A short course in LETTERING

A lover of hand lettering (me) reveals his lettering secrets

Can you tell from this art I did for the New York Times how much I LOVE hand-lettering? I had the good fortune to be an art director for many years before I was an artist, so letters have always been some of my best friends.

To letter better in your art is to know the letters so well that they become your friends. So let’s meet them and learn about them …

But first…

WHY add words and letters to your ART?

Words (and the letters that make up those words) add something magical to your art. It’s an image and a story that allows you to access not just the artist within you but the writer who wants to say something, and oh yeah, make it look good too.

Instead of going into the craft of perfect lettering, we’re going to learn how to think like a letterer and to befriend letters and get to know them so they’ll love you back when you need them in your art. And as a bonus there will be a few basic tips and tutorials on the craft of lettering.

Three essential secrets for hand lettering

1. Collect complete alphabets of your favorite fonts. With a complete alphabet, rather than guessing what a letter looks like, you’ll have reference for every single letter to copy their shapes. As you get more experience with a font you’ll be able to skip the reference. (I’ll list resources at the bottom of this post where you can find complete alphabets.)

2. Be FREE! Once you have reference for your font, be free in the way you draw the letters. You can see in all the art on this post that the whole point of hand lettering is to add a sense of humanity and fun to your art. In other words, it’s better to infuse your lettering with your personality—improvise and break the rules—than it is to be perfect.

3. Match your lettering style to your message and taste: Just like we love our favorite genres of music, we tend to love some types of letters more than others. Lean forward with your lettering taste, but at the same time, get to know the whole big extended family of letters so you can select the right type of lettering for whatever mood you’re trying to create in your art.

Meet the LETTER FAMILY

Every member of the letter family has a personality that communicates a mood in your art. Let’s go meet them and befriend them so we can know how and when to use them.

Meet the SANS-SERIF letters:

These audaciously simple letters shout out, “LISTEN UP!”

If you have a simple direct message, the no-frills, no nonsense sans-serif fonts are the letter style for you. These letters are stripped to the essentials—every shape is either a straight line or a curve—which is why they’re used in political art, comic books, traffic signs, monopoly boards and in airport terminals.

You can draw sans-serif letters in one go with a chisel marker or just outline the edges of the letters and fill them in. I tend to just wing it because I like my letters imperfect, but if you want to be more precise check this tutorial out. The main thing with all letters is to find complete alphabets and then study the shapes and copy them.

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Meet the SERIF letters:

These classic letters with their cute little feet, capped ends and graceful curves have a comforting, cozy, curled-up-on-the-couch, old-timey feel to them—as if they are saying, “Welcome, I have a story for you.” They’re great to use if you want to give your art a literary or old fashioned feel.

Interestingly, serif letters are what we imagine when we think of a classic font, because most of the books we read use serif fonts.

Serif letters with their varying line width and end caps can be kind of tricky to draw. I tend to draw them with a brush tip in one go, or do the straight lines first and the serifs after, but if you want to make them look just right, check this tutorial out. Again, study the alphabets and copy them. .

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Meet the CASUAL HAND-DRAWN letters

If you want to create an intimate relationship with your readers write in your natural handwriting. Whether you write in block letters or script, your natural handwriting is so freaking friendly because your readers will feel like you’re writing a letter directly to them. Of course, depending on your handwriting style, you can clean it up or stylize it to make it look better and don’t forget to go crazy and do whatever in the world you want—after all it’s your own private font.

No advice or reference needed here! Just write like you write! And don’t be afraid to get wild—use curlicues and fast slashes and rough crayons and you can even draw with your wrong hand.

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Those are the main letterforms. Of course there are many more variations and themes like script and poster type (which we will get into next week) but before we go, there is one more important secret of hand-lettering … and that is to…

MIX-IT-UP!

The examples above mostly feature a single letter style. But one of the superpowers of lettering is that you can take all styles and mix them together to create a visual delight. It’s a way to say to your viewer…

Here you can take a quick glance at some samples of how I’ve used lettering in my art. Enjoy!

Did I hear you say you wanted to know what ART TOOLS to use for lettering?

You can use anything. Absolutely anything.

Next week: Part Two, NOVELTY

It’s good to know the basics about letters, but do you know what? People love novelty too. Which is why next week we are going to look at all the crazy ways you can dress up your letters in italics and in thick and thin and condensed and extended and with drop shadows and outlines and inside color bars and by curving them and running them sideways or vertically and upside down and squaring them off or making them bubble and anthropomorphizing them and of course adding in some crazy circus fonts, so that the eyes of your readers are typographically dazzled.

Thanks for Reading,

No need to go any further, but if you’re interested, in the next section there are resources for finding complete alphabets for you to base your lettering on.

Seeya next week,

Josh

Personal PS: A shout out to a fellow Substacker who I think of as the Bob Dylan of combining art and words. It’s not so much about her lettering but the way she tells stories by madly mixing her images and hand-lettered words in a form I’ve never quite seen before and BTW it really needs a name. In fact, the whole reason I created three images of the letterforms—serif, sans-serif and handwriting—is because, when I was thinking about how to write this post, I asked myself “WWKD?” K is for Kelcey Ervick. If you don’t know her already go check out her amazing work, and I kinda hope one day I can figure out how to tell my stories with nothing but images and hand lettering—none of these generic keyboarded-digital letters—the way Kelcey would do. But about that name for a new artform … Kell-See-Visons?

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Resources for COMPLETE ALPHABETS

Once you start studying alphabets you’ll see all the glorious variations of type forms in the same family. It’s kind of like taking a nature walk in the Great Forest of Typography and I’m sure, once you are there, you’ll find some fonts you’ll love and will use for the rest of your life.

Once you find an alphabet you like, just start writing words based on those letters. Be loose and free and just get the feel right.

ONLINE SEARCH:

Here are the best terms to use for an image search on Google that will bring up a bunch of full alphabets. When I find an alphabet I like I often print it out and put it up on the wall in front of me to copy.

Sans-serif Alphabet

Serif Alphabet

Woodtype Alphabet

Script Alphabet

More serif fonts are here

TYPE BOOKS

I own a bunch of type books so I can see what every letter looks like when I’m copying a font. But many type books only show partial alphabets. It’s so frustrating, “I need to write a Q, what does the f*cking Q look like?”

Here are a few suggestions for books that show complete alphabets. You can obviously search on your own, too, but make sure you can look inside the book to see if it has complete alphabets.

The Type Specimen Book has everything, but it’s bit hard to go through because it’s organized alphabetically instead of by type family. It’s out of print so buy a used paperback copy.

Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering is another comprehensive book but also out of print and you have to buy a used copy

Treasury of Authentic Art Nouveau is a great book for beautifully weird and eccentric art nouveau alphabets. I love this book and use it a lot.

Script and Cursive Alphabets is a great find if you like to write in script, and Bold Script Alphabets if you like those heavier script fonts that you see in old logos and vintage baseball graphics.

Next week we’re going to go a little deeper into those crazy circus and western letters you see on old-time posters. Here’s a good reference book for that, 100 Wood Type Alphabets.

For your hand lettering, sometimes it’s fun to have some inspiration of cool hand lettering done by others. This is an amazing book of folk art lettering, Letters on America. (Buy the paperback version)

TYPOGRAPHY SITES

Here’s a super cool trick. You can go on a typography site like My Fonts and then do this:

• Pick a font you like

• Type in the words you want to letter

• Screenshot the result and print it out

• Copy it!

MYSTERY FONTS

One last cool trick. If you find a font you like, say on a sign or an old poster, and you’d like to know what it is, here’s what you can do. First of all you have to be able crop the reference photo or a screenshot into a single line of type. Then go to a thing called What the Font. Once you are there you can upload that image and it will suggest similar fonts to you. From there you can write in the text you want to letter. Or now that you have the name of the font, you can do a search for the full alphabet. I do this all the time when I find a mystery font.

Happy lettering,

Josh

#lettering #handlettering