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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #4 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See the previous 3 weeks here. This past week was spent vectorizing the lowercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator in the same manner the uppercase was vectorized last week. Since the uppercase portion has a pretty smooth/clean aesthetic compared to the original live trace, I worked to maintain that same cleanliness with similar weight contrasts throughout the lowercase. One of the biggest lessons this week was that creating consistency throughout the lowercase is definitely more challenging than with the uppercase. There are far more details in the lowercase letterforms that you don’t really realize until you get into it. For example: the weight contrasts and curvature of the ‘c’ should be the same as in the lowercase ‘o’ should be the same in the lowercase ‘e’, etc. This created quite a few differences in the original drawn letters to the cleaned versions, but when placed together to form simple words, the font really started to come to life! The personality I had intended is coming through and it has me really excited about getting this into Glyphs Mini. As with last week, I took a bunch of timelapse videos of my Illustrator work where you can see me pulling portions of other letterforms to define new ones. Read on to see it all!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #3 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See Week 1 here and Week 2 here. This past week was spent vectorizing the uppercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator, which was created last week. I followed the same methods of vectorizing + cleaning paths as seen in this tutorial and this one. I found my pen tool and occasionally using my Wacom tablet to be the most helpful when it came to cleaning up lines (here are my Wacom recommendations if interested), but anyone handy with a mouse could do a very similar job. I tweaked my initial live trace slightly (exact settings I used are below) to create rougher outlines to start with, which gave me more room to decide how ‘hand drawn’ each letter could feel. Read on for more of my process and some time lapse videos!

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Holiday, Illustration, Illustrator, Tutorials

Spence doodled out this adorable Frankenstein the other day and I just had to bring it to life in Illustrator! Since flat illustrations/icons are still very popular these days, I decided to draw it out in a flat illustration style with a half face shade and a long shadow. This would work great on a party invite, perched atop toothpicks on Halloween themed cupcakes, printed out life sized on a front door, or tied around candy goodie bags. This same style could be adapted for a ghost, witch, pumpkin and/or skeleton to create a full set. Video tutorial below along with the template sketch used in the tutorial!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

Welcome to week #2 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! This past week was spent drawing letters out…a lot. My font is inspired by the free font, Amatic, whose hand drawn quality and character I really like, but wish it had a lowercase and a bit of a stronger presence structure-wise.

I started out with a .25mm Micron using the 2nd font guide sheet which had a taller x-height. I really liked how things were looking, but decided to go with my medium waterbrush filled with speedball super black since it naturally gave my letters some nice varied line weights which will give the font more character overall. I played around with applying different levels of pressure on my downstrokes with the waterbrush and liked a lighter pressure best since it makes the letters more readable (and small counters wouldn’t risk being accidentally filled in with extra ink from the pressure). Process shots from the last week below!

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Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Holiday, Illustration, Tutorials, Typography

Last week, I gave away some free October desktop wallpapers and I wanted to share how I created the typography before I digitized it 🙂 I’m calling it skeleton typography, since it was inspired by Day of the Dead sugar skull designs and we’re creating some decorative ‘guts’ for our type. In this fine art tutorial, we create our skeleton typography using 4 writing utensils and a sheet of 110# white cardstock. Get creative with your own Halloween typography this year using the same techniques for any words you choose! Read on to see how 🙂

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

This is a big post for me. Like, bucket-list big. No kidding, Spence has heard me talk about creating my own font every week (if not every day!) for over a year.

If you’ve ever been here before, you know my love for type is pretty intense and I know I have some fonts in me waiting to get out. Maybe that’s you, too. On the chance that it is, I’ve decided to create a weekly post for the next 6 weeks for us to hold each other accountable and really do it – really create our own handmade fonts! I’ve never made a font before, so we are definitely in this together 🙂

Every week on Friday, I’ll share the progress I’ve made, resources I’ve used and tips/tricks I’ve learned. I’ll keep posting process shots over on Instagram with the tag #etfontproject and I’ll share the steps I plan to make for the next week’s font project post. At the end of this, we’ll have our own handmade fonts we can share with each other or sell online.

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Illustrator, Tutorials

After the tutorial How to Repeat Any Shape Along a Circular Path, I had a few questions on how to repeat shapes along any path, not necessarily a circle. In this week’s tutorial, I share a quick tip that will make repeating shapes along any path a cinch in Illustrator. In this video, we’ll utilize the shape tool and blend tool to create repeats perfect for borders, dividers or accents for your designs. We’ll go over repeating a single shape style and expand into a shape transition with a color blend for more complex results using the same technique. Read on to see how!

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Photoshop, Textures, Tutorials, Typography

Welcome to Part 2 of how to create 3D typography from scratch! In this final video, we take everything we created in Part 1 using Illustrator and bring it into Photoshop. Using Photoshop, we’ll add custom shadows and texturize those shadows to add extra visual interest and dimension. At the end of this video, you’ll have your own custom, print ready 3D typography you can use for social media profiles, posters, prints and monogrammed stationery. Let’s get started!

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Illustrator, Tutorials, Typography

Happy Tuesday! First of all, I have to tell you that I’ve been completely overwhelmed by all of the kind comments from last Friday’s post. My heart is bursting with gratitude. Thank you so very much for making this past weekend one I’ll never forget!

My co-workers gifted Spencer and I this amazing typography book as a going away gift last week and I have a serious problem with putting it down! There’s something that completely pulls you in when you lay eyes on the shadow type in the book – each layer so carefully planned, highlights and shadows in perfect contrast with one another along each angle and curve. Handmade type back in the day was so killer. I’m jealous of those craftsmen and craftswomen type masterminds. Of course, I couldn’t help myself with creating my own, digital form, inspired by pages from the book. In this week’s tutorial, we’ll create our own multi-layered 3D typography from scratch in Illustrator. In part 2 next week, we’ll bring that typography into Photoshop to add texture and enhance highlights + shadows to complete our type. Let’s gets started!

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Hand Lettering, Tutorials, Typography

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some tips for using a waterbrush to create watercolor lettering. It was so well received, I wanted to do a follow up using that same waterbrush, but with ink this time. Yep, I filled that blue waterchamber with super black speedball ink instead of water, squeezed + lettered to my heart’s content 🙂 Before filling the waterbrush with ink, I had been using a Tombow for my brush script lettering, but after burning through a few pretty quickly, I was in search for an alternative to save a little dough. That led me to the waterbrush and I haven’t looked back! In this week’s video, I share some basic tips for getting started with your own brush script lettering. Lettering in black vs. watercolor will quickly allow you to scan your artwork in, vectorize it and use it in a bunch of applications quickly, like masking or font making (more on that next month!). Let’s get started!

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Hand Drawn, Illustration, Illustrator, Patterns, Tutorials

Seamless patterns in Illustrator have been on my tutorial list for a while, so I’m very excited for this week! There’s something about the anticipation right before you test your pattern that I love. The total surprise when you see this pretty little square you made repeated a dozen times – suddenly the little square looks the same, but entirely new. And then go ahead and imagine it on your favorite throw pillow, mug, notebook, mousepad, comforter, wallpaper..it’s a great moment for a designer, even if they’re just daydreams 😉 My goal is to bring you one step closer to those daydreams this week with a method you can use to create seamless, repeatable patterns no matter which version of Illustrator you have. We’ll take a square with elements from the 100+ Vector Leaves and Flourishes pack and go step by step to achieve a fully usable pattern at the end – color palette included. Let’s go!

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Color, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustration, Tutorials, Typography

If you’ve been following my Instagram, you know how obsessed I’ve been lately with lettering using a waterbrush! It combines two strong passions of mine – watercolor and typography and I can’t get enough! Since I’ve been experimenting like a crazy woman, I wanted to share some tips I’ve learned over the past few weeks. I’m no expert by any means, but I’ve gotten into a rhythm and I’ve been really happy with how I’ve improved by remembering a few simple things. If this is something you’d like to try, my hope is that this video will save you time, money and supplies. Speaking of supplies, everything mentioned in the video that I’m currently using is listed below the vid 😉 For more on brush lettering with watercolor, check out my master course!

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