Sicily, it's summer, it's warm, we're staying in this castle and we have all of these brick tones and stones. I'm reminded of these earthy warmer colors like ochres. Right now what I'm just doing is before I start out my larger project, which is going to be all these name cards, I'm just really working out color one to get in the mood, and also to just have a broad look at what my project is going to look like. I'm going to practice with a little bit of color and also a little bit of shapes and obviously lettering, which is the final intention with this project here. Right now I'm just working out a couple of earthy tones. We're also going to be staying at olive oil farm. It's this [inaudible] Sevilla and it's a working olive oil farm, so these really nice dirty greens which are olive greens, really play nicely here. Again if you want to really get into mixing color, make sure to take my color mixing class, we really get into that there. I'm just mixing some over the green now. Just quickly, I always like to do a little filling out the color before I actually dive into a larger project. Again, these are the colors I'm feeling drawn to with Sicily in mind. A lot of rocks and stones and ocher and olives and just like earthy and sunny. This is like the color palette that I'm going to work with. Obviously you just need to choose a theme of whatever it is that you're going to do. I know you guys sometimes see what I'm doing and replicate it, and that's totally fine. But what I really want to do is challenge you to do a project for yourself, something your own. You can choose inspiration from a large variety of things. Looking at my color swatch here, I'm looking at these green circles here and they remind me of olives, which I think is a perfect theme for my name cards. I'm actually just going to try out painting very loose style of olives. I think I could actually have fun and making different colors of olives and like a nice variety of this. I'm just going to paint here for a bit and you can see how I work it out. Here I'm just very loosely working through an idea, and I think I'm into this. The cool thing about painting olives for these name cards is, it totally goes with the theme. I want to make a theme, so I'm going to end up making about 14 name cards for all the women that are coming to the retreat and I want to think of something that I can do a few variations on. In this case, I'm thinking I can do some green olives, some black olives and just have fun with that. That's just a little tip. I really love painting themed stuff. You guys might enjoy, I don't know, botanicals are always great. Sea life, if you're doing something like more holidays, I'm really doing a very loose painting here, but you get the idea. It's going to look like this. Now I want to work through what the lettering is going to look like. I was thinking of either a cursive or maybe even a really simple like Serif classic lettering, but I'm a little bit more inclined to recursive just because I think it's more elegant and simple. I like more this style here, where we did a thinner style of lettering and more flowy, more wavy. I think I might end up doing something a little bit inspired in this, but obviously with my own individual style. I'm just going to work out like the word Sicily. Just trying it out. What I'm going to do is just use my really fine brush, which is this is the number 0, I've been using a lot for lettering. Just really loosely, start painting here. Now that we have our concept clear, and I know what I'm going to do, a variation of olives, which I'm really excited about. I'm going to do one right now with these little cards that I have here. We'll do the first one and then, I'll work on some other ones and show you variations of the same design. Right now I'm just going to grab one of these and basically just start painting olives. We have a mother daughter pair coming to the retreat, so I thought it would be cool to paint the daughter's name, which is Tina. I'm going to make Tina's card right now. Basically what I'm going to do is just start painting the olives that are going to be on her card. I decided to go with this yellowish ocher for hers. I'm just starting with these three olives here and then, I'm going to start painting these leaves just like I did in my practice. Now I have my painting for this name card, and I'm just going to wait for the paint to dry a little bit because, I'm going to write Tina's name right here. If I don't wait for it to dry, my hand will ruin the whole painting. I'm just going to wait for this to dry for a bit and then I'll be back in a second and we'll actually paint the name, and then I'll show you what the whole collection is going to look like together. I just finished painting my first set of olives, and I started out with this golden ocher color. I'm going to write down Tina's name, and I want to do it in this style of a very loose calligraphy, a little bit inspired in the style that we did in one of our fonts. Let me see if I can find it here, so you can see. I don't know, as I was painting this, I really got inspired by the looseness, the waves, thinner lines. Just very loosely this style, but in my own handwriting. I'm going to write down the name Tina. I think I'm going to do a little bit wavy and have a little bit of swatches mixing with the plants here. Just go start writing and very softly. Now I'm just going to grab a little bit of, using the tones that I worked out here. My color palette, I have this brick color. I think goes really well with these earthy tones. I like to put these little slashes within the different leaves just to make it be all integrated. Just for some finishing touches, I do have my ink here that I like to use a lot. This is not necessarily for the lettering its just for a little bit of touches for these olives. Again, I know I've been referring a lot of my past classes, but I have covered so many topics here that if you're interested in learning more about white ink or white paint over watercolor, please go ahead and take the watercolor and mixed media class we talk a lot about that there. But here what I'm going to do is just basically to give the olives a little bit of shine. I'm just going to grab a little bit of white ink here and once my watercolor is completely dry I can go in here and just do a little bit of extra work here. Nothing too fancy, just very simple strokes here and maybe older here just to give it that effect of shininess, that's enough. Just these little shiny parts are going to make them look a little bit different than the leaves, and I always like to add these little details. This is my very first name card. As you can see, what my idea is for this, it's going to be a little gift where I write each participant's name here as a little cover. Then I'm going to write a thank you card in here individually, just my regular handwriting. I really think these are just beautiful things that you can do in life with your lettering knowledge that you have now. Just create gifts, make something cool for people. Host a brunch, have people over, make thank you cards, whatever it is, it's really a cool way to practice your lettering and also have a little mini collection of something. I'm going to just cut it here for a second because I'll be back with you in a few moments to show you the rest of the cards. Again, these are great gifts. They're awesome to make for a group of people. I'll show you the rest of them in just a few moments. This is the card we just made together with a name Tina on it. Before I did this, I actually do a little practice run, and I want to show you also part of the creative process that sometimes you can do variation and it won't necessarily turn out the way you had in mind. The very first lettering style I tried out for this name was more of the Serif, a more bold and classic look. It doesn't look horrible, but it I wasn't feeling the vibe, I wasn't feeling the energy. I decided to take the more calligraphy lettering approach, a little bit more delicate and feminine. I ended up being a fail, but it's cool, it's totally fine to try stuff out and if it just doesn't feel right, try something else. For me it was definitely going more with this style here. It's the same name, Kristin. Also I made it a little bit more airy, the branches a little bit more spread out and this felt more of the vibe that I wanted to do with these name cards. I'm going to show you all the variations I made so you can see how cool it is going to look altogether. I'm really excited to give these out to everyone. Again, it's just a really cool gift. Here we have more like black olives. Now, we have a full collection all based on this color palette and this little inspiration page that I made. Then it looks really cool when you have them all together. Finally, it was just this idea of making a gift for everyone, and it turned into a really cool lettering project. If you notice, I did use variations of color. Some of them are for example, more a little bit darker lettering and then I have little bit of polka lettering and a few like the one I just did of Tina, brown lettering and also the olives are different types of olives. These are black olives and then we have calamari olives and these are more like the ocher colors and more classic ones. It's just to show you how much fun you can have with the lettering project and using the same concept but making little mini pieces of art. I really encourage you guys to do something like this at home. Again, try to host something, try to make thank you cards. Maybe even make a couple of birthday cards and write your siblings names. I don't know whatever it is. I think that you now have the tools to make something totally unique, totally yours. I really want you guys to take advantage of that in this class. Right now, this is our final project for this class. There's a bunch more of activities and tips and stuff that I want to teach you with lettering. We'll probably have some part 2 in the future, but for now, what I really want you to take home with you is being able to do something like this, like a cool piece of collection using lettering that is completely yours. That's the most important part for me of this class. Just figure out what your personal style is. Do your different hand writings, make them better, use a little bit of inspiration here and there, just work on your pulse. Do all these different things that'll make you be able to create something like this that looks completely yours. I'm super excited to see what you guys make. I can't wait to see your projects. As always, you guys are awesome. Everything you do just blows my mind and thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing you possibly in a part 2 of this class. Happy painting.