The Art of Whimsical Lettering (3 page)

To get comfortable and confident with letter spacing, height, and design, keep piles or pads of graph paper handy. It’s a staple in the exploration of lettering and fairly inexpensive to use as practice paper. The lines will help you to fully grasp the dimensions of letterforms and explore various composition and layouts.

A helpful practice is to trace by hand and duplicate actual letterforms on tracing paper to understand the feel and movement of letters. Find inspiration for your own font creations by copying the characteristics of printed letters.

Pre-stretched canvases or canvas panels are interesting surfaces for painting in acrylic paints and textures and decorating with verses, quotes, and artwork. Canvases range in price from inexpensive to whatever your budget will bear. One of the techniques I enjoy is filling the surface with organic lines, whimsical shapes, and vibrant acrylic paint color, then writing an inspirational message with a water-resistant marker that works on a nonporous surface.

Canvas makes an excellent surface for lettering projects.

Much of my inspirational art and illustration is done on watercolor paper or in a watercolor-paper journal. The light, sheer, vibrant colors of watercolor paint make the most beautiful background surface for washes and patterns for lettering art. I reach for watercolor most of the time, so I have a variety of hot press (a smooth surface—just think of the watercolor paper as being “ironed” smooth and flat) and cold-press papers (textured surface—think of being cold with “goose bumps”). I get many interesting effects on both types of paper, and they both react differently when inked or lettered with pens and markers.

If you take my “Play, Practice, Write, Repeat” mantra to heart, you will use reams and reams of inexpensive printer or copier paper for practice. Write and write until you love your efforts and keep the good papers pasted in a lettering journal. You can create wonderful collage elements by cutting or tearing up your lettering pages and adding them to other artwork as design elements and paper embellishments.

Heavy paper is perfect for marker or paint techniques that require more saturation of inks or layers. Many brands of cardstock in white, buff, and assorted colors are easily accessible at craft and art stores, as well as office supply stores. Again, practice pieces done on these papers can be nicely incorporated into other artwork or collaged journal pages. Always keep your favorites to use at another time.

Photo by Ann Swanson

A few of my favorite surfaces for lettering—from left to right: tracing paper, graph paper, printing paper, assorted sheets of cardstock, watercolor paper.

O ne of my greatest personal resources is what I call my Letter Love Inspiration Journal. This is a very casual journal, filled with ideas, messy practice pieces, scribbles, notes, fonts, and samples showcasing all things I love about lettering. In this chapter, you can take a peek inside my journal and discover some prompts and inspiration for creating your own lettering journal.

My journal is really a place to play, with no judgments or critiques. It’s my personal collection of practice letters, scribbled ideas, and thoughts about what inspires me about how I create my own distinct style of lettering.

This is really an important part of my process for creating new designs and direction in my lettering. To me, lettering is my art, and I constantly have to grow with my art. As an artist, I am always seeking inspiration, ideas, and influence from my surroundings, whether in my own imagination, my daily life, or travels.

As you become more aware and curious about artful lettering, identify the elements of letterforms that inspire you to pursue these ideas with creative wings. Be brave and try new movements with your hand and arm as you write, stretching and exploring which direction feels most natural to you. Always be on the lookout for interesting images, lettering styles, fonts, creative layouts, and designs. Gather items from the Internet, books, magazines, junk mail, brochures, travel memorabilia, etc. Fill your journal with bits of lettering treasures, clippings, practice samples, and ideas.

Use small journals in a landscape format to experiment with word layouts and compositions.

Make your own lettering inspiration journal using a simple, inexpensive composition book.

Glue every other page together with glue stick to make the pages stronger. Use assorted pens and materials to decorate, design, and color pages with lettering, words, quotes, and ideas. Record every creative whim on the pages until it’s overstuffed with ideas and inspiration. Save your piles of paper doodles and scribbles and paste them into your book.

As you use this space, experiment and develop your own personal style using images and designs that speak to you. Don’t worry about how the pages look; just fill them up. This journal is a place for experimentation and collecting ideas that make you swoon.

Using assorted markers and pens, decorate the cover of your Letter Love journal in your own personal lettering style.

In the pages that follow, I share excerpts from my own personal journal along with prompts to guide you in filling your own Letter Love Inspiration Journal.

Grab a fresh blank notebook or journal and all your favorite journaling supplies in your personal art stash. Begin your lettering adventure by filling pages with these playful activities. You’ll end up with at least twenty-five pages instantly!

Remember, your journal is a safe, fun place to experiment with ideas for lettering. The pages of ideas and practice work in this journal are not meant to be perfect. This is how you will learn, how you know what works.

1. Play around with your own handwriting, creating words and entire alphabets with all the pens or markers on your desk.
   
   
2. Write several pages of words and alphabets in all capital letters, upper and lower case, large, small, tall, wide, skinny, and fat. Don’t judge, just write pages and pages, sampling your letter flow and creativity.
   
   
3. Doodle letters with colored markers. Add colorful patterns, swirls, stripes, lines, and dots to embellish the letters.
   
4. Look through old magazines and other printed materials to find words and phrases in assorted typefaces and sizes that you find interesting. Cut them out and paste them in your journal. Become a pasting pack rat with anything that you hand letter and make sure it ends up in your journal.
   
   
5. Using assorted markers, color in layers and add words on top of each layer.
   
6. Collect brochures or magazine clippings with interesting letter placement and unusual compositions and layouts of text to inspire new ideas and direction for your lettering projects.
   
   
7. Do an Internet search for topics relative to lettering, such as lettering, fonts, typeface, handwriting, letters, alphabets, calligraphy, etc. Use your colorful pens and markers to jot down notes and inspirations in your journal as you come across ideas that “speak” to you.
   
8. Get out every single pen you own and write what is unique to each brand and style. Fill as many pages as you need to make it through your entire pen “stash”!
   
   
9. Collect samples of interesting maps and old book pages and glue them into your journal. Use them as backgrounds for your lettering.
   
   
10. Purchase some new pens you’ve never used before. Start to define your own alphabets and lettering using the features of the new materials.
    
    
11. Handpaint words in your journal pages with acrylic or watercolor inks and paint. Let the paintbrush be your pen tool.
    
    
12. Play with scale. Write one word the full size of the page and surround it with a block of color. Add journaling or other text over the large word in a fine pen.
    
    
13. Experience the drama of writing on black papers with white, gel, and metallic pens. Cut or tear small pieces of black cardstock paper and paste them into your journal or paint your pages with black gesso.
    
    
14. Draw a composition of playful journaling boxes in various sizes. Fill each box individually with your favorite quotes or writing.
    
15. “Negative space” refers to the empty area around written letters or words (or other shapes). Color in only the negative space around letters or words to make them “pop” off the page.
    
    
16. Test your markers and pens to see if they’re waterproof by writing something with each pen on a page and then run a wet paintbrush over the lettering. It’s better to do this in your journal than on a piece of finished artwork!