Watercolor Lettering: Block (Sans Serifs)

1. Lettering Secret Intro: I'll let you in on a little secret. Look at that lettering. The most work that I've licensed that has hand lettering on it has been in this style. I don't know what it is about. Is it like how bold it is? It's there, it's out there. What I also like about San Serifs writings and also feels really approachable. Even though you might think they're not as sexy, since serious writing in ink, in watercolor, in web media is very much in demand. When you're using the right tools and you're incorporating it into your designs. It super simple. It's just your watercolor writing. Oh and it's fun, I forgot to mention that. 2. Supplies + Overview: All right, basic question, supplies. I'm going to show you a lot of supplies in this class not to frustrate you but to show you a lot of options, to grow from especially. First we're going to start with card stock paper. Really this is going to be your practice paper. We're going to go from there working on dry media to wet media. We're going to start with a sharpie marker, something that everybody should have. A fancy marker which is in our brush marker, which actually has ink in it then we'll move on to Chinese brushes. It makes sense. I'll show you how to really get loose with India ink. You can use any of these brands or even Dr. Ph. Martin's or liquid water color black. Now I'll also be showing you a technique using these fluid watercolors. I'll use 2-3 but if you want to use your regular watercolor paints, whatever brand you like, that works. My preferred watercolor paper is this Canson watercolor paper. In terms of brushes, we're going to use a variety of brushes. I'm going to use a round brush, a liner brush, and flat brushes. With my watercolor work, I always like to add a little touch of white sometimes. The structure is much like the other watercolor lettering classes that I'm doing in this series, so we'll start with some basics. Not get too technical but just have enough of an understanding to approach your paper and get your ideas firing up and we'll go from very simple and approachable art supplies to things that are more advanced that you will feel ready to do. 3. A Brief History: I'm going to give you the quickest introduction to sans-serif fonts. Before I started out with grotesque lettering, meaning it wasn't pretty and full of serifs and embellishments as other typefaces had been done before. They used a limited variation of strokes, so that means that they didn't tighten very much, or loosened very much the width of the line within a letter. There was a uniform width, so every letter had the same width size. There was often a shorter kerning, shorter spaces between each letter within a word. Here are some commonly used fonts that we use now that were called grotesque, that fall under this category. Then we moved down to neo-GRO-TESQUE, meaning basically new grotesque. From the early 19th century to now this one that came out in the mid 50s, we're talking Helvetica. Helvetica really shook things up and it took a long time to develop this font. You might take it for granted, but is so well-designed that it's used universally, almost from street signs to high-end catalogs. It's supposed to have a very straightforward appearance, limited width in variation. Again, we're still going with a very simplified width of the letter that has very clean lines and it's just a very neutral typeface. What's great about it is that you can use it in a lot of different settings and impose your own interpretation to it. Now the next style is geometric. This is one of my favorite fonts, so I tend to use geometric fonts in a lot of my work and my class tiles, etc. We're talking Futura and we're talking Century Gothic. These were based on squares and they include almost exactly circular forms, like let's say I'm a letter G, or the letter C, or the letter O. They're very clean again and very symmetrical, balanced from width to height. Last type of san-serif font I'm going to walk you through is a humanist font, and this was a throwback to the classic letter forms. I don't know if you've noticed in your history, we tend to progress more and more in a direction and then we swing back and we use what we learned and edit to an older style that we are now freshly inspired by, because we're again sick of the current trend. With this one, you do see some stroke modulation being that the width of those lines within the letter and do vary quite a bit from narrow to thick. Examples of these fonts would be like Myriad, or to Tahoma, Lucida Grande. That's a really brief history of some san-serif fonts and their evolution in the 19th century. 4. Exercise: Sharpie: Let's get warmed up with something I know we all have at home. Just as a very simple exercise, we're just going to write our alphabet with a simple sharpie marker. Now, this might not seem a big deal at all. But when I show you the work of some of the artists that use this method really well, you might be impressed. Here's work of Mike Lowery. I really enjoy his winsome look and it's so fun, it's so approachable, and he uses sharpies, and pens, and markers, and iPad. As you can see, there's such simple illustrations done with a very consistent line and you see a lot of those block letters. It's worth just investing a little time into your own handwriting to make it look awesome. I'm going to do a lower case alphabet to just so I have that variety. If I do scan this, these results weren't great in Illustrator. But while I talk about that, let me introduce you to another artist. Someone else, so how does away with the chappy? Is Austin Kleon and it's fun to read his books, they're incredibly inspiring, and he illustrates them with his own sharpie work, his own handwriting. This one which I have show your work, has been a lot of fun to look through, and there's a lot of pages within it that have his hand lettering. Again, it's a San-serif, just handwritten look. Now you might be thinking, what's the big deal. But we're going to look into these letters a little more. With the lower-case alphabet, I really based it on circles, so very geometric look. Now at the top, I did letters that were much longer and elongated, I didn't do those circles. With this bottom look, which is my preferred way to write, I start from the bottom up. Instead of writing, let's say that a, I make it like a triangle from the top to bottom and over. With this a, I start from the bottom and arc over to give it a more curved, consistent look. Be thinking of how wide, how symmetrical you want your letters to be. I know that we're stemming from our handwriting, but take your handwriting and improve it. With these letters if I'm making them a very symmetrical to fit within a square, then they're all going to have that feeling. Play with different ways that you already write and you'll see just like I developed my third look, what you want to consistently recreate. 5. Exercise: Art Brush: The Pentel brush marker is a new popular brush marker among illustrators, at least that I know. That's who I heard it from. I'm going to walk you through this little step of removing this red ring. If you do purchase this from, like I did from Amazon, the instructions will be in Korean, so it might be a little difficult to figure out what to do as it was for me. Get ready for your hands to get messy. But just take that ring off and it'll be ready to flow with ink to the top of the brush. To warm up the brush, I squeeze a little bit on the bottom and I apply a little bit of pressure. If you've ever used a paint marker that you have to shake up, without shaking it, this is a similar process. Get a feel for that, that look. The way that I'm using it. I really like that dry brush look that I get from it since I work in watercolor so much, I'm used to creating a look that is very wet and consistent. I really appreciate this dry brush look that I can't achieve really easily and it's really accessible. I actually try to keep my brush a little bit dry. I don't press down that much. But again, as I press down and I squeeze together the tip of the brush, it will get very wet. You saw how I do it? Now if this is your first time trying the Pentel brush marker, I suggest that you start with just some simple lines. I want to show you also the variety of the thickness of the line. By applying pressure, I can create thicker lines and it gets raspier and more textured as I'm going along on ink. Because what's happening is that the ink is actually within the black body of the brush. When I squeeze it, then it falls down into that little clear well between the brush hairs and the wealth that is in the body. I'm just playing with some mark making. I like to use these in my designs and it's also a great warm up before I start doing something that's more important than say, my alphabet in my brush marker. I'm warmed up. I've got a good feel for this brush marker. As you noticed, differently from, let's say, a watercolor brush that is loaded with water and paint. I don't always work top bottom to get a consistent line, a light to create that texture by going up and down and making my lines thicker by going up and down as I would with a graphite pencil, but with this brush marker. When I'm working with a brush with something that is very loaded with ink or paint, as you'll see later. I don't scratch up and down typically with it. As I'm finishing up on my alphabet, I'm going to do some extra vowels and punctuation so that if I wanted to scan it and use it in some artwork, I can have some options on more E`s and more S's that are often in words. Real quick here and wanted to contrast and show you how this looks with a lot more ink flowing through the Pentel brush. The lines are obviously darker. They're more consistent. They're not raspy and jagged on the ends. If this is your tool of choice, now start thinking of what you might want to write. There's nothing like actually writing something that is meaningful to you are just resonated with you on a certain day, and putting that into writing and beautiful letters that you do on your own. You never know what's going to come out. At least I do, I have of course, some an idea in my mind. I always try to encourage students to have some a concept, but to be ready to let it go, and watch what evolves out of your creative time. 6. Exercise: Round Brush: As we continue, we're getting more and more challenging but still sticking to black and white. I'm going to use this Black India Ink. It's from Blick Art Supplies. It's not the thickest black that I have, but it does a trick. It's a nice big bottle. I have all my supplies setup, got my ink, my brush. This is a brand new brush, it's an eight round. With this size eight round brush, I'm going to get it pretty saturated, pretty full of this black ink. I'm using this black ink because it's inexpensive and this is just to get my feet wet to practice. If I were going to want those riches, riches blacks, I would use something that is more professional grade and is definitely India ink because it's that very rich black. The reason I'm using an eight, a rule of thumb I used. Let's say if I'm working on five by seven and I'm doing this type of san-serif lettering, then I will use an eight size brush. Something that's close to the dimensions of the paper. My paper is in inches five by seven, let's say half of this nine by 12, it's more like nine by six or six by nine. I'm going to use a size eight brush. If I were using a sheet of paper that's 11 by 15, and I want those thick bold lines, then I would look for the size of a brush that's in between 11 and 15, let's say a 12 round. Obviously, if I have a lot of words to fill that sheet of paper, then I'm going to go with a smaller brush. But that just helps me gauge what size brush to use. 7. Exercise: Chinese Brush: I think we're ready to get a little bolder. I'm going to show you what a Chinese brush looks like. Now, Chinese brushes might look intimidating. They often times don't have sizes on them. The bristles feel a lot rougher, and it's hard to tell which would be best quality. Price is a good indicator if you're not familiar. I have found that kind of a golden brown hair is best. These white synthetics are good too. I'm going to use this smallest of mine, at least, brushes. If it were comparable to one of my sable brushes, I would compare it to this 10-point. Maybe 12-point, not quite. Let's say to my 10-point brush. A nice way you to see, it's a little more, wildly, little more under control. You see this is not a very large brush, and yet it's creating very thick lines. I'm not going to be able to finish this alphabet on this sheet of paper. Now, how fun is that? I'm still going thick as I'm going down. Winding up. If not, I'll have ink spray over the page. Again, if you want to experiment with that, feel free to. We just want to get some of these roles down first. As you're getting ready to write whatever you want with your Chinese brush and your black India ink, some tips are to have a lot of paper on hand. I don't use my best paper. I use card stock, or even newsprint, worked okay for this piece. To be ready to do a lot of takes and just take the best one. Use one or a few of these methods to find your way of writing. The way that these words, these letters, voice what they want to say in thick and then in consecutive line and in bold, chunky lines. 8. Watercolor Letters: What I get asked them out the most is my watercolor lettering. It's basically just using your handwriting with a brush in your hand. I know I'm totally over simplifying it, so I'm going to break it down. For these letters, I had this huge commission by which I mean it was large as it was 20 inches by 30 inches. When I was doing the majority of the words, there are about 200 words. I used a sans-serif handwriting looking letter form. I used this liner brush. Liner script brush is also another name it goes by, this is size four liner, is what it actually was sold as. I usually buy Master's Touch, which is a brand that's found in the US at Hobby Lobby stores. The important part to remember with doing the handwriting is always the direction. I wanted you to take a long look at what direction I'm going in as I make my strokes. If you've ever taken any other kind of brush lettering class or a calligraphy class, you've heard that before, where you put pressure as you're going down and let up as you're going up. Since I'm doing block forms, then I'm going straight up and down, lifting up my brush when I need to go and take another stroke and take it down, always going down. Obviously, sometimes I need to go sideways. When I'm doing these diagonals on that Y, I'm going from the top to the bottom, and I'm reloading pretty often. The reason I'm doing that, one, I'm using a rough texture sheet of paper. So everyone of those little holes that the paper has, that paint and that water needs to sink into, unless I want a jagged edge like that cursive G up there. So I'm reloading often. I have a lot of paint and a lot of water on my brush. The good thing about this brush, is that since the bristles are so long, it can hold a lot of water, and it can hold a lot of paint. If I had used a brush that's maybe like a detailer brush which has a really short body of brush hairs, then I'd be reloading constantly. So that's the reason why these script brushes, these liner brushes are good. Since I'm doing smaller words and they are thinner, I'm going with a darker color. You can go lighter on your colors when you are painting your letter forms. If they're nice, big, and bold, thick letter forms, because then they're highly visible. You'll notice also, that as I'm doing these darker letter forms, I'm working on top of penciled in lines. If I were doing this with a lighter color, also not possible. That's why I think this is probably the best way to just start getting your feet wet with hand lettering in watercolor. Doing a dark color, a block find or lettering that just feels very natural. I like block because it's just basically a lot of straight lines with the exception of a few curvy lines, writing it out in pencil and then tracing over it in a darker color. I'm using an indigo that's mixed with a brown to just kind of give it a little more interest and not just be plain black. Now that we've warmed up to the idea of it, I'm going to work in watercolor without any pencil lines in a slightly lighter shade and with a thicker brush. You might not believe me, but I'm going to focus a lot of time on water to paint ratios. I want you to see how much paint I put on my brush. I'm going freeze the frame because I can. So it's about half loaded with paint and water, a lot of water but that paint is actually saturating the water that's on my brush, so you see how dark the colors are when they come off my brush. Notice also how I'm reloading on paint after just about each letter form, and then I feel like my brush is getting a little dry, I add into the paint and then I swish it around so that my brush has a good balance of paint and water and it's already mixed in on the brush. You don't want to have clumps of paint and watery places. That said, I do like to play with larger forms. I like to lay down water and then lay in the paint. We'll talk about that later, but when we're talking about just having something that's somewhat consistent, that's what you want to do. You want to mix the water with the paint right on your palette, loaded onto your brush so it's ready to go. When you're writing with your own handwriting in watercolor, the most important thing for you to take care of, is how much paint and how much water is on your brush. I use a lot of paint on my brush because I love really saturated colors. Another reason I do that is because I like to do things in one stroke if at all possible. Once you have those correct proportions of paint to water, and you have your brush ready to go, a lot of this will sort itself out. And you'll feel a lot more natural as you write with that brush. Letting up as you go up and going firmer as you go down. 9. Watercolor Block: We're going to jump into a fun watercolor technique and I am going to bring up even more supplies, don't get frustrated with it, you can always use whatever watercolors you want to use, you are used to using but I'd love to introduce you to new mediums and that way you get to watch how they work before you have to put in the money to buy them. I'm going to use fluid water colors as I have in many other classes, I'm using my Dr. Ph. Martin's, are radiant concentrated watercolors and I'm using three colors, three greens; eyemass green , a Calypso green and the jungle green. Now for the brush, we're going to use a flat brush. This is number 9, size 9 flat brush. It's got a square head. You're going to see that in the painting, these little hairs aren't perfectly trimmed and if you do have one that's brand new and does, it'll have a cleaner look and with these, it'll look maybe a little more rugged like when you chop wood and you have that jagged edge. It still works well for this and each letter form is going to have its own brush stroke. It's a great way just to flex your mind and do the exercise of thinking of how these letters are put together. Your hardest letters are definitely going to be the curvy letters, but it'll still be fun to actually use your entire arm to do those Cs, the Os, the S, the D, R, Q, letters like that. Obviously if you're doing this in another language and other alphabet then take it or leave it. You can assume from what I am telling you, or what your experience is going to be like. Now when I start with A, maybe not the simplest letter I is definitely the simplest but the letter A is a great way to start because you have a triangle shape and we're going to do it in three strokes. I'm changing the color every time that I pick up my brush and do a different stroke. Sometimes I just add more water, other times I do get lazy and maybe I'll do two strokes of a little letter with the same loaded brush. But I want to differentiate as much as possible. I want each letter form, even though I could make that C in one swoop, I want it to have a couple of different colors, so I'll drop some color in there. The most important part of this exercise as you're creating these letters is to not put your wrist down. A lot of times when you write, and rest your hand a little bit; you're going to keep your arm lifted and make those strokes from your wrist or from your elbow even especially that letter S as you curve around any letter G, any of these really curvy letters, you're going to end up doing that. Now I'm sure you noticed that I'm skipping around on different letters just because I want to use the same color in different places. In the spirit of not wasting paint, I'll drop in a little color there, start with another letter over here, refresh my brush, use a different color and hop around in a rhythmic way so that I can get all my letters done. This is going to be an exercise where you don't have a ton of control. You're going to have a very loaded brush with paint, very loaded with water but the results are beautiful as the color just bleeds into each other. I'm going with wherever I have space so if I do or choose to display this somehow I will have to work around in Photoshop; either scramble my letters even more, or arrange them in the proper order. I am adding in a tiny bit of yellow that I had on my palette already to bring in more differentiation, the more I dip my brush back and forth from water to paint and to paper and water paint paper and I go back and forth my colors are getting a little mixed together because the brush is, obviously the conduit. Between all three and it's contaminating the water making ingreen, contaminating my colors making them a different color slightly so sometimes I'll just introduce fourth color that I just have around just to freshen things up because I do want the color variation within each letter form. I'm a little hesitant to call this my final because we are going to work on it a little more. Some of you might be so thrilled with how it looks that you won't want to touch it; I'll show you how it'll look. If you do touch it. I'm pretty happy with the result but I'm going to push it further. I'm going to take my number 6 round brush. This is just my favorite brush of the moment. Use whatever your favorite brush of the moment is and make sure that it has a good tip on it. You want to have as much control when you're dealing with mistakes as possible. Listen less to what my favorite is and follow your gut. With a slightly wet brush, I'm just going to rub in those edges. The water will reactivate my paint. Now since I don't have more paint on the brush, I have to be careful that when you're adding water, it's going to change the ratio of how much paint or water you have on the piece. You can see here that these taps of these letters are lighter than the rest of the letter which looks a little weird. With now my brush that's a little drier, I'm going to start pushing the paint back up. If I want to be bolder, let's say with this letter B; this jagged edge here, I'm going to use more water on my brush and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to reactivate the paint. But I'm going to let it bubble. I am going to keep it fairly wet and then I'm going to let the paint do the blending instead of redering into it with a dry brush. Personally, I don't overthink my pieces quite that much. I find that if I think and think and tinker with a piece, I will lose enthusiasm and I'll lose my sense of direction. What I really want to do with something, what looks good or not because I'm just asking so many questions instead of just going with my gut. 10. Watercolor Block Final Touch: Now we're going to add more to this alphabet with a little drop shadow action. Since these are very simple letter forms, very blockish, then it's going to be a lot easier than you might think to create a 3-D feel. All we're going to do is extend the lines, the edges of each one of the edges that we find and go down at a 45 degree angle, and then connect the dots. Then a line, curving around, echoing that same line, extending the line. I'm using really a muddy color. I want my letters to stay vibrant. I could have used black or gray but I always like to add a little color when I can. I'm going to skip all these letters. Let's do the S together because that's tricky as S doesn't have as many corners. I'm going to do what I can, what I know, and extend what I can. Again, it's just about connecting those dots and trying to create the same amount of distance between the letter form itself, the top of the letter form, and that's really the edge of the bottom that we curb around and create this Shadow 3-D film. Wire frame was something that became very big with these Gothic letters. A lot simpler to do it. Since they started as a means of creating easier signage posters, then it was all about just attracting attention. A trick in trying to imagine where are these drop shadow lines, these 3-D lines fall is to almost duplicate the letter in your mind. If I take this P and I duplicated, do another P. It's just like it shifted down and over just a little bit. All right, let's speed this up. My letters are coming together and as you see the collection of all the letters put together, it becomes really interesting to see the different bleeds, the different colors within each body of each letter. Then adding that wire frame just grounded them just a little bit. 11. Bonus Bag of Tricks 1: Now I'm going to start writing in watercolor. I have a sheet of paper and I'm going to do the cover to this class. Sometimes I sing things, and as I have in the other classes, I'm going to write lettering. Gets this nice and wet. I'm going to paint these letters in a lot of different styles. Watch out for tips on how I give each one of these just a little different touch, different techniques you can use. I want you to notice how clean the lines I have to use with the very tip of my brush in order to have these clean edges on my letters. I also want you to realize that it is totally okay to go in and do one side of a letter. One thing that you might think should be just one stroke and perfect it if you want those clean lines. I go in and I do the body of that letter, and then I go in and I add a little bit of that crisp edge with the tip of my brush when I can focus a little more on that edge. When you're painting with your brush, you're going to have one crisp edge at a time, because that point can only be pointed at one side of the letter form. That's why that left-hand side was nice and crisp, and then I came in with a second stroke, or maybe even a third, and cleaned up the left-hand side of that stroke. On the bottom the same way. I'm going in and I'm doing a crisp line straight, across, horizontally on the bottom, and that top bar looks nice and crisp. But then I need to go in and do another brushstroke with the tip of my brush on the bottom of that L. Into fashion, I like to add some variety and I also think that it helps you see a variety of letters and ways to go about this one style. It was admittedly challenging to have a feeling of a lot of different styles when they're all san-serif fonts. I couldn't play with serifs like I did in the last class, and I couldn't play with curlicues as I would with cursive type lettering. But what I found was in this effort to simplify the letter form, I have a lot more freedom to get decorative, and geometric, and just compile a letter out of shapes and lines instead of adding flare through other means of how I use that style, that wrist of my hand. Here with the n, I'm using a rounded edge, as you would, let say Arial Rounded. With the G, I get more bold with those brushstrokes, but still trying to not give it that brush script necessarily look. With the word watercolor, it was fun to just write it in the style that I prefer to write in, that is just a little handwritten and all in caps, and typically starting from the bottom up. 12. Bonus Bag of Tricks 2: As we did in the last set of segments, I'm going to add a wireframe to this L. It is a really simple way to start off. I always like to start with something that comes easily so that I gain confidence to get more creative down the line. So if you notice the colors that I'm using in the second layer that's going on top of the base layer are just one-step darker from the base layer color. Something tricky about watercolor is that it drives lighter than it looks when it's wet. So even if you go a little too dark on your colors, don't worry, it will wash out and you'll get an opportunity to add yet another layer of full color if that's what you want. In the class before this watercolor lettering serifs, I go more into shading and what an impact it has by creating layers and starting out with a light shade on the side of that E and going darker and darker and darker. It really gives your letters a sense of space, it pops out a little bit, it defines them. With watercolor, you really can't go wrong because you can always add more layers if you want to go darker. So not only am I adding layers, I'm also getting darker with my colors. If you'd like to learn more about how to learn the proportions between how much paint, how much water within that ratio to put on your brush, check out my class, watercolor story. But really we're just adding more paint to our brush, making it darker or maybe even progressing to even darker colors so that you know when it's done, when it's just jumping out at you and you feel like it has a very defined presence. Those layers show through even if the viewer does not know how much work you put into it, it absolutely shows. Okay, so I'm taking this back to a slow dance because I think this is a technique that you would really benefit a lot from learning. For making these light shadows, I load my brush with water and paint and make that thin line on the left-hand side of where I want the edge of that shadow to come up against the letter, and then have a wet brush that doesn't have very much paint on it at all, or a somewhat dry brush if I want to have a little texture to it. I worked from there to spread it out a little more. I want you to see that it's not that I find the correct concoction of how much light in dark paint, I actually use just the same amount of paint and spread it out to different areas as I need to. So my final touches are not going to surprise any of you that know me. I am going to use acrylic, white ink, and some white gel pen. Here I just have fun. I'm going to mix it with a little bit of a contrasting color. A color contrasts orange would be purple and that's why I made that shadow purple. Then what's relaxing as a final touch for me is to use my gel pen and to add teeny tiny details that most of you might not even see, but they're fun for me. I do believe that on some level they're noticeable. You'll find your own tricks of what you feel really sets off your piece here at the end and if not, pick up a white gel pen. 13. Final Words: A few last words of encouragement, this is basically the creative process; just to keep going, keep trying, keep practicing. I'm constantly writing notes, writing words that stick with me, just writing a letter, a single letter in a style that might be a little different or I'm just trying to stretch myself and explore it a little more. It's not something that I need to be in my studio for, it's something that I've done on our family vote, in the car, at church and during board meetings, and all I cast off. It's time for me to sound like a broken record and invite you to post your project. I give you a lot of options. If you want to share it on social media, let me know, this is my handle. If you like this class and you haven't watched this one yet, you might enjoy it, watercolor lettering with serifs. This is part of a series, so feel free to provide any feedback for the future ones.