Five Reasons To Draw Small

1. Doodling focuses your mind, giving you increased attention (even when it looks like you’re not).

2. You’ll increase your awareness- when doodling flowers, you’ll start to notice more aspects of a flower, the way that the stem tilts the flower, the way that the same petal shape varies with each single stem.

3. You’ll create your own style, a visual vocabulary, a way of drawing shapes and lines that is uniquely your own.

4. You’ll feel more relaxed. And creative blocks will melt away when you’re not under pressure to create something nice. The small scale makes it easier to detach from results and enjoy the sensation of making lines and circles and little faces or flowers.

5. You’ll have a bunch of small sweet drawings that will give you a feeling of satisfaction.

via 31 Days of Doodling: Creating Creative Characters | Katanaville.

I especially like drawing and doodling as a way to notice small things like the flowers written about above. It is surprising how much attention to details you get when you begin to draw something versus writing about it. Not only how does it look but what can you do to make it look that way on paper?

Try some doodling next time you feel stuck in what you are writing.

Mainly this is about lettering, how to create fun, fanciful and pretty letters. These can be used to illustrate quotations. Or add a unique touch to other creative work you are doing. Think outside the box. Just get the basics and take off with your own imagination and favourite things.

• Start by drawing your letters as usual, in your own hand drawn print. Use a soft pencil (#2 or mechanical pencil) which you can easily erase if you also use a white eraser. These should be easy to find in any kind of art or craft supply shop.
• Outline your letters with a fine black liner pen. Don’t try to make them perfect but do think of your original letter as the centre point so that your new letters will be in the right place while becoming fuller in size. Once you have outlined the letters you will need to carefully erase the original letters you drew with the soft pencil. Use thicker paper if you find the paper you are using is ripping too easily.
• Add life to your letters with crayons, coloured pencils or markers. Draw thick and thin lines, polka dots, diamond shapes, whatever you prefer or get the idea to try. When you colour the letters in pick your favourite colours. Outline some of the shapes you drew inside the letters, give them extra focus and it’s a way to get more colour in your design. Experiment and discover what styles and colours you like best.
• Now shadowing… the rule I discovered is “outside right and inside left”. So you will be adding shadow to the outside of letters on the right side and to the inside of letters on the left side. Do it for awhile so you get the feel for it. Try different thick and thin shadows, see which you like best for your own style of lettering.
• Decorate your letters with a little extra touch. Add shapes to the whitespace around your letters. Or, draw a frame around some letters and then decorate the frame with more shapes and colours.
• Add a whole illustration around your letters. Maybe a cityscape, a sandcastle, a garden, something that just appeals to you or seems to suit the words you used. Whenever you need some inspiration or a general drawing guide for an object try to search for it on Google. In the Google Images section you will see a setting “Any type” which gives you the choice of clip art and line drawing. Either of those will give you illustrations instead of photographic images. Study how someone else drew the cityscape (for example) and then you will be able to use that as a guide for your own illustration.

Read more about The Sketchbook Project World Tour 2012 on their site.  It’s for visual artists to contribute and eventually the sketchbooks will be exhibited in the Brooklyn (US) Art Library.

There are a list of topics to choose from to use as inspiration for your illustration. Which would you pick (to write about or) illustrate?

• I remember you
• The last of the people I know
• In fifty years
• Ask me how I can help
• The first ever…
• Hope
• In 10 minutes
• Along the line
• Grey side of life
• Fill me with stories
• Things found under car seats
• Untitled
• Travel with me
• Forever in a nutshell
• Disasters
• This is a sketchbook
• The worst story ever told
• Fears and tears
• The companion books
• Transatlantic
• It’s summer where you are
• It’s winter where you are
• Nothing new
• Time Traveler
• Opposite day
• Uncharted waters
• Life underground
• Monochromatic
• Long trips and short phone calls
• Encyclopedia of
• Sandwich
• Prehistoric
• Writing on the wall
• A path through the trees
• Stitches and folds
• Heroes and villains
• Treehouse
• Forks and Spoons
• Waterslides I never rode

I have a letter sent in the mail from a corporation. The paper is sexy. It feels smooth, silky even. The envelope was the same quality of paper. It feels like luxury, decadence and lust all on a page, blank on one side. How can you resist doing something with such marvelous paper? I saved it a few days. Just enjoying having it around. Today I made my first drawing on it.

It’s a shame I’m not a better artist. Someone who could draw something truly amazing. But, isn’t part of art just showing your emotions, your feelings, expression at heart? So that is what I did. I still have room to draw more. There is even some space on the front, the letter side, that I can use.

Dzineblog has a post about trends in web design. One of the elements they write about, twice actually, is typography. What do you know about it?

I Love Typography: A Guide to Web Typography
The Font Feed: Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips
A List Apart: On Web Typography
Smashing Magazine: 10 Principles for Readable Web Typography
The Blog Herald: The Ten Commandments of Blog Typography
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

Extra Resources:

Typography Daily
I Love Typography
We Love Typography
The Font Feed
Ministry of Type
The Typographic Hub
Twitter: Typegirl
Twitter: TypeTweets
Twitter: Typophile
Twitter: Friends of Type
Twitter: Ray Larabie: typodermic
Twitter: espierkermann
Typedia
Design Muse
Flickr: Typography and Lettering
Easily Amused
Eight Face
Letter Cult
Addictive Fonts
Upscale Typography
Typography Served
Flickr: Typography and Design
Flickr: Typography and Lettering
Flickr: Ink and Typography
Flickr: I Love Typography
The Case and Point
Twitter: TypeMedia

Typography Groups

The Type Director’s Club
Association Typographique Internationale
The Society of Typographic Aficionados
TypeCon
Type Camp
Flickr: Letterbugs – Typography by shutterbugs.

Vintage Typography

Flickr: Font of all Wisdom – Unique vintage lettering.
Flickr: Historical Type and Lettering
Flickr: Vintage Product Signs/ Murals

Hand Lettering

Flickr: Hand Drawn Type
Flickr: Hand Lettering
Flickr: Typostruction
Flickr: Custom Lettering
Flickr: Signpaintr
Flickr: Handpainted Signs of the World
Flickr: Handmade Signs
Flickr: Handmade Typography/ Lettering
Flickr: Bad Type
Flickr: Folk Typography
Flickr: Blackboard Lettering

Found Typography

Flickr: Found Typography
Flickr: Urban Typography
Villa Type – Type and lettering found in the public domain.
Letterpeg – Fonts found around Winnipeg, Manitoba
NYC Type – Typography and lettering found in New York.
Flickr: Street Typography
Flickr: Found Type
Flickr: Signs, Signs
Typarchive
Flickr: Fontspotting
Flickr: I Love Typography
Flickr: Signage and Typography
Flickr: Font Whores
Flickr: Barn and Building Painted Advertisements

Ghost Signs

Flickr: Faded Signage
Flickr: Ghost Signs
Flickr: Old Painted Wall Advertising
Flickr: Old Signs
Flickr: Ghost Signage
Flickr: Ghost Ads
Flickr: Half Lost Signs
Flickr: Old British Signs
Flickr: Fragmented Urban Language

Font Making

With FontStruct or BitFontMaker: Try creating a font of your own.

I like to draw a bit. Sometimes they get online, but my scanner is a bit temperamental, so sometimes they just get added to the pile of drawings I have done. I used to keep them posted to Flickr as well but I haven’t kept up with them there.

What do you draw or doodle when the mood comes over you? How do you feel when you draw? How is it different from when you are writing?

Sometimes odd phrases just pop into my head. They don’t make sense in a logical way, but they reflect my sense of irony and personal logic. Today I’ve been watching a marathon of TV shows about geography of the planet.

Chances are people assume geography is about knowing where places are, like towns and countries. That’s only a small part. Geography is as vast as our planet, it is the study of our planet, the elements that create our planet and continue to change it. I love the science of geography. Everyone should take a moment to think about geography once a day, it keeps you humble to know we mean nothing to the planet we live on. That must be why “lava doesn’t care if it hurts your feelings” popped into my head this afternoon and made me laugh.

Geography (Definition from Dictionary.com) -

the science dealing with the areal differentiation of the earth’s surface, as shown in the character, arrangement, and interrelations over the world of such elements as climate, elevation, soil, vegetation, population, land use, industries, or states, and of the unit areas formed by the complex of these individual elements.

Draw the globe, the world with it’s land masses, as correct as you can by memory. Start without looking at anything, just to see what you can do. Do you remember what the world looks like?

When did you last write something out, by hand? Reconnect to your creativity by getting more hands on again.

Pull yourself away from the computer and write long hand at a coffee shop. Or get paper and pen and draw something instead of writing a word.

Write in a journal, something personal and connect with yourself too.

The problem with having a lot of ideas is finding the time to do them all well enough to bring your original ideas to life. I’d like to do web comics/ cartoons. Like this idea I doodled above. Before I’d post this as a web comic I would draw it again, better, maybe give it some colour too. But, I probably won’t get time until about 4:00AM tonight. So, instead, I am leaving the original drawing in my ideas folder. Something to be worked on at a later date and time.

Do you keep an ideas folder or is it one of those things you thought was a great idea but haven’t gotten around to actually doing yet?