The Revo Project

 Begin Brush Lettering

It was recently sent a link to the above infographic and introduction to an accompanying article which coincided with a friend asking me about the basics of hand lettering. I thought it would be worth sharing for those of you tempted to pick up a brush pen for the first time! 

Although much of our correspondence is done via keyboards, tablets, and smart phone, actual writing—particularly calligraphy—is seeing a comeback. That artful hand-lettering has been appearing in all sorts of printed pieces, from magazines to invitations to events and art on walls.    From looking at the beauty of calligraphy, you might assume that you have to be an expert or have a background in art to create script like this. But there are accessible ways for everyone to take up calligraphy and to create their own brush lettering pieces that endure—either letters to make a birthday card special, for example, or a family motto that gets framed on a wall.    Before you begin, it helps to know a little of the history of calligraphy. The art form has been around for thousands of years, and used many different types of writing tools, including ink brushes made of bamboo stalks.    A more modern approach to calligraphy relies on a brush pen, much easier to use than bamboo, of course. Some have a tip that’s more like a marker than it is like a traditional calligraphy pen, and others will allow you to have more artistic freedom in your creations. And with brush pens, it’s easier to create calligraphy that’s made of different colors, too.    Are you ready to get started on a new artistic endeavor? This graphic explains some of the tools, techniques, and ideas of calligraphy.

Want more?

Daniel Palacios, who drew some of the letters above, shares his tips on Highpulp

Seb Lester explains his approach to starting calligraphy here on Type Worship

‘Lumen Type’

These beautifully ethereal letters have been created with water droplets and light.

Inspired by the reflections of car headlights on a road spattered with rain drops they are the experiments of Russian designer Ruslan Khasanov.  

STRANGER OBJECTS 26.01.2018

SCENE SETUP

Cinema 4D

Corona for Cinema 4D

Rotoscoping is, in essence, a technique that goes back to the early days of cinema, when animators would trace live action footage projected frame-by-frame onto paper, either to use as motion reference or directly copy into their work. Here are two of our favorite examples:

L’Eau Life (Jeff Scher, 2007)

Milk of Amnesia (Jeff Scher, 1992)

At TED2017, the TED-Ed animation team taught attendees how to make rotoscoped animation, using the TED Talk intro sequence as our inspiration. Attendees used paint, clay, whiteboards, coffee grinds, map tacks, paper, and yarn to reimagine the TED logo. For software, we used iStopMotion. Here’s the end result:

How we developed this animation workshop: Our challenge was to come up with something that would allow people to experiment and have fun within a short time frame, but still wind up with some sort of coherent end product. Thinking about past examples of this sort of undertaking, the animated MTV logo came to mind. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, a dense roster of animators and filmmakers created 30-second promotional bumpers for the network, using a countless variety of approaches and techniques, all riffing off of and landing on the iconic MTV logo at the end of each visual romp.

Taking inspiration from this era of experimental popular culture, we thought it would be fun to have workshop participants remix the 10-second TED intro title sequence animation, using a variety of materials and frame-by-frame animation techniques on tabletop stop-motion setups. And in order to maximize the time we had with people, many of whom likely had very little prior experience with animation, we decided to have them rotoscope the TED intro. For our purposes, we had the TED intro sequence pre-loaded into the stop-motion software we were using to capture frames. This enabled us to superimpose the sequence over the camera feed on the screen as participants animated, so they could visually refer to it frame-by-frame as they went. We prepared a short reel of examples of work created with the techniques and materials we were about to employ, and then turned our participants loose, encouraging them to experiment and diverge from the reference material if they so desired.

Here are a few of the methods, materials, and references we shared:

Clay: The Creation (Will Vinton, 1981))

Whiteboard: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Andrew Park, 2010)

Coffee Grinds (similar to sand): The Owl Who Married A Goose (Caroline Leaf, 1974)

Object: Game Over (PES, 2008)

Oil Paint on Glass: Retouches (Georges Schwizgebel, 2008)