Hello, Everybody.

A reader asked me how to include lettering from signs, billboards, shop-fronts, etc. when Urban Sketching. Great question!

I often omit (or don't even notice!) the lettering when I draw because I'm focused on geometry: solid 2D and 3D shapes. I also find that reading is a different mind set than looking. But occasionally the lettering is unavoidable or intrinsic to the scene.

Here are some examples of drawings with lettering:

I draw lettering like any other abstract shape. It helps to stay on the "right side of the brain." (Even though the right side/left brain theory is somewhat outdated, it's still a handy metaphor for different ways of seeing). During my initial 60-second planning stage in pencil (this image is darkened so you can see the pencil lines), I lightly draw a bounding box around the entire word shape, and divide it into the same number of parts as letters in the word:

Then I trace their contours in pen as I would anything else:

Don't think of them as letters, but only contours, as if you're tracing islands on a map. My focus is not on accuracy, so sometimes I'm pretty sloppy:

As long as the entire image, lettering and all, is done with the same attitude, it looks okay to me. When in doubt, leave 'em out. Thanks for the question! Keep 'em coming.

I just finished entering all the text for my forthcoming book, About A Year:

I'll take my time editing the book before I launch the Kickstarter. The plan is to have it available for the holidays.

The year-long, journal-entry per day is still going strong, four months in and over a hundred drawings so far:

The daily page might be an Urban Sketch, as above. Some are in-class demos drawn for students in my Gage Academy classes:

Some are experiments and journal entries:

And now, back to work on my new book!

Steven