How to develop artistic skill in lettering

This is part three of a timeboxed series. [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ]

I've always been artistic and interested in drawing, and probably would have been an artist if I'd never found computers and programming, but even though I never followed that particular path, I still draw almost daily.

Developing the skill is easy. As I mentioned in my post on how to rhyme, all it takes is just a hell of a lot of practice.

Here's an example from my Flickr account:

As cool as this is (to some people,) you might be surprised to know that I don't actually consider this very talented or even skillful work. Anyone can do this sort of thing if you practice it as much as I do.

Of course, you have to find time to do these things. And that can be no small task when you're a busy person. We only have so many hours in a day, after all!

I did take art lessons back in grade school and high school, but once I was out and got hooked on programming, I stopped really nurturing it. And the sort of art pictured above isn't anything like the sort of art I practiced in school. The art above is all straight lines and relatively few curves. In school I practiced people and realism, with lots of shading and far more curves and detail than the angular and rapid strokes above.

It's interesting to me how I actually came into this sort of lettering. It was a pretty incremental and natural process that... just kind of happened.

When I got heavy into programming, I began reading a lot of technical texts. "Teach yourself programming in 21 days!" and all that jazz. Perhaps because I was musical and into rhyming and therefore songwriting and poetry, I was used to writing a lot. Lyrics, etc. When I began teaching myself to program and reading all of these books, I began to transcribe a lot of the text and example programs I read. Much like the monks back in super old-timey times (yes, that is a technical term) would transcribe bibles I suppose. Sometimes verbatim, sometimes brainstorming alterations I might soon attempt.

I'll put pictures up at some point possibly, but I literally wrote all day long. Tomes and tomes of college-rule paper. It's like I was trying to forcibly imprint the contents of these books into my brain. All of the insightful passages and clever bits of code slowly made the trek from paper, into my eyes, my brain, and then back out of my pen again.

As a side effect of this, I developed very legible handwriting. Teachers would often comment on it in notes when grading handwritten papers I would submit for school assignments. Friends would comment on it when coming over to hang out. I didn't realize until much later that this was excellent training for developing the steady and decisive strokes needed for drawing.

You'll notice the picture above has a lot of hatchwork. It's very similar to a lot of lowercase Ls, very close together. The letters are just enlarged letters in my own writing style, with a very limited sort of "this vs. thick" characteristic. The only real artistic license in any of it is the flair at the base or extremities of the letters. And those are mostly just easy quick flicks of the wrist that are then capped off with straight lines. And I'll add fling fan out a few of them here and there. Then, I trace it. And nothing is easier than tracing!

I still write on paper a lot to this day, and I still mindlessly do art as pictured above almost daily, often in 10min or less. During lulls in meetings or after meals, while brainstorming, whenever. But the cool thing is, I found a way to take a mundane skill like writing, and turn it into something fun and at least a little pleasing to the eye.