Hey friends! Elizabeth here from Plant Based Bride, back again with another video, and today I wanted
to make a quick little video talking you through how I typically use my ruler and circle template
to create fonts. This is something that I have been asked so many times in my comments here on YouTube.
So many variations of the question: How do I know how to use my ruler and circle template
to create letters that fit a particular font or style that I'm going for? Now I feel like I have to
put a disclaimer at the beginning which is that I am not an expert at creating fonts. There are
so many amazing lettering artists out there who first of all could probably freehand
the stuff that I meticulously use a ruler and circle template for, but there are also just people
out there who, you know, know a lot more about fonts and creating letter forms than I do. So please take
my advice for what it is, just my advice from my personal experience of what I have learned to do
that has allowed me to create some more intricate or uniform fonts than I could do just freehanding!
So with that little disclaimer out of the way let's jump into this particular quote page that
I'm creating that I'm using as an example to show you how I use these tools. So what I'm creating
here is a quote page for father's day because it's a bit of a more complicated font so I think it
allows me to show you a few more techniques than some simpler fonts. And something else I love about
this particular font or this style is that not only does it have many straight lines but it
also has a lot of curves and flourishes! So again, I feel like this is not only a little bit of a more
complicated font in general to create and might be the type of font that you might want to reach
for a ruler and circle template for, but it also allows me to show you lots of different types of
letter forms. So starting from the beginning, one of my favorite techniques for lettering is to do
extensive sketching ahead of time. You'll always see in my videos that I sketch out pretty much
everything before I ink it in or paint it. I don't trust my ability to freehand things
to my own exacting standards. So I always pencil things in first and I often will change dimensions
and redraw things and clean things up pretty extensively before I go to the inking stage.
And I think that this is honestly one of the most important tips I'm going to share in this video.
Spending the time in the sketching stage, not only on the composition and placement of whatever
quote you're writing, but also on the letter forms themselves is just going to lead to a
better result in the end. So I highly recommend it! If you're not usually someone who likes to sketch
things first give it a try, I think you might find that your results are a lot more polished and
uniform. Once I'm happy with my sketch the first step I always like to do is to start with my ruler
and attack the straight lines. Personally for me I really like to work on a single orientation at a
time. As you can see here I'm starting with all the vertical lines or diagonal lines that are
closer to being vertical than they are to being horizontal. And this is honestly mostly for the
ease of moving the ruler around the page and just for the comfort and speed of creating these lines
but it's also to help with the consistency, because if I'm working only on those vertical
or diagonal lines for every single letter I can make sure that I'm getting a
similar distance between the lines which will lead to a more uniform line weight in the end.
And also just making sure that I am addressing each letter in as similar a way as possible by
focusing on specific portions of the letter forms at a time. Hopefully that makes sense! So I like to
start with those vertical lines or again diagonals that are mostly vertical like the diagonal lines
in a v for example. Once I have all the vertical lines sometimes my next step will be to go to all
my horizontal lines but this particular font has basically no straight horizontal lines
(most of the horizontal elements are curved in some way). For that reason I'm now grabbing my circle
template. I'll link the specific circle template that I like to use in the comments down below.
This is probably one of my most used tools and I'm sure y'all have seen it a million times if
you've been watching my videos for a while. Of course, you don't need a circle template
if you're really good at free handing curves then go ahead and freehand them, but I have shaky hands
(probably due to a combination of anxiety and too much caffeine). I prefer to rely on my circle
template to make sure that the curves are nice and uniform. A lot of you ask how I use my circle
template and I feel like it's a little hard to describe which is why I haven't done this video
yet, but i'm going to do my best in this video. Basically what I do is I look at the sketch, I
look at the curve I'm trying to achieve, and I see if there's a circle on my circle template that
is just the right size to either draw the entire curve all in one go or most of the curve. The
larger amount of the curve that you can get on a single circle the nicer it's going to turn out
because you don't have to worry about extending it and making sure your pen is in the exact
right place after lifting off the page. But again, depending on what you're doing, you might have to
switch between multiple circle sizes to get the entire curve. And you can see me doing that here
over and over again. Because so many of these letters have a larger curve that kind of spirals
in at the end, those end portions are a tighter curve than the larger curved portion of the letter
form, which means that I start with a larger circle to get the main curve and then I have to find a
smaller circle to bring in that smaller portion at the end of the curve that spirals inward.
So again a lot of this is just moving around my circle template as you can see, trying to find that
circle that best fits the curve I'm going for, and continuing to switch to different sizes of circles
as needed to finish off a curve. Especially if they are a curve that ends in a little bit of a tighter
spiral. For this particular font I wanted it to have a bit of a thicker line weight and I would
recommend if you're using this technique to use the finest pen that you can get away with, I'm
using my sakura micron 005 here which is a very fine-tipped nib, with the plan of filling these
letters in later to have a thicker line weight. In my experience, especially when you're using
this kind of a technique with a ruler and a circle template, starting with thinner lines that you're
planning on making thicker means that you have a lot more leeway for recovering from mistakes.
It also means it's easier to make adjustments if you're not happy with a certain portion of a
letter. It can't cover for every mistake or for every adjustment, you may still need to use a
little bit of a corrector that matches the color of your page, but I do find that using a finer
tipped pen with the intention of creating a letter that is thicker than the line weight of that pen
in the end really really helps with making this technique look really polished and clean
in the final result. Another question I get asked a lot is how do I come up with fonts. And my number
one tip for coming up with new fonts is just to do research. To look online, to notice if there's an ad
that has a font you like, if you're on pinterest and you see a quote and you like the font that's
there, save it to a board for inspiration and try out different types of fonts! You can even get
a free font, there are lots of websites that have free fonts, that you can download to your computer
and try typing out what you want to write in the font so you can see how all the different letter
forms look and how they fit together. And use that as a guide for the lettering that you're
going to do on your page. You don't have to come up with a font completely from scratch, you can 100 %
take inspiration from the many amazing fonts that already exist. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, okay? (chuckles)
Though it can be really fun to combine elements from multiple fonts together to create
something that is uniquely yours. So I'm just continuing the same technique again I started
with those vertical lines right at the beginning, and I'm just moving my way down using my circle
template to add in all of those small curved details. If you have more tips, more advice for
creating fonts, if there are other tools that you personally love to use for font creation that I
didn't talk about in this video, please leave them in a comment down below! I would love to hear your
tips and tricks. And of course, as always, all the supplies I used in this video will be linked in
the description box down below so check that out if you want to get the same ones that I was using.
Now as I get to the bottom here, this is the very small font that says "happy father's day" at the
bottom. Some of these letters are quite small and for some of them I'm actually finding it a little
bit easier to freehand some of these curves and connections rather than using my circle template.
So again this is something to keep in mind based on your own steadiness and the look you're going
for. I find that this section of quote is so small that you're not going to notice if the curves
aren't perfectly evenly curved or perfectly proportionate, whereas on the larger letters
it's a lot more obvious if those curves are a bit wobbly or not quite even or symmetrical. So again
a lot of this is just going to be your own judgment and trial and error. You have to do what
works best for you! Once I have all the outlines of the letters done, I can go back and fill in
all of these letters. And this is the time when I can make adjustments as needed. So as you can
see here I wasn't super happy with the curve on the "a" in dad, so after I filled it in I went back
in with my circle template to adjust the curve. And because these letters are thicker than just
the line weight of my pen, I'm able to make those slight adjustments without making it stand out
or look heavier in line weight compared to the other letters that I maybe didn't have to adjust.
I continued to use the same really fine nibbed pen to fill them in. Again, this is just for precision's
sake. If I'm using a really fine nibbed pen it does take me a little longer to fill in the letters
completely but it does really help with making sure I can stay between the lines and have a
really precise fill. It also makes it easy if I do want to make any adjustments that
I don't have to switch to another pen. I can just keep the same pen in my hand as I fill things in
and make slight adjustments. So that is the basic technique of how I use rulers and circle templates
to create fonts! I really hope that this answers the questions that so many of you have had. Again,
this is something that I have wanted to address in a video for a long time because it has been
so frequently asked, because using the tools that are around me to help me to get nice clean
lines to adjust for my natural shakiness of hand is just something that I did without even
thinking about it or considering it, so it's really taken me a while to try to think of a way that I
could explain it that could be truly helpful to everyone else that doesn't live inside my brain. (chuckles)
So i really really hope that this was helpful. I hope that it showed you that it's actually a
really really simple process. It is trial and error and using the tools that you have at your disposal,
in this case a ruler and a circle template, to find the shapes that best align with your sketch
or your vision and to use those to get nice clean straight lines or nice proportionate
curves. If you still have questions after watching this please leave them in a comment down below!
And with that, I'm going to get going. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed it
please give it a like and subscribe if you haven't already, we would love to have you! And before I go
I want to take a moment to thank my patrons for their support. Extra special thanks to our newest
patrons: XYuko, Gunner, and Hester. Welcome all of you to the squad! We are so happy to have you.
If you at home want to join the squad feel free, there's a link in the card and in the description
box down below. I actually did a whole live stream that was more than an hour-long with my patrons
a few months back going into even more detail of how I create letter forms using my circle template
and my ruler, how I approach creating fonts, if you want access to that video it is available to all
patrons over the $3 level. You can go back and watch old live streams so if you want
to see that, if you want to see more about how I approach creating letters, consider joining
our little patreon family! And that's it. I'll see you really soon in my next one! Bye, friends!