Lessons

Lesson Info

Alternate Uppercase Letterforms

There is so much you can do with uppercase letters it's it's amazing um, you know it's just like and you don't have to follow any rules at this point, but I do recommend like, you know, if you see a calligrapher that you really like their style and, um, you know, just and just going to be a few, you know, I think I suggest just looking at how they very their letter forms and then also, you know, even like scripts that, you know, like, become script, um, on the computer, you know, it's just like there are so many different alternate forms that you can use and things like that are really great thing to check out when you're doing this, just to give you ideas of what you can do with a letter um, for me, I actually really recommend taking the letter apart, so let's, just talk about the a, um, so just to start off your age and have obviously europe stroke and you're down stroke and across the line across, um so basically, I'm gonna look at this into three three like as three parts three pie...

ces that you can modify, um, you're going have this your upstroke, you can have your down stroke and you can have that, and this puts this obviously oh, and this equals that, but just to give you an idea of, like, just breaking it apart, like, what can you do with this? Well, for this part, for example, just one of the many, many things you khun started as a down stroke with light, um, you know, a light pressure down, and then you can make it a little bit of the loop or a lot of a loop and that's, one of the many things you can do with that side for the down stroke this you can bring it down under that line, you do it to so many letters. Um, I'm not totally sure if I'd want to connect these two. This is just an example of what you can do with the segments, you know might look a little weird if I actually pared those two up, but, you know, you could certainly pair this with let's just say it's, more simple peace, and then instead of making a separate line across, you can really just bring that around and have that be this line. So basically, you're taking this, and you're doing that tow, ignoring this line, of course. So basically, that's, just one of the many, many ways you can do in a, um you can just do you could do it all in one stroke teo I mean you don't have to like actually break up your letters and reassemble them I just want encourage you to actually look at the letter as shapes and not to say you know just they that's an a is like this is this line in this line in this line and then it just gives you a little bit more freedom to be creative with those particular lines so again um you could do it all in one piece you could d'oh that come back up come back down and then just do your line across so you could do it all obviously in one shape two or one um stroke um for the b can have a lot of fun with that again just I'm not going to go through every letter by the way that would take so long but I just want to give you an idea of like how I you know basically go about this process s o the b you know it's just going to be you obviously have that stroke and then you have you know you're fun loopy part that's going to make up the rest of that letter and this will just tuck right into their um so you know there's just a lot of opportunity here to change up this letter form and to add on to it and to flourish it so you have this part that you can have fun with obviously this part you know you can have this go do something like that you can have this part actually start instead of starting here you can have it start under it and go around and obviously you're not gonna be able to tell what that looks like so I will actually do it. Um see here and for that minus ball just another have a fun loop here so you can actually keeping in mind on oval shape and you know, a circular ovular shape basically that's um, something I always keep in mind as you're doing this versus like, you know, you don't want to come in and approach this letter like this to come around here so that would look awkward so you're gonna want to keep it nice and I'll try to make it steady uh, just a nice large circular shape has will finish it off with that so again, not your typical b but it's just one of those ways that you can just sort of take it apart put it back together um in a different sort of form um that's, another fun one let's see here see it's kind of straightforward so there's you can obviously have fun with it, but I'm going to skip that one I think the d's the days are actually really great to sort of play around with, um I'm just gonna actually write a word with this one, so I'm gonna stop here for right now and I'm gonna write the word dear, dear, thank you, quick dog e o dear um, so dear so what I'm do here is basically used this d to sort of accentuate the whole entire word um, so instead of his just being on its own, like, standalone d that's scripted or it's cheesy florist, we're going to actually have it, like, kind of flee into the rest of the word, and so we're going to finish it where I left off here or to go around and maybe do a little bit of that, so that is actually something you could do with the lower care excuse me, the upper casey as well to take it under your letter, and that makes it just a lot more, um, ornamental, basically, but you're not actually you don't have to do, you know, flourishing on the rest of it, they could just leave it as simple is that but again, there's just a million things you could do with all these things, but that's sort of one of my most, and I just really like to do that with the d a lot of times, it's just kind of a fun way to do it just like all right let's make it go play with the rest of the letters so um e kind of same things to see you know, it's just, um really like when you're coming into the when you're finishing it off you khun dio basically you know, you can take excuse me this part and sort of do the same thing with it just kind of keep going with it let's see what's the what's the letter that you guys would like he s okay oh let's see what you like to do with that s so that s you know, there are obviously a couple ways you do you can do a simpler, you know, just copper plate s which it is hard to actually go and have fun with so we're going to dio different es eso we're going to do that alternate form and we're gonna basically obviously the biggest opportunity to sort of play with is this right here, right? So it's just right salad cause I'm starving and that line didn't actually write off write so that scares me is supposed to actually be like that um you know and you could do something really simple and just do this um you can do something like, you know, just start off here and then you can sort of dio backwards and have that sort of be like the playful part under the rest of the word so that's a little bit you're not gonna actually want to make it look like that but um this is a this is a bit I encourage you to have more fun is like the line with some just actually going to redo that since to scratch that um this is actually kind of a tough one s so he may have stumped me no um let's try that again here actually no it was just do a different one let's d'oh you actually can't have a little bit more fun with us than I thought so there is a kind of a fun lupi more relaxed one um I mean it really seems like you're just kind of taking either the beginning like the beginning end or the the finish and you're really just personalizing it a lot of ways yeah yeah so like I said you kind of segmenting it out and just seeing what you can do to change the shape without you know running the integrity of the letter of course but just sort of like what you can do with those different parts of the letter um one of the ones that's kind of like things like a lower case f for example that's kind of something it's like they we have that cross party you can actually have a lot of fun with on the f so it's not necessary like the beginning or the ending of the letter it's sort of that little peace in the middle again I want just the many ways that you can do this and we're going to stop that right there um before I finish it so you can do that and then you can have this basically finish off your f there. Um so yeah again you know it's basically I'm finishing it off in that certain way but it's instead of now three parts enough there's only two I just merged them. Um yeah that's basically varying your uppercase letter forms again you know, there is just so, so many ways I mean, you could I could sit here and like, two pages of just a cz but I won't but you know, I just want I just want to encourage you guys just to think about it in that sort of a ways just like, you know, just what can I do to this part of this letter just to make it a little bit more interesting and and also related to the next letter so like with dear before I smudged it you know, it was just like, ok, it's actually kind of underlining the rest of it so it's just, you know, it's the whole relationship thing there is there a kind of a best case our best tigers of this time to use thes like, do you find you use them in just the first word? Or they're you know, when you're using these, where do you find that the flourishes work the best? So it's a good question, and it depends on the project, so if you're writing an envelope, you're not going to want to do this on the first line, for example, is this, like, post offices not gonna want to deliver your letter? So, um, but you're certainly, you know, able to do that like above, you know, you can do the flourishes above and the u s centers, which I'll get to in a bit, and you can do this on the bottom just fine as long. It's not intersecting your your, um, the zip code, and I'm going to talk about all that in the next class to so as faras bringing that into envelope addressing or your projects all of mentioned that we discussed that in depth. Um so again, it just depends on the project you're doing if you're doing something where it's, just like you wanted to be, like super floor, she and you having like, a cool sign injured just, um, you know, have at it get crazy. If you're running the words like love, you can floors the top of the l and the bottom of the l a and the e and then maybe even the v if you really wanted toso it's just, you know, it's just it's ah, it depends on the level of, um, dick or that you want basically so and it doesn't mean that you should do it all the time in every instance because obviously, if you're like, have something like, you know, it's like the double l's, you know, if you don't want to get crazy and force both of them because it's not gonna make sense it's going to look like a mess so it's just something where is she? Have tio figure out your balance? It also depends on the kind of flourishes you d'oh. So if you're like me, I actually don't do anything too crazy. So if it's just my personal style, but if you do that, you know, if you really wantto, like, flourish the heck out of a word, just make sure you can still read it until you know just guessed that our tables together not like, but how to describe something, but you know, it's just it's ah, it's a balance and you will see it is just like you can go on the top and say, I should probably do that because I could no longer read what I wrote. So it's, just you don't want to pay attention to that, like, don't get so crazy that you completely lose sight of the word. Basically, um, any. Do you see that a lot. And like typography these days, I feel like a lot of people are really going nuts with the flourishing and there's, just like, what does that say? So that's? Just something to keep in mind again just depends on the project.