Friday Archive Dive: Hand lettering

Today's archive dive is from Aug. 28, 2012, when I talked about my opening steps into hand-lettering.

If you remember this post, you know that my approach to lettering has slowly evolved over the twelve years of my creating a daily strip. I originally did the completely backwards approach of inking the balloon first and fitting the test into the space (Photoshopping when my guess was completely off). Then I started inking full panels, leaving space for word balloons, but adding both the lettering and the balloons digitally after the art was inked.

And, to be honest, I was quite content with that process until I flew to Los Angeles to prep for Comic Con this year. I was staying the night with Dave Kellett and he was trying to get a handful of strips done before leaving for the convention. I was eager to try drawing at his new stand-up drawing board (pictured above), so I offered to do a guest strip.

To make the process as efficient as possible, I decided to hand-letter the strip. Dave's drawing board as a built-in lightbox, and he has created his own handy lettering template (pictured below) to make his process accurate and quick.

As you can see, he has printed a guide to his lettering (his lettering fits neatly inside the black bars, but he mentioned some people who have tried it out like to letter in the white spaces and allow the black bars to guide their lettering). He also has panels measured so he can quickly sketch out a four-, three- or two-panel strip. The horizontal center is marked with a dotted line, to aid composition). The entire thing is printed on a sheet of transparent film and then laminated.

Read the entire post and comment there.