Home2015 (Page 9)

March 2015

Happy Tuesday! This past weekend was reallllly busy for me! I designed our wedding invitations and recorded a Skillshare class on the entire process from start to finish: all of the research, sketches, lettering experiments, then finally setting up and saving the file correctly so it’s ready to hand off to my letterpress printer. You can watch the free intro to the class (called Laying out Your Lettering for Letterpress) here and just for my blog readers and YouTube watchers, I’m sharing one the other videos today. This video covers the sketching process of lettering based on research which determined the look and feel we were going for (Southern rustic). If you’re interested in seeing the rest of the class, you can sign up for Skillshare free of charge for an entire month using this sign up link.

Brush script style fonts have been gaining in popularity – from hand drawn versions to vector point-perfect variations. Brush script styles lend themselves to applications with character and personality, an artsy organic feel, or just an extra human touch. This versatility gives brush scripts a well deserved spot in any font library. Here are a few for free and for a fee to round out your brush script font collection.

There are a lot of tutorials out there on how to create hand lettering, but far fewer on what you can do once you create your lettering. In this week’s tutorial, we’ll create a hand lettered photo composition using just photoshop. We’ll start with placing and coloring our lettering on a chosen photo, then go over the basics of masking and applying environmental shadows to give the final piece a polished look. As a bonus, I’m including the lettering used in the tutorial so you can follow along exactly if you’d like. Let’s get started!

Holy moly. I turn 29 tomorrow. This year is a big year! I'm marrying that handsome fella in September and I have so many things planned for the blog, youtube, and maybe some other little surprises peppered

Happy Tuesday! I’ve had a few requests for more lettering tutorials, so I’m here to deliver! I’ve also made a lettering playlist which you can check out here where I’ll keep them all together 🙂

In this week’s quick tip video tutorial, we’ll digitally letter the number 3 two ways. For the first way, we’ll be using this Wacom tablet (or any of these) and the brush tool in Illustrator. After that, we’ll digitally letter the same number 3 from scratch using just the pen tool. We’ll go over the best way to plot your points and basic point handle adjustments using the direct select tool in Illustrator. Let’s get started!

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I’m a little bit obsessed with typography! Every year around my birthday (next Saturday!) or around the holidays, when my family asks what they could gift me, I always ask for some kind of book relating to lettering or type. I love these books because, although there is sooooo much online, there are always gems buried deep within those book jackets or paperback covers. And while it’s common to come across a lot of recycled material online, it’s nice to be inspired by something different. So if you’re looking for some lettering books to inspire your next project, here are some of my favorite lettering books – and I own all of them…except for #5, that’s getting delivered tomorrow 🙂 

Hatched drop shadow text effects are becoming more common in typefaces these days – Trend was one of the first to offer a layered font with a faux hatched drop shadow which motivated others to offer them. But what if you want a hatched drop shadow on the font you’re using, not trend? What if it’s for a one-off headline where lots of text doesn’t need it, it just needs to look beautiful in one powerful instance? That’s when we start making art instead of adjusting type, which is why this week’s tutorial isn’t on a text layer style; we’ll be customizing our hatched drop shadow to fit an artistic style.

GDPR Icon

Your Privacy Matters

We use cookies to customize and create content that’s most important to you. We’ll never share the info we collect.

View Privacy Policy