More incisions…

Me just continuing the path set out by the incision sketches, my son claimed this was a drawing of a pipe. So I added the text balloon and introduced him to surrealism and image semantics… Did I shake his innocence, replacing his reassuring world with arty abstraction? Or did I restore some innocence by making him look at the lines and shapes instead of what they might refer to? Strange how abstraction – a word often associated with moving away from the particular towards a general concept – can lead to immediate sensual contact with the material world. Or how the sensual makes sense.  The power of art over philosophy? Pre-linguistic cognition has a very pretty word in dutch: voortaligheid.

For those who wonder: the yellow overlay was done afterwards in Photoshop. My sketchbook is not that clean.

Filed under: lettering, droodle, sketchbook

Some b’s

Less abstract, this lettering. My pencil definitely wanted to draw some b’s. Number three is funny, but maybe an example of the gimmickry I mentioned in last post? you decide…

Filed under: lettering, droodle, lettering, sketchbook

incisions

Sketches below and in earlier posts are to some extent absent minded. The hand moves over the paper without aesthetic consideration. At least at the start… Once something strikes, the next few attempts may try to refine the emerging idea. Sometimes for the better, but after a while – and often while ‘style’ creeps in – they soon become boring. Gimmicks that can amuse for a while but are a dead end. It is hard to keep things to the basics.

These ones were vaguely inspired by working with Maple, a great font by Eric Olson at Process Foundry. The incisions between the stems and joining bowls or curves are amazingly deep and deliver a very lively image for a sans serif font in the Benton tradition. 

Filed under: lettering, droodle, sketchbook

Abstract lettering: some R’s

These were done some time ago. New sketches coming up…

   

Filed under: lettering, droodle, sketchbook