I have been really interested in calligraphy and lettering lately, and have been playing around with them a lot. I am trying to learn calligraphy and I'm not very good at it, but practicing it has helped me to begin to approach lettering like you do drawing--focusing on the shapes, the line quality, and the negative space. From this I began looking at fonts present on Microsoft Word and tried to sketch them like you would a still-life.
These are some of the initial experiments:
This is a line from a poem by Anis Mojgani called "These Things are the Way You Make Me Feel" If you are interested, you can watch him perform this poem here. I think it's really beautiful and the video in the link is a wonderful performance of it.
This is a quote from the film "Beginners," which is one of my favorite movies, and the font I chose was inspired by the scene from the movie in which this phrase is spray-painted onto a blank billboard. The plant pictures are cut out from an old Anthropologie catalogue.
From this, I went on to experiment further on little stationary cards. I found some scraps of vellum paper in my collage materials, on which I drew the lettering and then placed it over the collaged backgrounds. I really like how these turned out, as the vellum mutes the colors of the backgrounds and highlights the emphasis of the words.
I made the Alaska card for my friend Setasha, which has personal significance to us and our friendship and some goals we have as people.
The other two cards are based much more on aesthetic than on personal symbolism and have phrases that I thought had a nice sound and complimented the backgrounds I collaged with scraps from old NYLON magazines.
I have been sorting through all of my collage materials, including old magazines, paper scraps, stickers, and many odds and ends and I have been finding a lot of inspiration in doing this. I am working on many little projects in my down-time and I hope to finish some of them up and share them on the blog. Keep checking back for updates…
