I began to design the text thinking I should do it the way I did the cartouches for my orchids. I found some nice Zerkall Wavy paper and a soft pencil and began drawing.
But I spoke to Philip and he explained that he would have to vectorise them as there would be complicated textured edges.
Okay, let me explain about VECTORS and BITMAPS
If you have a digital letter in, say Word, you can change the size or stretch it (and wreck the proportions) . But you can't add a flourish or change the shape of anything other than by stretching it. That is because it is a bitmap, so you can't edit it..
In Illustrator, you can vectorise it by selecting "change to curves" and you'll see the nodes on the letter. The more complex the outline, the more nodes there will be.You can work with the nodes to change the actual shape of the letter in any way you wish. I've vectorised a typewriter font T and a plain one to show you where the nodes are.
If I were to do a letter in calligraphy and scan it, it would be a bitmap. In order to create a font, letters have to be vectorised, so you would import the scan into Illustrator and trace the outline with the pen tool. Each time you click to change direction you add a node. There is also a facility to create curves using "handles"" on the nodes.
Instead of doing the letter in calligraphy first and tracing it, you can just draw it directly using the mouse. So I drew a b in Illustrator - a beautiful shaded b! At this stage I realised that if this b was really tiny it might look nice typed once it is a font, but I could never reproduce the shading in screen printing.
So now I am going to begin to design a font especially for Rope of Words, using Illustrator and the mouse and "pen tool" and see if it is viable.
Philip Kelly -
www.pkfont.co.uk - is happy to space and kern letters if the client gives them to him already vectorised, as mine will be, or to vectorise them for the client. It suited me to draw them on the computer because I could get a better uniformity this way.
This is going to be a huge amount of work!
