Tracing Todd Klein
on November 11th, 2009As some of you may recall, I had the privilege of going back to my work on an issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman to recreate the ink art over my old pencils. The original inks did not compliment my pencil art very well. We all thought it would be best to allow me to re-ink my pages for the Absolute Sandman II collection.
Ideally, I would have been able to ink directly over copies of all of my pencil art, but only three copies survived a flood in my studio. So, I re-inked the art on blue lines. Blue lines are copies of the pages printed in non-photo blue ink. The printer cannot see the blue lines. I simply inked directly on top of the blue art, doing my best to recreate the pictures as originally drawn.
The lettering appears on the original art in little blue lines as well. I simply drew around the word balloons. The final lettering was dropped in mechanically later.
I later sold most of the original art, with blue lettering remaining as is. One customer, Wei Shawn Low, asked me to go in and redo the lettering (for a fee, of course). It turned out to be an interesting learning experience.
Now that almost no one is doing lettering by hand these days, I doubt most people would be interested in this exercise. But tracing over Todd Klein’s letters forced me to think about the letters as shapes. I had to consider his style of spacing and his form, and I really enjoyed this. I tried lettering some words out of order to force me to concentrate solely on the letters as line and curve. It was interesting to sense how different his letters felt under my hand.
Todd Klein has a detailed discussion of his work on Sandman here. Check it out!
PS: Forgive the delay in answering mail and approving posts. Lousy weather and my satellite is behaving very ill. This is the third time I have tried to upload this post!
I’ve always had a thing for lettering. I think I got infected with it in 7th grade – my geography class, we had maps we had to do for the countries we studied, labeling the rivers and cities (and often governmental subdivisions). I loved the map-making, and of course took note that different elements were presented with varying fonts. So I tried to emulate that. The country name in all caps, cities in mixed case, rivers in an italic.
I got very good at freehand lettering. My dad, an electrical engineer, urged me to take an engineering drafting course (so I would have a “fall back”). It astonished me that the engineering majors had some of the sloppiest lettering (between two guidelines, no less) I had ever seen. (Though I suppose these days, they do everything on computer and so only rarely are called upon to expose their inability to form letters.)
Letters as shapes in and of themselves have always interested me (since 7th grade). I like looking at different fonts, and thinking about the shapes. Things I liked I incorporated into my own handwriting — I like using the Greek /e/, and in my “book hand”, my /a/ is actually taken from the font used for the titles of THE WIND AND THE LION.
I love calligraphy. And fonts. I have over a thousand loaded on my laptop and more on disks in boxes. Letters just fascinate me. But I’m not so good at doing them by hand.
My mother used to buy those calligraphy-tip felt pens and put flourishes on the everyday: shopping lists, crossword puzzles, you name it. And she let me fool with them too. I never got really good… but every now and then I stylize a letter just to make it stand out from the rest of the word.
But when I’m asked to initial something, like a bank form or whatever, I use the letter I created, the stylized A that is both crossed (twice) and dotted. It’s only one letter, but I do it well and it’s mine
I can’t letter for the life of me. I just stick to using fonts. :/
Is it weird that I actually like the peculiar stench of fresh bluelines?
Penmanship remains the only subject I’ve ever flunked. I admire those with clean lines in their letterforms; mine, alas, isn’t.
It kind of reminds me of turpentine. I love the smell.
And we are getting hammered by this storm. Holy Cow, can’t believe I actually got online for five minutes.