Lettering with an 83 year old Mabie Todd Swan

I have not been able to post any new lettering samples lately due to long hours of commercial projects. I still finish the day with some quick handwriting samples while trying a variety of vintage fountain pens. This lettering piece was created with a Mabie Todd Swan pen manufactured in 1927. It has a flexible nib and writes with a featherweight touch. Its an amazing 83 year old pen. Very enjoyable to create lettering with vintage writing instruments.

More fun with the Condor nib

This is another example of the brush quality I can get with the Condor nib. This pen is wonderful lettering instrument. The line thickness changes depending on the angle the nib touches the paper surface. Rather amazing that a fountain pen can produce wet brush strokes.

Playing with this pen is a nice way to end the day after a long stretch of deadline work.

A Lettering Practice Session

This photo is a typical evening handwriting session with fountain pens. I'm currently using 8 fountain pens and each nib has different flex from full to stiff including various line weights. Some have been modified to allow increase in flex. I plan to try a vintage pen from the 1930's later this week with a needlepoint nib and full flex. I continue practicing with fountain pens as they offer much more precision than design markers I used in the past.

A handwriting session usually happens late night after finishing daily project deadlines. Script writing with no restricions is an excellent method to learn different styles form loose to formal. Some styles from the past month have already been used on commercial lettering projects. Of all the practice sheets from lat night I about a dozen beautiful loose rhythmic scripts that will make for good portfolio samples and generate new projects in the future.

More Fountain Pen Writing

In my spare time I have been handwriting with several fountian pens. They all have different nibs, thickness and flex. The pen I enjoy the most is a Namiki Falcon 2 with a fine point. I can use slight presure for thickness and lift up for a very thin return stoke. This is turning out to be a fantastic experience as I am now able to control shape of the letterform compared to writing with a design marker which did not prvide precise control of thicks and thins.

A Sketchbook Page with SuzieQ

I write with fountain pens every day and this is what a typical page of my gestural writing looks like. Anything goes. I tape words from other pages, add tissue overlays that I write on and continue to look for flow of the letters or an interesting way to loop and connect. With all the random words and letters I find nifty little visuals to create.

For this piece, I cut Rolling Stone off the page, taped it over SuzieQ and wrote "is a" on another tissue overlay. The small tissue was scanned and I did a quick redraw in Illustrator trying to maintain the loose quality of the original fountain pen writing.

The Best is yet to Come

This lettering piece started as a series of rhythm studies with pencil, pen and marker on a tissue pad. I eventually got a sketch to use as a starting point after several pages of studies. My intent was to combine a formal script and mix it up with Spencerian style characters. I plan to continue creating letters of this style and in time the best is yet to come.

Gotta be Bad to be Good

Gotta Be Bad to be Good is a freeform script style I have been developing for the past few years. This style is a loose mix of upper and lowercase letterforms. When the piece was only 3 words it needed more interest and was changed into a play on words. After getting the rhythm and flow worked out for Gotta be Bad to be Good I decided to change the visual read to something a bit more complex with flourishes and swirls. The final result is quite different than the initial sketch and definitely more interesting to view.

You Call the Shots

Another quick wrist script exercise with a Lamy calligraphy pen on graph paper. I made the strokes thicker with a Sharpie marker and scanned the lettering for use as a template.

Little Dude

Here are some preliminary sketches for the Little Dude lettering design. This project is another example of how I change letterforms and structure while drawing in Adobe Illustrator. The tight sketch was a good start but was out of balance and the cross stroke of the double t did not read properly. All in all I am pleased with the final result and plan to continue developing this lettering style.

The Amazing SB

This is a project from last year that I'm going to enter in the Best Of 2009 at LetterCult. SB is a dog I've been taking care of for a few years and I wanted to create a lettering piece that honors his amazing personality.

The sketch was a quick wrist exercise with little detail. The scroll lines and flourishes were drawn freehand in Illustrator and adjusted as each letter was drawn. After drawing Amazing and SB I decided to make the design symmetrical and place The on top. This piece will probably be reproduced as a T-shirt sometime in 2010.

Creative Magic for the New Year

While playing with a calligraphy pen today I decided to post my New Year greeting to one and all.