EXERCISE 4 | DRAWING THE SKELETON

At this point, you now have several drafts of your lettering piece in front of you. Now it is up to you to choose which direction or directions you want to explore.

In my case, I chose the third version of track 2b, which I believe presents the greatest uniformity. The other tracks are also interesting, but they each have a lot of white spaces, and I felt that they wouldn’t leave enough room for a sufficiently wide and detailed capital L.

I decided to keep the vintage style for the word “Ateliers,” and to pair it with “Lettering” written entirely in script lettering, going in the direction of funky, in order to create a good contrast for the whole piece.

Before working on the contrast and the details, it is important to create a good sketch to use as the foundation. To do this, use the skeleton technique introduced in workshop 2, on page 38. Take a new sheet of paper and draw a careful skeleton, making sure that it is large enough for your project. It is always better to make large sketches so that it will be possible to apply contrast to the entire piece. There is no need for tracing paper or a light table here: this is the first draft of the final project, to be drawn on a white piece of paper.

Feel free to draw a horizontal and vertical grid to help you position the letters correctly and keep the same rhythm for each of the important words.

1. My sketch, revisited as a skeleton. I have added two straight lines, above and below the word “Ateliers,” to ground the word and fill the space.