Fun with lettering

So here’s what I’ve been doing in my spare time. Right. Spare time.

I’m practicing lettering. Because I simply don’t have enough things to do. Well, I do, but I was feeling like there was something missing in my comics work. I’ve accepted that I shouldn’t be drawing anything, and that includes breakdowns. I simply don’t have any business doing any part of that. The artists all know this stuff far better than I could hope to.

However, I have done my own lettering, which has made the writing on the comics a lot sharper, I think. There’s not much to do with hamhanded plotting, but I can try to make the dialogue work better at least. For the first two STRANGEWAYS books, I did all the lettering in Illustrator, which has worked well enough, though there’s still a disparity between the artwork and the super-clean computer lettering. I figured the best way to soften that up a bit would be to do hand lettering.

But then I used to think that the world was flat and that when my dad was a kid everything indeed was in black and white.

Anyways, some practice. I modified the “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” line to something a little more comics-like. And yes, the lettering is based on Alex Toth’s hand lettering, from a free font I tracked down. Probably wouldn’t ever use it for actual typesetting, but as a template to work from, it’s pretty decent.

If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can see the full-sized version on Flickr right here. Once I spend another month or so on letterforms to begin to grasp the basics I’ll start working on different balloon shapes/forms. If I can learn to draw an oval.