(2nd in a series)

People are anxious to get pen in hand and produce something. But pause a moment…what do you want to produce? What have you seen?

When I was a young girl, I fell in love…with Old English lettering! My father had one room in our home dedicated to books. And I had found a small slim brown and gold bound book, “The Essentials of Lettering”. I don’t remember why I opened the book. But what I found within its pages were alphabets: different styles, different shapes. And one alphabet caught my eye – Old English.

I loved that alphabet. I did not have any fancy pens. I did not care about that. I had some examples of beautiful letters. So I did something which I found out later was a very good thing to do – I copied the letters. With a common pencil I copied them. I made outlines of the letters I loved and I shaded them in. This was all a lesson in observation. I had to look, reproduce what I saw, evaluate my reproduction, redraw and adjust, until my letters looked like the letters in the book – beautiful. I was becoming very familiar with those letters: with their proportions, with their spacing, with their curves and their rigid lines. And as I copied them, they were becoming mine!

Have you seen letters worth copying? Find some letters you love. Look in magazines, ads, type catalogs, artwork. Then get familiar with those beautiful letters. Copy them. You don’t need special equipment. Observe. You are teaching your eye to see and your finger to reproduce something lovely. Give it a try!