Your handwriting as font

Hello everyone!

Sorry for not posting for a very long time, but well, life was busy :).

Anyway, as the first post after a long break I thought about something nice for all of you. How about turning your own handwriting into a font? Wouldn’t that be nice for personalized (printed) letters and things like that?

I used to do that regularly many years back. Back then I would use a special software that was quite pricey by that time, yet it still took a lot of time and tweaking to get an acceptable result. The good thing is nowadays you do not really need any kind of special software (at least not if you do not want to create something exquisitely and fancy), there are websites that will transform your writing into .ttf (true type font) and .otf (open type font) for free.

So how do we go about it?

1. Go to one of these websites like http://www.myscriptfont.com or http://www.paintfont.com
2. Create your font. If you’re language isn’t English make sure you use a template that will allow you to add every kind of special character your language has. There are also templates for mathematical symbols and so on.
3. Print out your template and fill in the letters. There are guiding lines to help you get all characters in approximately the same height and length. It’s advisable to work with a bold black pen, to make sure that the characters will be read correctly by the software.
4. Scan your template sheet(s) in 300 dpi and in greyscale. Save the file as either .jpg or .tif. Make sure that the file isn’t bigger than 2MB, because most websites won’t accept larger files.
5. Upload it to the website, choose the type of font you want and don’t forget to give it a nice catching name aaaaaaand
6. You’re done! 🙂

 

 

PS: Please don’t forget that you will have to install the new font into your computer’s font library, before you will be able to use it with your text editing or graphic programs.

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Time for a little blog cleaning

IN my neverending endeavors to make this blog simpler to navigate and easier to read I’ve once again changed the theme. “Simpla” was already nice and clean, but I think that “Oulipo” is even more so.

Also I’m currently checking all the links in order to replace or delete the broken ones.

Today was 26th World Wide SketchCrawl Day

and I wasn’t even aware of it :´(.

You can check out what participants from all over the world were sketching here, in the official SketchCrawl forum.

Okay, the next one will be May 15th and I’m totally determined to go sketch crawling that day, too. ^-^

And what exactly is a Sketch Crawl? Mainly a meeting of different persons that gather somewhere and then walk around the place sketching everything they see or everything that inspires them. I guess the main reason of all this is to meet with fellow artists, to practice drawing, share experiences – and most of all to have fun :).

Last month was strange…

… now I’m feeling lucky that it finally passed by. I had some unpleasant problems with my Internet connection and couldn’t log in for almost two weeks because of this. Luckily everything is fine now again. And I wished it would stay like that forever now.

However, there were a few very nice things, too. I hosted the August Oil Pastel Challenge over at WetCanvas (oh, sorry, should I have informed you about this earlier ?!?? 😉 ) and it was really, really fun! It never fails to amaze me how talented and creative the folks are over there! So many different interpretations of the same pic – it’s fantastic! 😀 And if you don’t believe me, just go and check it out here.

That little boat on top of this blog entry was my humble contribution to the challenge …. guess you can easily tell that I need much, much, much practice in painting water. I’m aware of it.  :o))

Some minor and some major changes :)

Hi everybody, as you may have already observed (as long as you don’t read my posts with a reader) I’ve currently changed the outlook of my blog. I couldn’t stand the old CSS anymore – I just had to to something about it. For the summertime the blog will most probably stay with this neat little flower-theme.

Last week passed by very fast for me, I did not even have much time for drawing or painting. To my big shame I didn’t continue with my oil paintings challenge either… 😦
Yet, I started with some nice experiments. I’m planing on doing an oil portrait for a friend of mine and she wants it to look a little bit like a Klimt, so I started experimenting with gold leaf.

gold leaf, acrylic and oil color on canvas

My first tries were just a little bit messy, but I’m already getting better at gilding :). Actually I’m not working with gold all of the time (since this would be a little bit too expensive), usually I’m using metal leaf that just looks golden. It works just the same, however it is much more prone to corrosion, therefore it has to be sealed with a few layers of coating before one can paint with acrylic colors (who contain water) upon it.
I’m really looking forward to painting this portrait, I’m sure it’ll look great in the end. Well, and even if it doesn’t look good in the end, it will at least look very interesting ;-p. The only thing that is still troubling me is that I have not the slightest idea what kind of patterns to use for the background and for her dress in order to make it look more Klimt-esque. I still need to ponder that :).

And since we were talking about changes to this blog: another one will be, that you will most probably get to see some 3D stuff from me soon, too, since I recently rediscovered the fun and the horror of sculpting and modeling with clay, polymer clay and plaster. I’ll just have to see how well these crafty things will fit into the concept of this blog :).

EDIT: Sorry guys, I just realized that after my little CSS intervention some of my pages don’t show like they used to (and I want them to). I’m going to fix that as soon as possilbe ^^!