Art Journal 025: Letters

I’ve been thinking about doing a writeup about letters for a while.  There are a lot of areas to explore about them and I like to keep these journals organized, following some sort of internal rhythm to help all the words make sense, and I haven’t been sure how to capture that rhythm until recently, so this week I’d like to take a look at the fun and wonderful world of words!

When we’re young we learn to read and write, we’re introduced to letters as sounds captured in line.  We pick up speaking from the world around us and we figure out what different sounds or strings of sounds mean, and later we’re taught an array of symbols to convey these sounds visually, where another person can read them and understand the sounds you’re making without you needing to speak a word.  This is the fundamental purpose of letters and for most people that’s plenty good enough, but for an artist we can add so much more to our letters, building subtext and implied emotion into the very structure of our words in ways bold and italic typefaces can’t begin to match.  The trick of it is to not think of letters as lines we make, but rather as shapes, and then control the dimensional qualities of those shapes to give your letters an emphasis or subtext you desire.  We’re not -writing- letters, we’re -drawing- them!  For sake of conciseness I’m going to condense the permutable qualities of letter shapes into three major categories: hardness, texture and direction.  There are many, many things you can do with your letters but all of them would have their roots in one of these three areas.  I suppose “color” would be a fourth element but color is such a big issue it’d warrant a write-up all its own.

How we want to use our letters has a big impact on the kind of hardness we want to give it, since that hardness most directly conveys the audio qualities our words might represent.  What we mean by “hardness” is the rigidity of the shapes we build our letters from.  Straight lines and square corners imply a sharpness of tone and a consistency of sound- a gunshot is a crisp punctual sound that stings the ears so I’ll often draw their reports in very stiff, sharp letters.  Straight lines also represent order, cleanliness and officiality, mechanical, manmade, threatening, structured and loud.  In contrast the hardness of a letter can also be soft, using more curves and less concrete structure to give a letter an organic feel.  A fluidy sloshing sound wouldn’t make sense in a rigid typeface, it’s splooty and gooshy so a rounder softer quality to our lines would help convey the subtext we want.  Curved lines are chaotic and organic, they’re free-flowing and alive, wet, squishy, quiet, gentle and playful.  Matching the appropriate hardness to the right setting can really bring out the most from your letters.

If we think of our letters as shapes, and hardness represents the straight and curved lines that build our shapes, then the texture of our letters would describe the quality of the elements that build our shapes.  Whether its an outline or an interior paintjob the texture, the nature of the parts that go into our letters can help flesh out the unique flavor of our words.  Using curved, soft letters we can give our lines a sort of rounded tension like an inflated balloon, which has a very predictable, swollen arc to it and a thinness at its peaks, or we could make our organic lines chaotic and irregular brushstrokes, thick and wet like spattered blood.  A sharp, hard-lined word could be broken up horizontally to imply a crumbling quality like a blast or a cave-in, or a jaggedness to emphasize the piercing sound of a shout.  Internally a letter can be any number of things, depending on what you want to do with it!  Solid shapes are often simple and bold and stand out well, but a metallic texture can be built through contrasts, or a soft glow without any hard contrasting edges.  These don’t always have to be sound effects, but sometimes I like to give my letters a cracked, stony interior texture with a smoothness on their outside- there’s one or two like that in the comic.  Basically when we’re building the shapes of our letters, think of the textures of physical materials or the qualities of particular sounds, draw out what visual elements make those ideas stand out and find a way to incorporate them into the textures of your letters.  At least, that’s how I think of it.

The last of our three broad categories of letter qualities is the direction of our letters. The western-language speaking reader is conditioned from birth to read from left to right, top to bottom.  This is what’s natural to the majority of people who will probably be reading your words, so you can use that presumption to make choices in the way your letters are positioned, or are implied to be positioned.  Will you arrange them in a straight line, set them on a playful arc or place them on an angle, either elevating or descending with pitch?  Will they be far apart from each other and spaced out or very close together, bunched up, squished against or overlapping each other?  If you want to add a third dimension, how will you incorporate that into your letters and where would the letters be coming from?  Would the third dimension recede into a single distant vanishing point? With a few simple lines and very little effort you can imply a boxy, solid depth to a word.  By knowing how people are going to scan and read our letters we can arrange them in ways to convey added meaning seeded into the act of reading our letters.

The direction quality also has an internal meaning, not just referring to the overall arrangement of your letters but the way you create each letter internally.  When you’re building your shapes it’s important to have an internally-consistent set of directions for your brushstrokes so the end product has some degree of unity to them.  For example, when you’re building vertical structures like the backbone of a T, E or R, you want them to generally be going in the same direction as one another, even if the texture lends itself to organic crookedness. And your horizontals, do the bars of your E’s and e’s keep the same direction from letter to letter, and do they match the bars of your Ls and Ts?  Or if you’re writing with serifs, do the serif angles slant the same way in different letters and do the crossbars of your A, E and F line up at the same vertical height?  Are you treating each letter as its own separate case or are you creating specific angles your internal structures follow to give them a sense of harmony and togetherness?  Do letter details skew to the top or the bottom?  Is the thick stroke of the letter on the left or the right?  Directional consistency is a very fine, conceptual detail but it can go a long, long way to making your broader design choices in hardness and texture make a lot more sense.

Now that we’ve covered the major ways in which we can control our letter shapes and build fun subtext into our letters, I’d like to segue into the very specific application of lettering in comics, specifically in speech bubbles and dialogue.  This one’s a bit of an oral history of my own work so that’s the easiest way for me to tell it, so I’ll take it from the top and go from there.

When I started making comics, I opted to use a pre-made, free-to-use font for a number of reasons, mainly because my writing style involved a lot of moving and editing dialogue before I was satisfied with the way a page was laid out.  A font is a common and easy choice, but not just any font will do!  A good dialogue font has to reflect the particular qualities of the spoken word for it to look natural.  Speech is organic and lively, so you want a font that is nice and round, ideally something that looks hand-made and not like machine copy.  You generally don’t want anything that comes stock with your computer and you absolutely do not want any font with serifs, that looks horrific every time.  I picked a font from Blambot- a great place to find free and pay-for fonts- and I used one called Mighty Zeo. I liked the kerning, the readability and the organic look of the font so I started using it early, and I’ve been using it for years.

I’ve always experimented with the aesthetics of my comic.  Recently, (well, sort of), when I tried out a shift away from outlines into an all-painted look I decided to finally make the leap into hand-lettering and make my entire comic hand-created, using as few machine-generated assets as possible.  This raised a number of problems for me, however!  Firstly was that I had used this one font for so many years, I wanted my hand-lettering to match the size, kerning and presence of the font I’d used before it so even though I’m not using the font anymore there’s a global consistency between it and my older pages. On top of this, I still write my dialogue as a big changing mess, constantly moving and tweaking things and making the minor adjustments that made a font so valuable, but I wanted to get rid of the font, so what do I do!  The solution I came up with was to do both!  My current lettering process involves my old lettering font, and I arrange my dialogue as normal, but when I finish everything else about the comic my last step is to flatten out my text layers, drop the opacity to 30% and hand-letter overtop of the font layers, using them as a sort of customized Ames guide to keep the kerning and scale that I like.  I don’t just trace over the font letters either, I draw my letters in my own way. I like to give my l’s and i’s a top-side little hashmark and give my t’s a little hook at the bottom.  My Y’s have a much different bottom mark to them than the font I used and U handle the little swoofy semi-serif marks totally differently. I basically type out my dialogue in font, lower the opacity and then draw my letters overtop of them on a separate layer, get rid of the font and poof!  Perfectly consistent hand-lettered dialogue!  

Letters are fun to play with in all their shapes and roles.  I’ve got pages in my sketchbooks where I just pick random words and draw them lettered in different styles, trying different approaches and different techniques to grow a repertoire of lettering tricks.  The most important thing to remember about lettering, however, is it is -*NOT*- just your handwriting!  Whether it’s a comic title, a word balloon or graffiti on a wall, treat your letters like little hand-drawn structures, build them thoughtfully and they will radiate in ways your old handwriting never could.