Typography: Hand Lettering, Who Knew?!

I will admit I did not “get” hand lettering for a while. Why wouldn’t you just use a font and type the words in your art?  Then mess with it a bit in Illustrator to make it more fun. Seems like a lot of work to write the letters when you have this thing called a keyboard that makes it super easy.

I then kept seeing really cute posters and T-shirts with unique lettering and I wanted to learn how to incorporate that into my artwork. I spent time trying to find the font on the interwebs and I realized that is a huge pain in the rear.  So I set out to learn more about typography & hand lettering. 

To Skillshare I went and low and behold lettering is a thing and I like it. 

Lettering, it turns out is the art of illustrating letters versus using typography or fonts. I think I was confusing hand lettering with Caligraphy which is more about handwriting. I did not realize there was a distinction between the two until I dug into the topic. Calligraphy seems too precise for me, beautiful but too structured. 

*I will reserve my right to change my mind about this statement 2 days from now when I learn something else. 

The idea of illustrating a letter versus handwriting a letter for some reason clicked with me. (I have always thought I had horrible handwriting so that might be part of it.) This felt more like drawing or making art than handwriting so I was more open to it.

So now I am fangirl-ing all of these hand letterers like Shoutbam, Gia Graham, the Pigeon Letters, and Every-Tuesday and reading all their stuff.

With Inktober coming up I decided to get some practice in. For the next month, I will be drawing a letter a day to practice my hand lettering game. I’m killing two birds with one stone because Procreate just released their new update and I bought a bunch of brushes from Design Cuts so now I am going to play around with all these new toys and features.

What have you been hesitant to try or do but gave it a go anyway? Let me know in the comments.

Cheers!