Hand Drawn Lettering: Draw Paint Print

When I was very young, I used to love watching my sister write in bubble letters. I couldn’t wait to draw beautiful letters like that. Well, my love of beautiful lettering never went away—there’s just something special about words drawn by hand.

Hand Drawn Lettering is a visual feast, full of example styles and techniques. It’s a little bit thin on verbal information, though it does broadly sweep over a history of drawn letters and includes some information on Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese scripts. Many of the example alphabets are given with instructions for how to try them on your own. Here, too, the text is sparse, and the instructions are far from exact. But they do encourage exploration and play, which really seems to be the main point of the book.

Examples of whimsical drawn alphabets, a variety of techniques and tools to experiment with pen and ink styles, collage, and block printing are just a few of the topics covered. While this would probably not be my choice if I had to depend on the text, it’s just such a beautiful book, I’m willing to overlook any flaws in favor of browsing for inspiration.