Hi James,I was wondering if you use a light table to help with tracing and if so, what type/brand? Are they really helpful??
The Benefits of Using Tracing Paper
So often you see people asking: “what tools do you use?” and their response is always the pen that was used during the final stage. Never do you hear some reply with time, patience and tracing paper.
There are many different paths to take when it comes to hand lettering, more recently I have started most of my designs with pens, creating the feel for the piece and seeing which direction it needs to head in, before making adjustments. It’s a good way to help me visualise the letters and start to set up the composition.
During the concept phase of the design process you will explore many ideas and refine them as you go. What I used to do, which was a rookie error, was re-draw the design over and over again from start to finish. This often made this part of the process stretch for days or even weeks rather then hours or up to a day.
Rather than stick with this approach of writing the same word over and over again, you can use the tracing paper to protect the original sketch and make adjustments as you see fit. This was the single biggest change to my process in recent months and has streamlined the concept stage into sometimes as little as hours.
Listed below are just some of the benefits I have found from using a tracing paper:
Brush pens
If you do use a brush pen, a great tip for extending the pen life is to draw straight onto the tracing paper. I’ll be honest, when I first came across this tip it confused me. It looked like a huge waste of paper — just one drawing per page, but after trying it myself one day I soon realised why. Tracing paper is a lot smoother then normal copy paper. This means less resistance for the pen — it smoothly flows across the surface of the page. If you look closely at normal copy paper, you’ll notice that it has tiny little grooves and bumps. What happens is that the hairs of the brush pen get caught on those grooves and rips them out. I highly recommend trying your brush pens on tracing paper.
As I mentioned before, you can and should be using tracing paper to make adjustments rather then trying to nail the entire design in one go. Trust me when I say it is not easy getting everything aligned and perfect in one go. That’s why the world gave us tracing paper. Use it to your advantage and refine your ideas on it rather then starting over and over again.
For a piece to work well there must be consistency, which is something I struggle with. So many times have I been drawing and I look back over it and all the different letter “e’s” are slightly different, when they should be all the same.
So when it comes to tracing I’ll just take the ‘e’ that I do like and copy it throughout the design. As I’m sure you have noticed throughout your lettering practice, you can take parts of other letters and mix and match them to create some of the other ones. So for example if you have a heap of letters with bowls (eg a, d, b, g) you can take the best bowl and copy it across all the other letters.
Higher levels of consistency across the piece is important and tracing paper will most certainly help with that.
A point of reference
The more you trace and refine your idea; the more ideas are bound to pop up. What tracing papers allow for you to do is, if you do hit a creative block you can go back to all the old drafts that you kept and explore them instead. It is normal to reach the end of an idea and think ‘what was I thinking!?’, but of you have a heap of traces from this process you can go back to one and start exploring in another direction. It reinvigorates those creative juices that got lost along the other idea path. You want to keep your options open during the concept stage,if you draw and erase then you possibly lose your idea and have no point of reference to return to if you do eventually get stuck on any other attempt.
These are just a few examples of how I use tracing paper to help streamline my process and help me flesh out ideas during the concept stage. If you aren’t using tracing paper yet for your lettering, go out and grab some.
This is the tracing paper I use: Canson Tracing Paper.
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