for me there's nothing more beautiful than the convergence or the
juxtaposition of words and pictures that's why I love sketchbooks and I love
illustrated journals I love art journaling everything where you're
combining the words that express more than the picture and the picture that's
worth a thousand words there's something about the combination of them that says
so much more than each does individually now when we're working on the iPad and
we are thinking about this juxtaposition there's a tendency I think to or
temptation at least to say you know what procreate allows me to add text all I
need to do is find a font that looks kind of like handwriting and when I put
that next to my drawing it'll be kind of like an illustrated journal page I don't
really think so I think a lot of fonts that look like handwriting or try to
look like handwriting actually look kind of cheesy, kind of tacky, but I understand
the temptation because a lot of times we feel like our handwriting isn't really
good enough it's not neat enough and when you put it next to a drawing it
kind of looks well crummy now I want to show you a way that I have of taking my
albeit not terribly neat handwriting and making it neater without making it feel
mechanical and computer generated and you know cold and and really not
appropriate we can use the type that we set as a guide and then add our
handwriting on top of it so I'm going to show you so if a step by step how I do
that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to first of all go over here and
I'm going to open up add text and then I'm gonna just put in a quote I
happen to have a quote that I've copied into my into my cut and paste and I'm
just gonna paste it in there art is not what you see but what you make others
see and Degas allegedly said that so alright so now I've taken this thing and
I and I can pick a font you know there's a lot of fonts that are here but I'm not
really concerned about the font and I'll tell you why in a second because really
ultimately the font is just a guide but you know certainly I can do it and as
you know I could even find some kind of like let's see if there's a cheesy
handwriting font Jack Armstrong looks like a bad Sunday morning cartoon or or
noteworthy I don't know there's no reason for any of this or papyrus
papyrus is one that I hate people use that but we're just gonna take good old
Helvetica and what I'm going to do is actually going to take my quote and I
want to make it all camps see whether I end up making this in all caps but for
now so now I can take my box I can stretch it of it and I can sort of make
my line breaks the way I want to I can also adjust my letting inside how much
space I want to have between my my pages and yeah that'll do maybe I'll make it
bold no I'm not I'm just gonna leave it regular because I just wanted as a guide
for where I'm gonna place my own letters so I look at this it's a little bit
small so I can just make it bigger because I really want to make this page
about this about this do I like these line breaks not sure yet but I can go
back in here and I can adjust it and I can there I think that's better it's
more regular I could decide that I want to make it flush left I like that
I'm not sure yet do I like it right now I think I think I like it flush left
okay so I'm gonna leave it there others see now let's see what we do next we're
gonna open another layer and this is gonna be the layer that we write on and
this is gonna be our our template and I'm gonna dial back the opacity so you
can see it here it is it's there but it's not as bold I might even dial it
back a little bit more so I can certainly see it clearly but it's not
going to interfere because I'm now gonna work on this layer and I'm just gonna
start to make some letters and I'm not as you can see I'm not copying I'm not
copying the actual letters I'm simply using their position as a guide
and
there's a reason that I made them all caps and that's because I just like the
spacing I feel like the spacing is more even and less varied upper lower but I
don't know I'm not a graphic designer that may not be the case but you know
I'm just using this this as a template it's pretty it's pretty handy I don't
need to be overly slavish about it but I can know that I can just focus on
every individual letter in fact I can blow it way up and I can say okay I
don't have to ever concern myself about where I'm gonna run out of space or
whether the letters are not going to be properly proportioned or whether some
letters are going to be bigger than others or whether the letters are going
to suddenly be all like sloping to the left or to the light to the right
they're all basically and reliably positioned and that is exactly what I
want also you notice as I'm zooming in my my lettering looks thicker but it's
not actually it's all still saying the same
it's just unfortunate when I was back out it looks the same you see
all right
about my little quote marks here at the beginning at the end let's put them in
and now they go give him credit for this insightful statement right so yes so we
get rid of our let's get rid of our background look at it I think it looks
nice well it looks it looks early looks neater than if I had done it unhealthy
all right now I'm just going to I don't know shove a little drawing and there do
a quick trying to kind of make it feel juxtaposed do some stuff here
hope that's been helpful and I hope that you will consider combining lettering
and drawing together and make things you could share on Instagram things that you
could turn into pages of a book maybe a way of keeping an illustrated Journal of
recording everything that happens to you each day but never worrying too much
about how messy your lettering is going to be because you can always put some
type in use it as a guide and have the best of both worlds the neatness of
typesetting the expressiveness of calligraphy hope it's helpful