eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Wotzkow begins with advice on the tools necessary to hand-lettering. He then proceeds to a detailed discussion and analysis of roman majuscule and minuscule characters, the lettering upon which most styles are based. Both pen and brush lettering are covered. Subsequent chapters explore italic, gothic, script, and block styles of lettering as well as negative lettering, perspective lettering, and lettering on curves. Each chapter is illustrated with scores of examples of fine lettering executed by Wotzkow and his students. Rather than presenting a series of hard-and-fast rules, the author helps readers analyze existing forms, discover new techniques, and develop their own critical faculties.
"Valuable for the student, the teacher, the lecturer, [and] the designer," declared School Arts of this thorough, practical guide to hand-lettering.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486829647 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Materials
Doing all the styles of lettering mentioned in this book calls for a multitude of implements and tools; but, being a believer in an uncluttered worktable and in the advisibility of using as few tools as necessary, and of demanding that those few, through skillful manipulation, serve more than one purpose, I shall recommend only the ones I use all the time.
Most lettering is best done on a sloping surface at more or less a right angle to the line of vision. A small tilt table drawing table is of course very useful, but by no means essential, so do not buy one until you have enough steady work to make the investment pay. But two or three light drawing boards are indispensable. My favorites measure about 15" x 12" and 20" x 16". Occasionally I need much larger ones, but they are a nuisance unless really needed. Well-seasoned cedar boards 5/8" to 7/8" thick are excellent, as I have found that they are light and do not have the tendency to shrink within the mortised ends as ordinary deal or pine boards often do. This shrinkage is most troublesome when you get accustomed to applying your T square on all four edges, as you will when speed counts. Cedar is also pleasantly soft for pressing in and removing thumbtacks, whose heads should be as thin as possible. The use of adhesive cellulose tape (Scotch tape) as a substitute for thumbtacks is recommendable in general, but a trial should be made first in the case of some special papers whose surface textures might be ruined when pulling off the tape — forming unsightly blemishes on work which is to be presented in the original, such as addresses, illuminated manuscripts, greeting cards, etc. Where thumbtacks seem called for they should not pierce the paper but should be pressed into the board outside the paper's edges so that only the heads hold the paper — firmly of course.
It is a matter of taste whether you prefer a T square with a double "head" or crosspiece — that is, two crosspieces, one fixed permanently at right angles to the "blade" or ruler and the other adjustable to any angle — or one with a single adjustable crosspiece. I use the latter because it is handier, and, find it no particular bother to fix it at a right angle when needed. The one I have used for more than twenty years looks like this:
The cross section of its ruler is its most important feature. The fact that the transparent plastic edges are raised from the surface of the paper is an enormous advantage, as you can use any type of pen without the ink running under them as so often happens with the customary transparent-edged rulers. It is a good idea to buy a T square of this kind with the ruler about 30" long, and then to cut off an end of about 10" which you will find the most handy supplementary ruler imaginable, particularly for small work. I never use draftsman's triangles (set-squares) as I find that the near-enough right angle of the drawing boards is sufficient for every lettering job that I can think of.
For all work done with reproduction in mind, use very white paper if you can get it, but if you are compelled to choose between a white second-quality and a slightly cream first-quality paper, take the latter. Although it is exceedingly difficult — I might say almost impossible — to recommend, in writing, any particular brands of paper, I think I should warn the beginner not to be deceived by every beautifully white or exquisitely smooth kind. Even the holding of a sheet up to the light — a good paper is generally clear and translucent and the visible structure is only very slightly cloudy — is not always a sure test of quality. Bending over a corner of a sheet and only slightly pressing the crease is nearly always a reliable test, however; if the paper allows itself to be flattened out again with little or no trace of a crack it can be said to be good. If, though, the inner structure cracks, "splinters," or shows a thick and perhaps fluffy crease after flattening out, the paper is not to be recommended. Another test is to try the paper's erasing qualities, first with a pencil rubber, then with an ink eraser and finally with a very sharp erasing knife or scalpel. The rubber test should be practically unnoticeable, the ink eraser should do no more damage than a slight roughening of the surface; and the knife-scraped portion should, after a little cleaning with the rubber and smoothing over with some kind of burnisher of ivory or bone (even a glass stirring rod will do), still take a fine ink line without spreading as on blotting paper. From which it will be seen that quality is not merely skin deep.
Some cheap papers, on the other hand, have delightful surface finishes but are suitable only if you work straight on them with little or, better still, no preliminary sketching and, later, definitely no erasing. Sometimes it is even dangerous to erase the faintest pencil marks on such papers. I hope, however, that this book will make you so sure of yourself that you will soon be able to use them for at least a part of your work.
Bristol boards, unless you are a paper expert, are very difficult to judge either by look or feel, and I have found dozens of qualities between excellent and poor, all with more or less promising surfaces. The trouble with many of these boards is that they are artificially surfaced with a coating entirely unsuitable to receive any aqueous ink. If such ink is applied, the coating immediately dissolves or at least perceptibly softens. With steel pens, with which we shall have to do a great deal of our work, this annoying quality is not so noticeable at the beginning of a job, but after a few strokes you will find your pen dragging along quite a load of mud-like substance which makes fine or clean-cut lines impossible. For brushwork, most of the Bristol boards are good and they can also be recommended for writing with plumes (see Figure 4), as both these techniques call for less preliminary preparation and more direct execution.
All in all, the problem of buying the right paper is one that can be solved only by experience. Really good papers are expensive but for quality work only the best are good enough.
Use pencils that do not smudge easily and whose marks can be erased with ease. The draftsman's grade is recommended. I manage with an F pencil most of the time, and use a B to blacken the backs of tracings and a 7H for pressing such tracings onto the job; that's all.
You will need erasers, of course, for pencil and ink, as well as a kneaded eraser for cleaning. And no letterer should be without a very sharp knife for careful erasing jobs, together with a small oilstone for keeping it razor-sharp.
Now for the tools to write with;
Lots of comfortable penholders and a selection of steel pen nibs to go with them. For a start, some fine-pointed drawing pens, both hard and rigid, and soft and flexible — you will learn that different papers need different pens, and that you may have a heavy or a light hand and find it hard to work with one or the other pen.
And then a whole range of square-cut lettering pens. Just ordinary ones which look somewhat like our illustrations, and which come with a little clip (preferably only on the underside) to hold a reasonable load of ink. At this point, let me advise you always to fill your lettering pens (which from now on I shall call plumes to distinguish them from sharp-pointed pens) with an old pen or small discarded brush (which you can leave in the bottle while writing), and never to dip them.
The lettering pens you buy will probably be square-cut or slightly canted, and of course in various widths. If the cant is not more than in our illustration it makes no great difference to the beginner which type he uses.
A small assortment of high quality sable brushes, with good points, will complete your indispensable writing equipment. You will also need black India ink, some best quality black tempera paint and some white tempera.
When it comes to compasses, buy two if you can, one for pencil and the other for ink. Those made for draftsmen are the best. If you have but one compass, the constant changing of the working points will prove a nuisance.
As you gain experience you will find there are other lettering tools available in most well-equipped artists' supply stores. Whether you need them will be for you to decide.
CHAPTER 2
Good Lettering
An alphabet is always more or less a lifeless thing — a collection of signs and symbols not much more interesting than a box of building blocks. It is in the hands of the letterer (who, of course, should also be able to remodel these blocks to suit his purposes) that this material begins to live and gain expression.
It is something rather wondrous to contemplate not only the ingenuity in this set of man-made symbols but also the magnitude of their immeasurable power. A child finally arrives at the point when it can scribble the symbols and know that they mean (at least) a furry animal with four legs, a long tail, etc., although these symbols have not the slightest optical or other resemblance to the animal itself. But it will take that same child several more years to realize and understand the meaning of its rearrangement of those same three signs into which may represent quite a number of things, most of them being abstractions or notions. One is almost tempted to enlarge at great length on this idea, but I have said enough to initiate a train of thought.
The letters we form represent sounds which we would otherwise generally have to utter to express ourselves to other persons. But even these sounds bear no resemblance to the things or notions they are supposed to represent. A most extraordinary transformation has to take place before the very words, which I am at this moment writing with a fountain pen, finally express to the reader what I was thinking even before I wrote them.
There is sheer magic in this metamorphosis. I think of something and begin to formulate that idea more or less in terms of words. These words, originally known to me as sounds, must now be translated by me into symbols on paper, which I proceed to do in a more or less tedious, old-fashioned manner by writing them longhand. Nowadays, I could dictate them into a recording machine or type them on a typewriter, but in either case sooner or later some helpful spirit in the shape of a typesetting machinist — a "compositor" or, in the case of this particular book, a "linotype operator" — would have to get down to the business of finally utilizing in the form of metal type our lettering symbols used to print this book. My living thoughts have now become nothing but dead signs, a mass of little black strokes and dots, which would not mean a thing, say, to an Eskimo.
But they do to you. That is, if you take the trouble to retransform the little black strokes and dots into thoughts which would be peculiarly similar to the ones I had. And it is remarkable to ponder that you would have to do so by imagining the sounds which these symbols represent. And even still more remarkable to realize that a good interpreter would be able to translate the words into almost any civilized tongue even directly by word of mouth only.
The medium of this magic is not the spoken word, which dies immediately after its birth, but the symbol which perpetuates it; and to conclude my digression I would like to say that it pleases me to imagine that scribes and letterers throughout the ages have always felt some kind of subconscious pride in the making of such symbols because of the symbols' inherent powers to help express and perpetuate thoughts.
How else can one explain the early scribe's practice of embellishing his lettering? Or at least of giving it the most beautiful form within the limits of his traditional writing tools? The question of legibility — I should rather say quick readability — seldom seems to have been the early scribe's first and most important consideration. The few people who were able to read had apparently enough leisure to do so slowly, and furthermore enjoy the pretty decorations in passing.
Pure functionalism is a modern doctrine, but while it has left its mark on the shape of a few of our daily utensils and gadgets, it has left our lettering — even the most modern of our type faces — practically untouched. To say that some of our modern type faces are functional merely because they have been shorn of every trace of ornamentation, is hardly true. From a purely decorative standpoint they are often excellently proportioned and, at times, even beautiful, but it is a remarkable fact that the tendency to simplify the letter forms has also resulted in making quite a number of letters look surprisingly alike. Certainly no help to readability.
Now where, between the two extremes — excessively decorated lettering on the one hand and purely functional on the other — are we to find good lettering?
The golden mean is not the answer, as we shall discover later. Good lettering deserves a place among the esthetic arts; but is it possible to arrive at a near standard of beauty likely to appeal to a majority? For it is hardly conceivable that a lettering artist would ever be commissioned with a job solely for the benefit of one single reader.
In an effort to find an answer to this question, I decided to do what is generally done nowadays to find out what the majority wants or likes: namely, conduct a test.
As far as a statistical result was concerned the test turned out to be a waste of time. The twenty samples of lettering shown herewith (pages 10 and 11) were submitted to several persons who were asked which style appealed to them most. Every research expert will smile at my naïveté and I cannot blame him.
The result I expected from this test never materialized but two other very significant facts did emerge. I was unable to find out which style was overwhelmingly preferred, because practically each style was liked by somebody, for some reason or the other.
It was just this "reason or the other" that became significant. The interviewees, in the majority of cases, seemed desirous of applying the style they preferred to some project which was at that time consciously or subconsciously occupying their minds. For instance, the bride-to-be was picturing her wedding announcements; the young doctor his new shingle; the commercial artist his latest poster; the manufacturer his new product-container; and the ceramic artist a plate or bowl decorated with lettering.
The second significant fact was that the sex of the interviewee had nothing whatsoever to do with his or her preference. There seems to be nothing particularly feminine or masculine about any style of lettering, and I personally was gratified with this finding because it confirmed my side of an argument which I have been trying to expound for many a year. Women no more prefer thin graceful Script than men heavy Block letters. On the contrary, I contend that women lean towards severe functionalism a lot more than men do. That they should prefer formal Script on a wedding announcement is merely their way of demonstrating that the occasion itself calls for marked formality. On the whole, however, I found that women seemed to prefer the styles that were readable at a glance regardless of any so-called beauty in design, while men seemed to look for this characteristic of beauty first.
In summarizing these findings, a very logical, simple and obvious truth emerged. Good lettering, to have the widest general appeal, should be both beautiful and readable at the same time.
But we are often confronted with the fact that some lettering serves as nothing but a message carrier, and in cases like this any pretense to beauty would be almost ridiculous. Readability — preferably quick readability — would have to be our first concern and beauty would have to give way to pure functionalism. In other words, the forms of the letters would no longer be required to express beauty; they would now have to be adapted to express other characteristics or at least be as neutral as possible by expressing nothing. On pages 31 to 33, Figures 19 through 23, are shown five distinct styles of lettering. They all carry the same message, but some effort was made to keep the forms of the individual letters as stylized as possible. One of the reasons for doing this was to demonstrate that the styles used in this particular case have no inherent powers to express anything bearing on the message itself.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Art of Hand-Lettering"
by .
Copyright © 1952 Watson-Guptill Publications, Inc..
Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1: Materials, 1,
2: Good Lettering, 6,
3: Criticism and Self-Criticism, 14,
4: The Five Basic Styles, 28,
5: The Roman Alphabet, 36,
6: Analysis of Roman Majuscules, 55,
7: Variations from Typical Roman Majuscules, 84,
8: The "Roman" Minuscules, 85,
9: Layout and Spacing of Roman Minuscules, 113,
10: Variations of Roman Minuscules, 119,
11: "Romanized" Arabic Numerals, 125,
12: Evolution of Italic Lettering, 128,
13: Italic Majuscules, 136,
14: Italic Minuscules, 162,
15: Gothic, 178,
16: Script, 212,
17: Block, 256,
18: Handy Hints, 286,
19: A Tribute to Type, 307,
Index, 317,