Saturday, June 20, 2015

Gloria's Daily Hand Lettered Phrase #35

My interest in Tibetan Buddhism, my meditation practice, and my love of the way the Sanskrit version of this mantra looks... all of these contributed to my attempt to hand letter both. I'm pretty happy with it.

I recently shared all of these designs with one of my teachers, wondering whether they should be called "hand lettered" or "hand generated type" because I'm doing almost everything on the computer (only a few of these have I drawn first on paper). However, I AM creating each and every letter. I am NOT taking existing fonts and outlining the text and then making changes. I am drawing, using Adobe Illustrator, every letter (unless I note otherwise at the bottom). I didn't know if "hand lettered" meant that it was done using tradition tools such as pen and paper.

Anyway, I wanted to make it clear, publicly, that these are my creations, my designs, my lettering. I am spending several hours every day on these, and I felt a little hurt when my teacher told me that these are "type manipulations," and that hand lettering means I drew each letter... He suggested that I call them "type meditations."

I think there was probably a miscommunication on my part; nevertheless, I was disappointed that he apparently hadn't looked closely enough at one or more of them to see that they are indeed NOT type manipulations. On the other hand, I suppose it means they are pretty good—good enough to fool the eye. Do I use references? Absolutely. But I do NOT just place text on one layer and trace! I use it for ideas and for learning how to change the line widths appropriately, add certain embellishments, etc. And a lot of it is done with no reference at all. So there's that.

Okay, enough ranting and whining. It's just that his opinion matters a lot to me. I wrote him back to explain, but he hasn't replied in several days. Oh well. Let it go.


On to my hand lettered phrase #35!



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