This seems to be the most requested tutorial here, I understand the desire especially if you have been dipping your toes in the hand lettering pool and now want to be able to showcase your work to the world! I hope I have rounded up enough tutorials to thoroughly get you through this process. Some of these tutorials will be step-by-step, others videos, of course some may be better than others but they all have great information to glean and I hope you find this post to be a useful future resource. If you have any questions please let us know!
//FREE DIGITIZING LETTERING TUTORIALS//
Hand lettering from pencil sketch to digital graphic
Making your lettering into a vector graphic
Making your lettering available for web*
A beginner’s guide to spiffing up your hand lettering
Using the calligraphic brush to create decorative type
Hand lettering in Illustrator (this is great for learning about the Wacom tablet settings)
How to digitize brush or hand lettering
How to digitize your calligraphy
*Note her tutorial reads to save as a ‘gif’, but I always save as either a .png or .jpeg for web unless the graphic is animated then I use the .gif file format
//PAID DIGITIZING LETTERING CLASSES/TUTORIALS//
Photoshop for Lettering Artists (our super newbie class)
Digitizing your calligraphy with Molly Suber Thorpe
Introduction to the Wacom tablet
How to turn your handlettering into vectors
Digitizing hand lettering: creating organic and precise vectors
Lettering II by Mary Kate McDevitt
//RESOURCES/TOOLS//
These are some of the tools that you will need or read about in the tutorials that will help make your digitizing life a whole lot easier.
Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements
Wacom tablet (there’s entry level versions that are affordable)
P.S. That awesome font ‘lettering’ is in is available here
Miss Tristan B. is the proprietress of Besotted Brand and one of the writer’s of this delightful blog. She lives in sunny Seattle with her handsome husband, wonderful baby girl and two pups. Her lofty goal here is to make this a creative resource repository and to inspire you to fall truly, madly, deeply in love with your life.
Thanks for the link love! Awesome post! I will link back!
Thanks for linking to a tutorial on our site! :)
Thank you Emma for the visit, really enjoy your blog!
Your welcome, thank you for the visit!
love this post very informative and great tutorials! http://www.chloefullerdesign.com
you have no clue how much I appreciate this blog post! I’ve really into hand lettering and I often wondered how it was digitized! I was totally clueless, this is going to be bookmarked and referred to many times!! thanks again for compiling and sharing this information!
http://www.footnotesandfinds.com
I am so happy! Have fun with it!
I want to turn my handwriting into a typeface. How do I do that?
Oh, there’s loads of free and inexpensive ways if you are just wanting to do it for ahobby font, a pro font would probably run thousands of dollars unless you knew someone that could work the software and do it as a favor or discounted fee.
http://www.fontifier.com/
http://www.myscriptfont.com/
http://www.yourfonts.com/
Font software:
http://www.fontlab.com/other-font-software/
http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/22/so-you-want-to-create-a-font-part-1/
good luck!
Hi Tristan! Gracias for these amazing, helpful links! I was wondering if it was important to go with the Epson V600 scanner for scanning my artwork for digitizing… Are there cost-effective alternative that work almost as good?
Jasiel, we often use our Iphones now to shoot images of the lettering and bring that file in to clean-up, in fact that’s all I have been doing for the past 6 months!
Ah thank you so much for this! Just starting to get into trying to digitize my hand-lettering work, and this is a goldmine of information! I realized how little I really knew about digitizing hand-drawn work when I tried to do it on my own…haha.
Well, thank you for the thank you! We also created a super easy product here:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/232299363/digitize-your-lettering-automated?ref=shop_home_feat_1