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Old 10-11-2008, 11:42 AM
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Miss Ruth Miss Ruth is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Londonium, England
Posts: 44
Default Script Lettering, or a testament to the WWWW (wonderful world wide web)

The Music: Rob Bell, the Go team, the Man in Black (San Quentin)
The Drink: the elixir of Life, aka Coffee
The Weather: Stunningly beautiful sunny Autumn day. Proof the sun does occasionally shine in 'Ingerland'

I have a confession to make. I sat down to write this tutorial more than 3 hours ago and up til now have not typed a single word.

I've been surfing t'internet* and found some really cool sites on Penmanship, Script lettering and related subjects. So awesome, in fact, that I feel totally unworthy to even try explaining script when there are resources out there, so readily accessible, which lay things out so much more clearly and in-depth than I, in my limited knowledge and experience, could ever hope to do.

So, call me lazy, but may I direct you to the online awesomeness of
http://www.iampeth.com/lessons/ where you may discover anything your heart could desire to know about script including:
  1. lessons on drawing script - pdf downloads
  2. templates to download for drawing practice
  3. essays and discourse on lettering
  4. ornamental script
  5. flourishes
  6. online books (maybe should be added to the book page on this forum)
  7. Instructional videos (some online for free)

I would like to give full credit to the site and just draw attention to the fact that there is copyright on the site (though everything on there seems to be freely downloadable), so I am not going to use any images from there in my submission.

Before I start, here's the updated design. I scaled down the size of the block letters to make more room. I've added the slanted Roman (London EC1) too.


Here follows an outline of the Script that I'm using in my design. I must admit that I find this the most difficult lettering style to master.

Basic marking out
I use a basic template marking out 60 degree angles as a guide to get the correct slant. I find when drawing that I naturally tend to draw a slant of about 62 degrees. Everyone will have their own natural tendency, but anything between 50 - 60 degrees is good.

The 'Line of Beauty' follows this slant. It forms the backbone of the letter, and is the main basic stem for drawing script from which everything follows.


The 'weight' or widest point of the shaded line of beauty should be balanced so that it is heaviest below the centre line. Everything should flow in a graceful manner.

Ratios and proportions
The main body of the letter (not counting the loops and flourishes) should have an approximate height:width ratio of 2.5:1.
When drawing script I usually have an enlarged copy of the following from Meeks book in front of me for reference. I find it really helpful in breaking the letter down into its basic elements and getting the proportions right.


Upper Case in relation to Lowercase is about 1:1/3



Spacing
The lower case letters should be spaced quite close together.
This is also where drawing on with a single line (as I did with the Roman letters) comes in handy - it reduces the risk of spacing the letters too far apart.

There have been a few comments in the forum about using the computer to lay out lettering.

The second best reason for drawing by hand is that you can do optical spacing as opposed to Mechanical spacing.

Mechanical spacing places the letters equal distances apart, without allowance for the difference in individual widths of letters. Computer programmes fix this problem by using kerning*. If you have Adobe Illustrator you can make all sorts of adjustments to the kerning, tracking etc.

That's all great and fantastic, but the first best reason for drawing lettering is because drawing is FUN.

Personally, I find typing on a computer to be not as fun as drawing with a pencil. Besides, because of spending my apprentice days drawing endlessly, for me at least, the time-saving factor is not as high as it might be otherwise.

Here be the result of my script lettering. I used a .5mm pencil, but as you can see, some of the letters are a bit thick. Unfortunately my .3mm pencil is broken so .5 had to do. It's probably better to use a harder lead, but I like using B.
An H lead would probably smudge less and look clearer.




Glossary

Tinternet (also written t'internet) is a slang term for the Internet, popularised in the UK by the comedian Peter Kay. The word itself is a Phonetic rendering of how the phrase 'The Internet' is sometimes pronounced in the Lancashire dialect and accent. It is common for such dialects to drop the definite article and replace it with a 't' at the front of a noun.

Kerning: a term applied specifically to the adjustment of spacing of two particular characters to correct visually uneven spacing.

Links

http://www.zanerian.com/

http://www.iampeth.com/lessons.php
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