We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.

Posted on July 20, 2015 by jackstandbridge

“We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.” You’ll find this quote in various places attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but it’s more likely that it’s just a slightly modified version of a Leonard Cohen lyric from the song Anthem.

With the composition of this piece, I wanted to take a little trip into the past and go for something almost completely reliant on the letters themselves, with practically no flourishing. It’s a poplar style for things like posters and T-shirts, and the last time I visited it was really quite some time ago. Since then, having learnt many things regarding letter forms, I wanted to see what the results would yield.

With my recent foray into coloured work, I decided that this piece would be an ideal place to explore further. The fact of the simplicity of the letter forms means that the colours have plenty of space to breathe, and become somewhat the “point” of the piece.

It’s almost impossible to look at your own work without a critical eye, so I already know a few things that I will improve upon next time. One of which being that I will change my process slightly. I’m currently using calligraphy tools, namely pointed pens in this case, to get the paint onto the paper, but when using larger quantities that requite multiple strokes, the harsh point of the metal nib catches the fibres in the paper, sometimes leading them to create a rough surface on the piece once it has dried. The advantage of the calligraphy nibs is the supreme accuracy they offer coupled with their versatility in line width. However, the solution to this problems, I suspect, is simply to get a variety of brushes, including some that are very small indeed, which can mimic the tiny strokes possible of a nib. There’s also some benefit in looking into papers that are better suited to the medium. I currently use Bristol paper, which works wonderfully for ink, but when it comes to the far greater liquid quantity of paints, it could be better to invest in some hot pressed watercolour paper, which is designed to take the paint well and has a very smooth surface like the Bristol paper.

Feeling Good (and how to make an ambigram)

Posted on July 6, 2015 by jackstandbridge

It’s been a while since I’ve done an ambigram, but I was feeling good about this one, so I thought I’d give it a go!

Aside from the ambigram in the middle, this piece was a good excuse for me to continue with studying Copperplate styles, which is something I returned to last week. Copperplate is almost geometrically precise. The shape of the oval informs just about every letter of the script, and dictates the spacing of the letters too. An interesting thing you can do is to cover the upper part of any Copperplate word and see a funny little row of loops left, which form the lower halves of the letters. In the word “Feeling”, the loops on the underside of the E’s, L and I all form a row, and a little later, the second half of the N and the G, too. A curious side effect of this geometrical construction is that when it’s upside down, it almost looks like a word. It’s strange to try to figure out what the upside down “Feeling” should say. It almost starts with a B (though a true Copperplate B looks different to this), and is followed convincingly by a passable U. It’s from there that you have to do some typographical gymnastics to convince yourself of a possible N made from the I and L, or perhaps a P from the L and E. Either way, the good news is that this piece reads the same both ways up! I encourage you to do a handstand to see for yourself.

Once, long ago, I had a section about ambigrams on this website, which explained in very brief words a little about ambigrams. Since then I’ve done some thinking about the process, and I’d like to expound upon it a bit more:

Imagine trying to make ambigrams is like walking into a room with a million puzzles. All you know is that some of the puzzles can’t be solved and some can, but you have no idea what proportion is solvable or how hard they will be to solve. So you can just pick up some puzzles and try to solve them. Some of them seem like you can get somewhere, but then get completely stuck, and so remain only partially solved, and others look like they won’t work, but you find a surprising solution.

Chances are that you, as the person put into this room, are not the best puzzle solver in the world, and that someone with more experience solving puzzles could solve the ones you couldn’t and solve them well, too. The problem is that barely anyone has ever tried any of these puzzles, and if they have, you can only ever find out if they succeeded, because they never tell you about the puzzles that they didn’t solve. Because of that, you can never know if a puzzle you failed at could be solved well. Some puzzles are a little more popular than most, and so you can look up solutions that people may have come up with, but in general, that spoils the game, and it’s much better to look up solutions only after you have solved it, or decided to abandon it and never return.

That is what ambigramming is.

If you’re curious about the actual process that leads to a finished ambigram, though, here it is:

Write the word the right way up on a piece of paper.
Turn the paper upside-down and write it again underneath the other word. You don’t have to match them letter for letter, though it can help. Some letters are long or short, however, so matching an M with an I doesn’t really work. If you were doing the word “Mill”, you would probably want the M to cover the I, L & L, so don’t get stuck with doing a 1 to 1 configuration.
Start trying to find ways in which you can change parts of the letters to look like the others without sacrificing their defining features. This is the hard part, and often seems impossible. Different letters tend to work better or worse with different styles. One letter combination may work very well in a Blackletter style, but not at all in a Copperplate style, or typographical style. Similarly, they can work in uppercase, but not lowercase, and vice versa. Sadly, sometimes, a whole word can work, but needs to have a mix of styles to do so, and so looks ugly and needs to be abandoned.
Once you are lucky enough to find a solution to each letter pair/group, sketch it out several more times and refine it for legibility. At this stage, still, you may need to discard your ambigram, because it doesn’t ever look clean or legible.

There is one big trick that you can use, which took me a while to figure out, and it relies on a peculiar way that the human brain works. Test it out yourself: Take a line of text. Any line from my comment, or any text you have lying around will work. Take a piece of paper and cover up the bottom half of all the letters. The sentence should still be readable, depending on the exact letters used. Now try the other way, and cover the top half, leaving the bottom half exposed. It should be a bit harder to read. A well designed typeface should leave you still capable of reading what is there even with the top covered. If you were to try it with some Copperplate, however, as we just discovered, all you might see with some words is a row of loops. The bottom half of the letters doesn’t give you much of a clue as to what the word is, but the top helps.

With that knowledge, you can trick the viewer by making the top of the letters conform more to the target word than the bottoms.

Just Wing It

Posted on June 22, 2015 by jackstandbridge

Sometimes you need to stop preparing and jump in at the deep end. This weekend I went for a swim in a lake, and it turned out that the summer hadn’t warmed it up enough to really be hot enough, but the plunge is by far the worst part of it. After you get going with something, it often ends up not being so bad. Some times, you need to just wing it.

So here’s a little piece that puts into practice the things I’ve been studying about formal Romans, with a little dash of Copperplate thrown in for good measure. All of that is becoming familiar ground for me, however, so where is the proof of the jumping in at the deep end? Well, I decided to finally start a little more serious experimentation with coloured work that isn’t in the digital realm. I bought some gouache and turned this piece into something colourful:

I’m pretty sure that that just about wraps it up for learning blue, so if I just learn the other 6 colours, I should have it all sorted out. In all seriousness, though, this was novel for me in both execution and design. Working with subtly different tones was interesting, but the experience was added to with regards to the tools used. When making something that’s simply black and white I use Rapidograph technical pens, but this piece is one of the first lettering pieces (as opposed to calligraphy pieces) that I’ve created using my traditional calligraphy tools, in the form of a broad tipped dip nib.

Calligraphy is a great example of an art that is all about the hours of practice vs the minutes, or even seconds of execution that it takes to make a piece. A skilled calligrapher has dedicated thousands of hours to learning the correct letter forms so that they can produce them swiftly at a moment’s notice. This is paying off in my own work, as sketching out Romans like these is becoming something that only takes a few minutes, and is backed up by the time dedicated to acquiring the knowledge that supports the letter forms. The process of this piece, then, is relatively simple, as the first step is shown above. With a couple of guidelines pencilled in with a ruler, the letters are quick to outline. From there, the next stage is designing the Copperplate and flourishes to surround the Romans, and filling the outlines. Lastly, I laid another sheet over the pencil version so that I could trace the letters in paint, and not to have to worry about erasing the guidelines after the paint was applied, all of which means that I end up with two versions of the piece, one graphite and one gouache, as pictured above.

One Hundred Days

Posted on June 15, 2015 by jackstandbridge

Do something for one hundred days!

Recently, I’ve been making an effort to focus on consistency in putting my work out there. If you come to this blog frequently, you may notice that I post one piece a week without fail, and have been doing so for over a year now. I decided to take this attitude a bit further, and post one piece a day, every day, on my Instagram account. So far it is going well, as you may have read in my last week’s blog post. Just under a week ago marked the one hundredth day of posting a picture a day, and I’m nearly through posting the backlog of pieces that I built up in making this blog. Complex pieces are the kinds of things that take days to execute, and often spend weeks in the concept and design stages, so it’s not possible to post one brand new large piece every day, so there may have to be a little more emphasis on glamour shots and progress pics from here on out, but I’m planning to keep up the consistency.

My initial goal was to keep at it for 100 days, partly as a challenge to myself, but also because habit forming is a powerful tool for everyone to use, perhaps most especially for creative types. People may often ask how they can keep up with the creation of a large amount of creative work, often feeling burnt out or failing on the motivation side of things. It is often said that motivation is a welcome visitor, a friend who stops by, but discipline should be your faithful companion who never leaves your side. The reason for that is because if you have discipline, you don’t need willpower to keep going. That is to say that if you have formed good habits, it’s easy to stick to them, and what better way to form a habit than to do something for a hundred days? (Interestingly, willpower is considered as a finite resource in the brain; using it up is something called Ego Depletion.)

For me, self promotion is not something that comes naturally, so my decision was to make it something to focus on. Posting my work on Instagram seemed scary, and I felt like I would rather stick to my nice, familiar blog format, but now that I’ve done it for 3 months, I have no intentions of stopping.

A little on the piece: it’s a mix of calligraphy and lettering all in one. The calligraphy was done in walnut ink, which gives the rich colour and variation in tone. Then I used my lettering tools to outline the calligraphic forms and add some ornamentation. Stylistically, Italic and Romans complement each other very well, so much so that in practically all typefaces, you will find italics used in conjunction WITH THEIR ROMAN COUNTERPARTS. Each is considered an essential element of typography and letter forms. The only difference here being that these are the root forms, the source from which the typography was inspired, though most might not know it, and even hearing the word “italic” would first think of the typographical meaning of slanting letters rather than realising that it was first the name of a script.

So, a little challenge for you: consider a habit that would benefit you, or that you would like to be able to have. Once you have decided, do it for one hundred days. You may find that it’s easier than you think, but one last thing: don’t tell anyone until you’ve finished!

Thank You

Posted on June 8, 2015 by jackstandbridge

There’s a lot to be thankful for, and sometimes it’s easy to forget and get too caught up in worrying about things. Whether you’re thankful for something big or something little, sometimes it’s nice to put it out there and say the words. This week, I’ve been thankful for all the support I’ve received lately on Instagram. I’ve discovered so many amazing artists creating lettering work in so many styles that I never knew existed. It’s easy to think that you already know your own discipline well, and that there aren’t any more forks in the road or changes to come. You know what your favourites are and they’re not going to change. (This feeling is also known as the end of history illusion.) Well, I certainly thought that I had discovered what I thought was my “style”, found the kind of work that suited me, that I wanted to continue to refine and improve upon. Since seeing so many fantastic works by other artists, however, I see that there is still so much to learn, so much to explore and to discover. I’m also thankful for all the people who appreciate my pieces and who have decided to follow my account. I made this piece to thank my followers, who recently got up to 1000 in number. It may seem like few to some social butterflies out there, but for an introverted type like me, it’s really something to be thankful for.

This piece is a combination of several things I’ve been working on lately. First of all, for those who keep up with the more technical side of my work, you will recall that lately lots of my study has been dedicated to Romans. This piece is a little departure from the formal calligraphic forms, but every letter is shaped by the knowledge I have gained through study, much more so than my older Romans, which were done before my forays into the past. Little things to note, for example: the spacing between the stems of the T and H – they are almost equidistant; the curves and counter of the O – I definitely favour a fully circular O and a ~30° angle on the counter since studying the formal forms; subtle entasis and understated serifs – inspired by stone carvings of Romans rather than the larger serifs of brush Romans.

The flourishes on this piece aren’t really anything to do with Romans, but they’re inspired by some of the wonderful works I’ve seen lately by other talented artists. If you compare them to the flourishes in other works of mine such as Prepare Today for Success Tomorrow, you can see how they are a departure from the style that I had come to think of as the one I wanted to make my own and develop further, and with this new style comes a new set of principles to learn to make the balance correct and the forms flowing.

Hopefully you have something you’re thankful for, and you can say thank you to someone. Even if it’s something that wouldn’t otherwise have come to mind without you thinking about it, maybe it would be nice to thank someone, even if you don’t know them well, or even if it’s something seemingly inconsequential. For me, today, it’s you, who has taken the time to read my blog; whether you read all my entries, or this is the first, or somewhere in between, I appreciate it. So thank you!

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

Posted on June 1, 2015 by jackstandbridge

One of the first lettering pieces I ever did was the phrase “correlation does not imply causation”, a piece which has since been lost in moving house, and is probably tucked away in the pages of a notebook hastily thrown into a box with the word “misc.” on the side. This week I decided to revisit the idea that inspired the first piece. The phrase deals with a logical fallacy that leads people to think that because two things happen together that one causes the other. Similarly, it’s easy to think that because one thing happens after another, the first causes the second. This fallacy is called “post hoc ergo propter hoc”, or after this therefore because of this.

Enough of that though, let’s get down to business. The interesting element of this piece, for me, is the Romans. The Copperplate may look flashy and the flourishes fancy, but when it comes to execution of a perfect letter, nothing provides the challenge, the depth and the satisfaction that Roman capitals do. Recently, though my study of Romans, I’ve been examining something called entasis.

Entasis is best know for its applications in architecture, some of it (surprise, surprise) by the Romans. The meaning of the word is a slight curve applied to something that looks mainly straight. When it comes to architecture, it was used to combat a strange optical illusion: perfectly straight columns have a tendency to trick the eye into seeing a curve where there is none. A slight bulge added to the columns is said to do away with the phenomenon and give the impression of straightness. In terms of calligraphy, however, the entasis is applied to the negative space between the letters. That is to say that the upright parts of the Roman capital have a thinning in the centre and widen towards each end. The execution of this with a broad nib or brush when doing calligraphy is a delicate manoeuvre and the effect is meant to be subtle. As this piece is also part of my study of entasis, I also kept the letters as close to traditional as I could, with understated serifs, a long crossbar on the E than you would see in a lot of modern work, and an open P.

Over the past few days I’ve been toying with the idea of starting to include more Gothic/Blackletter styles in my lettering after some study of their forms in calligraphy. As with all forms, I’m sure there is much to learn to inform future lettering pieces, so be on the look out in the future!

Say Yes.

Posted on May 25, 2015 by jackstandbridge

Here’s a little piece I’ve been working on lately. The phrase is “Say Yes”, which is something quite nice and simple. The words also lend themselves to a neat symmetry, being almost the same as each other when reversed. This leads to a mirroring of the S’s at the end and an uncommon formation of double Y’s in the centre.

The Roman Y is an interesting letter. If it were to have no stroke weight, it would be a symmetrical letter. However, due to the calligraphic roots of all letters, there is a difference between the thickness of the branches. The result is that the branches come off the stem at slightly different places, though here it’s slightly obscured by some of the ornamentation. Because of the asymmetry, the negative space between them is also a little asymmetrical.

The execution of a piece like this can be tricky. Most of the ink is simple to put down, especially blocking in the centres of the letters. The finesse comes when creating the 3D effect. The seeming shininess of the sides of the letters is created by many tiny pen strokes. I use Rotring Rapidographs to do my lettering pieces, and one advantage of these pens is that they always produce a line of constant width. This is a great asset when you want consistency across your piece: no matter how hard or lightly you press, or what angle you hold the pen at, you always have the same result. The trouble comes, then, when you want to make a line of inconstant width – a tapering line. To create the effect in this piece, the lines were created with a quick sweeping motion in lifting the pen from the paper so that the ink flowing from it thins as the tip of the pen pulls away from the surface. The problem with this is that to create a tapering form, the lines must be drawn with quite some speed, and the faster the movement of the pen, the harder it is to make each line conform with the curves of the letters, some sharp, some smooth.

Above is a close-and-personal shot of the first letters.

The style of the letter forms in this piece was partly inspired by Tuscan typography, which people might associate with circuses, saloon bars and rodeos. Some of the easiest features to notice are the serifs almost reminiscent of a cowboy boot and the spur and eye ornaments midway up each letter. Along with the Tuscan influence, the piece is informed by my studies of traditional Roman Calligraphy, pointed pen flourishes and a little of my own personal lettering flair.

L’Albatros

Posted on May 11, 2015 by jackstandbridge

L’Albatros, which is by Baudelaire. The poem describes how the crew of a ship sometimes would catch albatrosses as they followed the ship. Bringing them on board they would laugh at how the once majestic creature would become comical and ugly in walking. Baudelaire then goes on to liken poets to these birds, a rider or storms, laughing at the arrows of archers, yet once grounded, his giant wings prevent him from walking. I wonder what he meant by that. Perhaps he was implying that a poet is one to wander in the skies, metaphorically, and what allows this flight — in the case of the bird, its wings, and in the case of the poet, the mind — is what hinders them from a normal life on the ground. Either way, as you know, the medium is the message, so let’s do away with all this talk of meaning and talk about the media. I did some calligraphy of a poem!

It’s often tempting to do all the fancy things before the boring things. It would be wonderful to use some coloured inks, or gold leaf to spruce up a piece of poetry like this, but the most essential thing in mastering something is to have a good understanding of the basics. That’s why I always make sure to make time for this kind of study. The ink is a neutral walnut, a rich brown that doesn’t catch the eye too much. The layout is simple and understated.

To master a hand is the work of hundreds of hours. There isn’t a short cut to creating the perfect letter form every time: it’s down to training the brain and the muscles to be able to execute it perfectly. One can have a great understanding of what the ideal forms should look like, but in calligraphy, there is both art and craft. The art is the forms, and the craft is being able to create them.

Speaking of understanding forms, lettering differs from calligraphy in the way that it is more forgiving on the execution side of things, but still requires a grasp of the underlying structure that makes letters what they are. Recently, I’ve been having some success promoting my work on Instagram, and so I made this piece to thank the (then) 500 people who follow my account. It’s a mixture of both lettering and calligraphy, using form of Italic calligraphy for the text at the top, under which the other words are lettered.

Many Thanks 500 Followers

Enjoying the effect created by a combination of ink and graphite, I decided to also explore a little way into the realms of 3D lettering. Here’s a little preview of what I’ve been experimenting with:

I’m planning on using this technique in some pieces in the future, so if you enjoy it, you may see some more coming up soon.

Strong Enough To Be Yourself (A study of flourishes)

Posted on May 4, 2015 by jackstandbridge

Flourishing is something that didn’t make it into my repertoire for quite a while. When we start something, we are often ignorant of the depth of it. The way we appreciate something deepens through understanding, and so it’s not surprising that when we don’t have a good understanding it can be hard to appreciate something on more than a superficial level. In terms of lettering, most start out with the desire to understand and create letter forms. Of course, that must be what lettering is all about, mustn’t it? I mean, it’s in the word. Soon, however, you come to realise that the letter forms only work if they are structured well, and so you start to learn about hierarchy and composition. Similarly, flourishing is something that I have been concentrating on lately as an area of study which can improve the pieces I make.

If you look back at older pieces, such as The Greatest Victory, which was a piece that I made when I first started to consider the composition of a lettering more, you might notice that the flourishes seem uncomfortable and don’t really know what to do with themselves, almost like teenagers who have grown too fast and haven’t relearned how to use their limbs. They’re there because they are necessary, to an extent, but don’t quite serve the purpose they were created for. Since then, I’ve learned a lot through my study and have applied some of it in this piece.

The piece started just as a sketch of the word “strong”, as I had wanted to try out an certain 3D effect on some letters. I thought of the full phrase and planned out a little more of the structure. From there, I decided to do a little exploration of the space between the words, so, loosening up my arm, I started designing the flourishes using larger gestures controlled by the shoulder muscles rather than the fingers. This advice of using shoulder muscles, often given to those learning calligraphy, can seem daunting to beginners, but when designing flourishes, it really needn’t be. Any detail work or corrections can easily be made later, as graphite is far more forgiving than ink.

One of the most key elements in flourishing is to pay close attention to the negative space. It’s important that no one area becomes too dense, nor too sparse. A roughly equal distribution is attractive, though some variation is pleasing too. Once I was happy with the design, I took from the sketchbook to the paper for the final piece. When it comes to a symmetrical piece like this, it’s convenient to flip the reference material (in this case, the original sketch shown above) so that there aren’t too many irregularities when comparing the two sides.

From then on, it’s the same story of inking that you have heard before: a soothing, quiet time spent with paper and ink. Becoming too tense or hurried never helps, as a calm hand creates fewer mistakes. Here’s a little shot of it transitioning between graphite and ink, temporary and permanent:

Prepare Today for Success Tomorrow

Posted on April 13, 2015 by jackstandbridge

A little while ago a client contacted me requesting a lettering piece. Surprisingly enough, I make more logos and digital pieces than physical lettering projects that get sent off in the mail. This client, however, wanted a custom lettering piece to give as a gift to someone special. The phrase was “Prepare Today for Success Tomorrow”. After many iterations, many design elements, hierarchy re-shuffles and composition tweaks, the piece was designed and inked as you can see below:

After that comes the part where you have to wrap it up tight and leave it in the hands of the postal service and international shipping companies, and hope that nothing terrible happens to your creation as it hurtles across the ocean. Thankfully enough (and predictably enough) the piece made it there just as it had left and everything was well.

Here’s a little close-up on the detail:

Though editing and digital manipulation were not part of the commission, I enjoyed working on the piece enough that once it was gone I couldn’t help but do a little more, so I took the piece into the realm of ones and zeros. Several weeks ago, I did some experimentation with using a photograph I had taken of some gold leaf to replace the colour and texture of the letters in a piece, and set it over a black background. The effect turned out well, so I used the same technique on this piece. I used the same gold colour, as it suited the piece’s luxurious style of flourishing.

I also experimented a little with adding a wooden texture. It gives a different feel to the piece than the gold does, and I can’t say that one suits it better than the other, just that they would serve different purposes.

Jack Standbridge

Hand Lettering

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