The Book of Rust

Alan Wake is one of my favourite games of all time, so I wanted to do something to celebrate it’s 10th anniversary this year — especially since our boy Alan will be back as part of Control AWE! 

Since the phrase is so iconic to the game, I decided to hand-letter it in the style of fonts I’ve often seen in old horror movie posters. The images I picked as backgrounds were to highlight some of the aspects I loved about the game. 

This is one of my favourite quotes of all time, and it’s a piece of advice I try to follow always. So when I first started learning how to hand letter, I knew I definitely wanted to make something with this particular quote. 

Artistically, I tried to visually reference three different pieces of stationery (pencils, erasers, and chalk) in terms of my colour choices and font styles. The background effect and style is meant to reference Looney Tunes and a lot of those older black and white movies I grew up watching because I really loved that visual style and effect. 

I’ve been trying to stubbornly teach myself hand-lettering for a few months now, and this is the first project I’ve been truly happy with. I drew every single aspect of this myself, and then worked on digitising it as best I could. 

I tried to base it on Tan’s aesthetic as much as I could (neat, clean lines, a nice blend of masculine and feminine colours, as well as fonts that feel like a good blend of fancy and classic). I also chose stars for the background because growing up, we’d always get them in school whenever we did something well or right.