Introduction
Have you ever been inspired to create some hand lettering and then realized it's not as easy as it looks? If so, this is the course for you. I'm going to take you through some actionable steps and break it down in a way that'll give you some structure. By the end, you'll have picked up some solid hand-lettering skills that you can use in future projects.
I'm going to be lettering a quote in this tutorial:
“Deadlines and things make you creative.”
Jack White
Feel free to use a different quote, but try to keep it short. You don't want to have a quote with too many words because then you're going to spend all your time trying to fit it all in, and you're not going to be able to focus on coming up with a compelling illustration and adding cool lettering styles and details.
Once you've selected a quote, the next step is to start doing some quick, loose thumbnail sketches. Don't spend time trying to make it look good—instead, focus on the overall composition and structure. Keep it loose and do lots. Your first idea is usually not your best one. I'll show you my sketching process and give you some tips on that later on.
You won't need any specific assets or resources for this course, but we will be adding some texture to our lettering later on, and these texture brushes will be very helpful for that:
Opening up Adobe Fresco
Let's open Adobe Fresco now. This is the home screen.
Go down to the bottom-left corner and choose Create new. For the dimensions, I recommend 4000 x 5000 px, since that gives you good control over the brushes and provides enough resolution if you want to print it later.
Sketching process
Before you start sketching, just write down the phrase using a default pencil brush. It'll give you a visual sense of the length of the words, and it's a useful reference to have when you start sketching.
As you break the phrase up into lines, think about the importance of each word. Clearly, "deadlines" and "creative" are the most important words here, whereas "and things" is the least important part—it's just a throwaway phrase.
Now you can do some experimentation, creating a new layer for each new sketch and just moving things around and trying different ideas.
For example, "deadlines" includes the word "dead", so why not draw a skull? Then we could put the most important words at the top and bottom, and have the other words in the middle, on either side of the skull.
Experimenting with more ideas
Then you can play with different concepts by reducing the opacity and drawing new ideas on top. For example, we could do this:
Try curving the word deadlines to match the shape of the top of the skull.
Add the less important words in a speech bubble and a star.
Experiment with some blocky lettering for the word "creative", and try out some ideas like tucking the "i" under the "t".
I also did some other experiments and came up with three different ideas.
The first one is just dividing the composition into a framework. I don't love it, but it could work. The second one has a skull drawing and some curved text that matches its shape and makes it feel cohesive. And the third one plays off the idea of Jack White as a musician who's into old-school ways of doing things like pressing his own vinyl. I like the idea, but I think for it to work, it would need to be an animated thing where it spins like a record.
So I'm going to go with the skull one. In the next section, I'll show you how we can refine it and take it to the next level.
Refining and taking it to the next level
For the text at the top, I'm going to use the block lettering technique, where you make an overall shape and then cut the letters out of it. So I'll start by adding black shapes over the text.
And then I'll start erasing areas to define these letters. As I do it, I'm playing off that curve on the side of the D that matches the shape of the speech bubble, and I'm using that to make some interesting shapes out of the letters. Here's what I came up with:
This looks OK, but maybe I can try to be more experimental with these shapes and try something new. So I can bring down the opacity and use this as a guideline, drawing new letters on top.
I'm going to try a fancy lowercase "a", and then I'll make some other changes like adding a tail to the "D". Keep going through the word and making little refinements as you go.
Then follow the same process for the word "creative" at the bottom. Here's how my lettering looks so far:
I have my sketch in a pretty good place, but I think the bottom of the composition is missing something. So I'll try to make some 3D text by copying and pasting the lettering, lowering the opacity of the copy, shrinking it slightly, and pulling it down underneath the main text so that it looks like a shadow.
We can do a similar thing at the top, and also add some shading that will allow that skull to pop. Then I can just tighten up the line work and refine the skull drawing, and now I'm pretty happy with this.
Time to add some color
Now, let's add some colors. You can see from the previous image that I picked a basic color scheme already.
Why did I pick these colors? Well, I started with red as a little homage to all the red and white in the early stuff by Jack White's band, The White Stripes. Then one way that you can make something pop or stand out is to make it different from the rest. So I decided to use two warm colors for most of the composition, and then use a pop of a cool color, which is the blue, to emphasize the word "creative". Here's how it looks with those colors applied:
Next, let's build this up as if we were actually screen-printing it. Start by putting each color onto a separate layer.
If you want to select all of the instances of a particular color on one layer very quickly, you can do this in Fresco with the Magic Wand Tool. If you go to the little menu at the bottom, you can uncheck Contiguous. Now, if you select some yellow, for example, it's going to select everything that's yellow. Then you can cut and paste it onto its own layer. Do that for all the colors until you have a separate layer for each color.
Choosing texture brushes from Envato
Now, let's add some texture to our composition to create a vintage rock poster effect. We'll find some suitable brushes from Envato.
Scroll through the options and see which one you like. I love the Machine Washed brush set because it offers a lot of variations for distressed ink effects, which is exactly what I want.
So just download the set, unzip the file, and choose Share > Adobe Fresco. Now the brushes are loaded in Fresco, and we're ready to go.
Next, tap the red layer and go to Load as Selection. Now we've got the red selected, and we're going to make a new layer and grab one of our new brushes. Let's try the one that says Distressed brush - old surface and start brushing across the layer.
That's already looking cool. Now let's switch to blue and do the same thing, with a different brush. I want to use different textures so that it feels natural instead of being repetitive.
Continue following the same process to add a texture to each color in turn.
Shifting registration
Now let's just make a couple of small changes to make it look even more authentic.
First, let's shift the registration a bit, which just involves moving one of the layers to reveal small amounts of white at the edges of the letters.
Next, let's use one of our texture brushes to add a little overall grit on top of everything. There's one called Random specks that looks perfect.
I'm also going to add a small amount of the red texture to break down some of the white fill.
Final result!
With all of that done, here's the final result!
Thanks for coming on this journey with me, and I hope you're inspired to make something new. If you'd like to learn more about hand lettering, try these free hand lettering tutorials:
Hand Lettering: How to Vector Your Letterforms
Mastering Calligraphy: How to Write in Gothic Script
Mastering Calligraphy: How to Write in Roundhand Script
Hand Lettering: Scripts, Swirls, and Flourishes
Team Awesome: From Hand-Lettered Logotype to Vector in Adobe Illustrator
Hand Lettering: A Project From Start to Finish
Or watch these awesome videos from the Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel:
