Lettering By Hand

 

Me in class today, photo courtesy of Bibi.

I realise I squint a lot when I do my work. I should stop that habit. But I was just trying to see the overall image as a whole. I find that squinting helps.

We did a lot of stuff in class today with chalk. It was pretty fun - but messy!

First exercise:-

Fold the A3 sheet in half, and draw the letterform without looking at the page while holding the chalk on the side (long edge). We had to do this 3 times. Here are my results...

    

You can see that the very first one is the more 'raw'. The 3D effect that came out unexpectedly was quite pleasing.

We also did more drawings of our letterform with our eyes open. Here are some experiments with serifs and kinda-cursive forms.

I kinda like this one cause it has a gentle flow to it. Am also loving how one edge has a stronger accent compared to the other. Texture is <3

 

1 Sans Serif and 3 Serif Bs. I really like the last one because it looks almost perfect enough to pass off as a letter from a typeface! 

Our next instruction:-

We had to draw the blackletter form of our letter. Oh man, I really loved this because when I was little I used to try to copy and draw this old traditional type for my birthday cards. It took a loooooong time, but the results were like something out of a medieval period. Anyway, here are the results.

I always seem to botch up the 'arm' on the left-hand side.

So I decided to remove it completely for the last one.

The third exercise...

We had to draw our letterform as big as possible, concentrating only on the negative spaces (which in this case, it's white, right? Since the canvas is black?). Here are my results (I did 2, with varying shapes).

Somehow I feel like it's so...normal. I don't know if I'm my own worst critic or I just don't know how to experiment? Hmm.

The next exercise:-

Do the exact same as the above, but concentrating on the positive forms instead. Since the curves and counters of the B are what gives 'life' to my letterform, I decided to try a few options.

The concept is alright, but somehow when I draw it out, it doesn't look beautiful.

I think I only like the first one because it took the least space.

Last instruction:-

Draw our letterform as a collection of graphic shapes! I liked the sound of this.

Yeah, I really liked some of these results.

What I learnt:-

• Texture is beautiful
• You can't replicate some hand drawings perfectly (although you can try)
• Simple is good - but it's hard to think simple sometimes
• Don't stress out! Just have fun with it :)
• Don't rush the process. Crafting it slowly is just as important.
• It's okay not to know what the end goal is. Experiment and play along to figure it out.
• There are more designs to the letterform that I never thought would be possible - I totally forgot about the blackletter style from the old days!

Let me end with these two drawings that I'm not sure when I did during class...

Here's a B that I tried to do by only moving my chalk in one direction - horizontally.

I'm not sure what I was experimenting here. I wanted to do a multitude of Bs at the edge of the paper (I started off with the flipped side). The result didn't look like a B at all so I added 2 triangles in a horrible attempt to 'save' it. So I ended up with this mess, haha.

Till the next graphic adventure.