The Iconic Font Project, Pt.3 - The Brushes are Made
Pre-Project Tasks…
Additions to My Book Collection.
Over the past few days, I’ve had some things in life throw a wrench at me… mainly, my work schedule, and jury duty. My appearance date is set for the 23 of May, so I guess we’ll see how that interrupts the blog. (Hoping for the best.)
That being said, I’ve still managed to do some of the prep work for this project, getting a few of the little ducks in a row. Firstly, I never pass up an excuse to add to my impressive book collection, so of course, I ordered a few calligraphy books on Amazon, and they should be coming in the mail sometime within the week.
But I didn’t just spend the weekend sitting around and waiting for books. I’ve been using this extra time to get a few of the background tasks for this project out of the way.
A New Hobby…
Or Rather, a New Obsession.
After work yesterday, I made a few brushes in Clip Studio Paint in order to begin practicing calligraphy on the “iPad”. Oftentimes, digital brushes can take days, or even weeks to get just right, but for the purposes of this project, I just wanted a basic flat-tipped brush to get started with, and boy am I happy to say, it was a SUCCESSFUL attempt.
After creating the first brush, I began doodling, drawing basic letters and shapes for a while.
“Digital calligraphy is amazingly addictive.”
What’s my initial assessment? Digital calligraphy is AMAZINGLY ADDICTIVE. I ended up making 4 more brush variants to start using immediately on this project, and I’m only scratching the surface. Five variations doesn’t even begin to cover the possibilities available with these digital brushes.
Keeping it Simple
I have no doubt that I will be making many more in the future, but for what I’m doing currently, I’ll need nice, clean letter shapes, so with that in mind, simplicity seems like the best route, for now.
Also, after I use these brushes to create my custom letter shapes, I will be tracing them and then converting them into vector images to prep them for export to Glyphs Mini. Because of this, I don’t have to concern myself with creating anything extravagant as far as brushes are concerned — not just yet, anyway.
I Finished a Mini-Project.
I Made a Set of Digital Inking Colors
In addition to the brushes, I also gave myself a little mini-project by way of making a small palette of traditional drawing and inking colors based on earth pigments from my oil paint collection. I’m hoping this will increase the feeling of authenticity a bit. Here are some of the process photos from that.
I Started Doing Research.
Solis Scriptorivm
I recently came across a delightful Youtube channel specializing in hand lettering and medieval calligraphy, called Solis Scriptorivm.
She has many informative tutorials, and “journal with me,” videos that I will likely be sharing in future posts, especially the tutorials about a specific type of letter style, called Uncial, which by the way, is looking to be the basis for the letter style I’m seeking to create for my header fonts.
The following two videos are the tutorials I’m beginning with while I wait for those precious books to come in.
Waterford Treasures
I also came across a channel called “Waterford Treasures”. This channel is still small, with about 200 subscribers and only a handful of videos currently, but on this channel there is a two-part series that I thought was amazingly informative so I’ve included it here also.
Final Thoughts
It turns out that even quiet weeks are busy weeks, when you’re a new blogger. I’m still very much figuring this out as I go, and learning that I might not have a new blog post every single day.
I’m developing a mindset along the lines of “After this current post is finished, hop right on to the next one.” This is a different (and much less pressured) mindset than “This post must be completed today, and my next post must be completed by tomorrow.”
Life doesn’t always work that way. And sometimes, (most of the time…) the things you HAVE to do in life will not make it easy to do the things you WANT to do.
“... Sometimes...the things you HAVE to do in life will not make it easy to do the things you WANT to do.”
The truth I know about myself, (and the truth I’m attempting to share with others through this blog,) is that no matter how slow my progress seems in life, I do AT LEAST one thing to move forward and stay creative EVERY SINGLE DAY.
My creativity does NOT pay my bills, but I don’t think that’s because I don’t do enough creatively. I think it’s because, until I created this blog, my basic modus operandi was to work quietly on my art, like a mad scientist, and never talk about all the things I’m up to.
For example, would you ever believe that this website consists of over 2,000 lines of custom coding, that I figured out through trial and error, just so I could sit here and type my little heart out to you?
Well… now you know. : )
