Welcome to lettering a logo part two, the second in a three part series where I encourage you to start hand lettering by drawing existing logos. If you’ve missed part one you can find it here.
I assigned both myself and you the exercise of starting hand lettering by choosing three logos to draw that have probably been created using hand lettering, or have developed from hand lettering.
As mentioned in part one the goal of this practical exercise is to get you started with lettering, and give you a little taste of what lettering can be like. There is, as I’m learning a lot more to lettering than just replicating logos by hand, but drawing logo lettering provides a good starting point with some structure.
Now I’ll reveal the first logo that I chose to draw……….(you can imagine a drum roll if you wish)……….I selected the Ford car logo from 1909 to draw. If you’re asking “Why Ford?” no I’m not much of a car enthusiast I just like the style of it as it’s old fashioned. I also thought it’s only four letters long so should be a simple logo to start with.
I wasn’t quite right about it being simple, when it came to drawing the ‘o’ of Ford I struggled for quite a while trying to get the shape right, and the angle right. Although the logo did only consist of four letters they all had a lot of curves about them, and weren’t as straight forward as drawing straight letters. If you’re just joining in on this lettering exercise now, I recommend taking this into consideration when choosing your logos to draw.
I recored a time lapse video of the drawing process and, even though the video is sped up greatly you can still spot where I struggled with lettering the ‘o’.
Please excuse the quality of this video, I used different software to what I’ve previously made time lapse videos with in the past and didn’t have it set up quite right. The next logo video should be much better quality!
Although I only lettered one word, I’ve already learnt a great deal. For example focusing on the smaller sections of a letter, rather than looking at the letter as a whole made it easier for me to draw it. This was how I was able to overcome my ‘o’ issues.
You can follow along with my lettering progress via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+ or Pinterest. Check back here to the site for weekly more detailed updates.
