An alphabet obsession, and a new trick

Recently I've been suffering from an overwhelming urge to digitise an alphabet. Goodness knows where this unnatural passion came from – I think maybe I was inspired by some old Renaissance alphabets, rather like these

 

Renaissance – or maybe medieval? – lettering

 

Whereever the idea came from, I spent many very enjoyable days digitising 26 leafy letters, based on a kind of modernised Renaissance style

A modern Renaissance alphabet

 

(By the way, I did do the whole alphabet – I just left out the Y and Z in this image, so that the others would fit happily into a rectangle for the scan)

Now – here's a note for the digitisers who read the blog. While I was working on these letters, I discovered something very interesting. Usually, when I digitise something complicated, I start with a drawing or sketch, which I then bring into my software to use as a template for digitising. For example, here's a sketch of the letter "D" which was supposed to be a template for a digitised "D".

The letter "D" in the usual kind of pencil sketch for a digitising template

 

But then I discovered that I didn't need pencil and paper at all – I could easily use digitising software to sketch the design straight onto the screen right from the beginning. For example, here I used a plain running stitch in vermilion to draw the leaves in the design.

 

I could then just digitise it as usual, using green for the design, and then delete the vermilion sketch afterwards. In fact, it was a lot easier to use digitising software than pencil, just because it's a lot easier to change a digitised image. If a line isn't right, if an angle is wrong, if a curve needs adjusting, it's so much easier to do it on screen, rather than mess about with eraser and pencil. And then of course you can always save several versions of your work, just in case you want to go back to them later. So you never need to lose anything!

Since I discovered this trick, I now usually draw things directly on the screen, with a "running stitch". I may do a very rough preliminary sketch of a subject, just to remind me what I want to do, but the main drawing gets put down straight onto the screen