Hand lettering typography illustrations are really cool, but it
takes a lot of skill to craft authentic artworks by hand with pen and
paper. Typically this style of art is created by elite illustrators, but
I’ve found an entirely digital technique that allows us mere mortals to
create cool looking artwork too! Follow this step by step Illustrator
tutorial to learn how to manipulate text within a silhouette shape and
add texturing to produce a realistic hand drawn style typography
illustration.
After releasing last week’s
free meat cut illustrations
I received a few enquiries from people asking how they were made, so
today’s tutorial is based on the same technique. We’ll be creating a
trendy hand lettering style quote illustration, except with this method
there’s no hand lettering required! Usually this artwork would be
carefully hand drawn and scanned, but instead we’re going to cheat and
use digital techniques to safely tweak the text until we’re happy then
fake that analogue look with textures.
The quote I’ve chosen to depict in this typography illustration is
“Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam” from the classic Home on the
Range song, so an image of an actual buffalo suits this quote perfectly.
I’m using
this public domain image as a reference. Paste in your reference image and reduce the opacity to around 50%.
Select the Pen tool and begin tracing a rough outline around the
subject. Accuracy isn’t too important because we’re trying to replicate a
hand drawn style. Once the path is complete, add a black fill and
remove the stroke.
Type out your chosen quote somewhere on the artboard, then scan
through your fonts collection for a nice hand drawn style. I’m using a
premium font named Daft Brush, but here’s a
roundup of loads of free handwriting fonts
you can choose from. Create individual text elements for each word of
the quote, fill them with white and place them over the silhouette
image.
Begin scaling and rotating the text elements to roughly fit them
within the silhouette image. Make sure the primary words are made the
largest in size so the quote is easily readable.
What our digital design is lacking that those hand lettered example
have is the free flowing shapes of the text. The hand lettering
illustrators will draw the words to match required shape, but it takes
some skill to plot the letters so they fit perfectly. Instead we can use
the Envelope Distort tool to manipulate and tweak the shape of our text
until we’re happy. Select the first word and go to Object > Envelope
Distort > Make with Mesh.
Add just one row but select a number of columns roughly equal to the
number of letters in the word. The more columns there are the more the
word can be reshaped, which is important for those words that need to
fit into complex areas.
Use the Direct Selection tool to select each point of the mesh and
move it into place to manipulate the text into the shape of the
silhouette outline. Don’t forget to adjust the bezier handles to
generate smooth curves.
Shorter words don’t require as many mesh points because they’re smaller in size. Make just 2 columns for a two letter word.
Some words will require some considerable manipulation to distort
them into the required shape. Move those mesh points around to stretch
the letters, but try to keep each column of the mesh equal in size so
the letters are still evenly spaced.
For words on the second line the mesh points will need manipulating
on the top and bottom so the word follows the flow between the existing
text and the silhouette outline.
Aim to fill as much of the silhouette shape as possible but retain
even gaps around the edges and in between each word. The great thing
about designing digitally is you can move and tweak the letters until
you’re happy. Whereas, whatever you draw by hand is permanent!
One advantage of authentically hand drawn artwork is the natural
texturing that is generated from the ink or lead. We’ll need to fake
this on our digital artwork. Add an Opacity Mask to the silhouette shape
from the slide out menu from the Transparency panel.
The opacity mask will create a black square inside the Transparency
panel to represent the mask contents. Select this square to activate the
mask, then paste in a texture from my
Vector Textures pack.
Deselect the Clip option and select the Invert Mask option, then
reactivate the normal artwork by clicking the left hand square in the
panel.
Make a group out of all the text elements then add a new Opacity Mask
and paste in another texture to erase away tiny areas of the text too.
The vector design is complete, but a few extra steps to mock up the
design will really finish it off. Open a complementing photograph in
Photoshop and apply one of my
RetroFilter Actions to add an interesting colour adjustment.
I’ve chosen the “Molle” Action then reduced the opacity to around 75% to allow some of the original colours to show through.
Paste in the vector artwork from Illustrator and press CMD+I to
invert the colours. Change the blending mode to Screen to render the
black text transparent and effectively punch out the text from the
silhouette.
We’ve already added some vector texturing in Illustrator, but
Photoshop allows for much more realistic edits. Create a Layer Mask,
ALT-click on the layer mask thumbnail to activate it then paste in a
texture file. Here I’m using one of the
vintage textures available to
Access All Areas members.
The final design has all the characteristics of authentic hand drawn
art, but it didn’t require the perfection and patience that’s necessary
with pen and paper. The manipulation of the text also helps disguise the
fact that it’s a display font; warping the letters means that no two
letters look identical. The greatest benefit of this digital technique
though, is that the text can still be edited and the new wording will
automatically form to the existing shapes.
Original Article: http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-create-typography-illustrations-the-easy-way
