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Inktober (2017)

What is Inktober?
Started in 2009 by Jake Parker as a challenge to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits, the basic rules have been to create a piece of art in ink, every day, and share it with people – online or offline. In 2016, Parker begun sharing official prompt lists for people to work with.

Challenge Accepted
When the frustration at not using my ipad as much I thought I should aligned with an increasingly bleak looking work situation, and off the back of a team-initated drawing challenge, Inktober 2017 became the perfect escape. And the perfect excuse.

Instead of going back to my traditional art roots, I wanted to use the challenge to develop something else. A problem that had been sitting gathering dust: the ipad pro and apple pencil. The 31-day challenge would be a great opportunity to push ahead one day at a time with getting more comfortable sitting down with the ipad and smashing something out.

But of course, worth doing, worth overdoing.

Go on, I dare you

I never wrote it down but I remember setting myself a few ground rules for this Inktober challenge.

1. Everything had to be done on the ipad with the apple pencil
2. You have from 00:00 to 23:59 every day to work on a piece. No more, no less.
3. Regardless of how finished or not it is, you have to post your final piece.

All 31 pieces were made with iOS Sketchbook Pro, and there’s a whole range of styles and pieces that came from the challenge. It’s fun to look back at these retrospectively;

Pieces such as #5 and #13 being inspired by Stardew Valley (#5 in anticpation before the Switch version had been released, ironically incredibly prophetic given the number of time I spent hunting down hardwood in-game once it came out. And I had managed to play enough of the game that by [Inktober] Day 13, I had an idea of what Amaranth as a grain crop was like.)
#15’s creature in the dark looking over its shoulder serves as a permanent reminder that The Rasmus’ album Dark Matters was on high rotation during this challenge (“Something in the Dark”, Track 2)
The teeny tiny Foreign Shrapnel Dragon as he appears in #7 after being spotted by the human owner of his spare coin hoard (mortified, truely), and #21 defending his stash of coinage.
Several pieces that serve as a reminder of circumstances and current events at the time too (#12, #27 and #29).

Some of these were revisited later, and some were polished into finished pieces:

In Conclusion:

All in all I achieved what I set out to do with this challenge – 31 days in a row, sit down with the ipad and the apple pencil and make something. Some days were easier than others, it got easier the more I did it, some prompts were easier than others. I might have a great idea one day, and barely execute the prompt the next. And that’s okay! If nothing else, it gave me the starting blocks for several illustrations that I could come back to – and in several cases, did.

Lettering sketchbook 2023

In the middle of 2022, I was gifted a Domestika Course – “Typography Sketchbook: Drawing Letters with Style” by Joanna Muñoz”. Of course I signed up, logged in, and then things happened and it fell to the wayside for a while. Quite a while. Eventually in September 2023, I dug up my log in details, grabbed an old dot-grid notebook, and started to make my way through the first few introductory videos.

An Introduction to Lettering

Going through the motions of following the course was a personally bizarre experience; I’d been dabbling in and out of lettering for decades, done at least one university-level introduction class to Typography and heard far too many coursemates telling tales of woe during their time taking the later electives. I had been able to see several prominent lettering artists present at Semi-Permanent in 2014 (such as Jessica Hische and Seb Lester), and had the chance to add some of their own books to my reference library in the years that followed. I knew all too well what things like descenders and ascenders were, I’d spent weeks studying the differences between different types of serifs and san-serif fonts for 36 Days of Type. It felt, in some ways, like I was rehashing things I already knew. That I already should be fine with.

But at the same time that frustration became a strange kind of super power. I could identify more easily what I didn’t know from what I did, things that I agreed with vs things that I didn’t (Even in the “old days” of 2023 I was still skeptical about leaning on pintrest for reference material, after personal experiences that showed it could be extremely difficult to track down original sources).

Of course, if you’ve been around the blog this should come as no surprise, as once again “worth doing, worth overdoing” kicked in; Tasks within the course, each done in triplicate.

Same Words, Three Ways (san-serif with a 3D effect, high contrast bracketed serif, and monoline script)
Flourishes and Swashes (script styles)
Interlocking Forms (blockwork styles)
Carved Out (more blockwork forms)
Circles (letttering in a form)
Arches (using guidelines)
Arcs (guidelines and rotation)

Moving from reinforcing new and old fundamentals, we started to get into the meat of the course. The stuff I was truly in it for.

Creating Compositions

The next task called for students to pair a single phrase with one of the references gathered during the ideas phase – where we looked at where we get our ideas and inspiration from, and whom. And yet in spite of following the assigned task to the letter, something felt missing.

Worth doing, worth overdoing.

I set about making my own twist on the task – picking 5 specific artists whose styles I liked and/or wanted to emulate, looking at examples of their work and identifying what made it feel like their work (to me, at least). Choosing artists with a range of styles and looking at how and what still made each piece feel very obviously “them” was something that appealed in the wake of the annual “style” discourse that flooded the internet so often and the push for creatives to be their own “brand”.

Putting It All Together

The course followed this with a set of exercises – a serif piece, a san-serif piece, a script piece, and a mixed lettering piece. (4 pieces total)

You know the drill by now, don’t you? Worth doing, worth overdoing.

(Can you tell what I was watching at the time I was doing these?)

And of course now that we’ve got a basic grasp of composition in pencil and black/white, the next task was to start adding colour to pieces and documenting them for social media.

SIDEQUEST: Font Studies in Letraset

Somewhere along the line I also paused the colour project to do an abrupt crash course in different font families from ye old trustworthy font friend, Letraset.

Final Project(s)

At this point you know I couldn’t just do one final project, of course I did three – and added an extra layer of complexity! In unit 4 we started with sketching compositions and adding black ink to them. Unit 5 saw us adding colour to our compositions. So it only felt fitting for Unit 6’s grand finale, to finally translate the skills across to the digital front and complete them on the iPad with Procreate. The final missing piece in this lettering journey.

In the end I gravitated back to this composition inspired by Snooze One’s blocky, bubble-like style
from the exercises in Creating Compositions for my final submission.

Words By Bangtan (2024)

Somewhere between 2021-2022 I ran across a monthly challenge within the fandom for Korean group, BTS. As with so many challenges, I would see the posts for the month’s event when it was finished, and forget to keep an eye out for the following month’s theme. “Oh, I should try and do something for that!” Famous last words.

What is Words By Bangtan?

According to the fan account’s carrd from 2021;

Launching a new monthly ARMY event to celebrate the lyricism and words of BTS called #WordsByBangtan! This commences on the 25th of each month, starting February 2021, 12 pm KST. BTS' lyrics have been an instrumental part of their artistry and propensity to build a connection with the fans.

This is an opportunity to showcase our personal connections to their words through a variety of different mediums - lyric analysis threads, sharing our favourite words by them, edits, visualizations, collages, blogs, dance choreographies, films and many many more - if their words ever inspired you to create something or moved you, this is an event for you.

We will also have monthly themes to make it more engaging. It is up to you whether you want to stick to these themes, as they're only created to provide guidance. The only instructions are to credit translations you utilize, use the hashtag, and most importantly - have fun!

words by bangtan, introduction carrd

At the start of 2024, as I was finishing up the final projects for Lettering Sketchbook* and working through Typism’s Lettering Summit, I set out to make a concerted effort to keep a close eye on the Words By Bangtan challenge. When the themes dropped, when the submissions were due. Because without the lettering course to keep me on my toes, how was I going to put these skills to practice? The challenge gave me an opportunity to pursue an interest in the music and lyrical content, while also putting skills gleamed from both the Lettering Sketchbook course and Typism Summit lectures to practical use.

Challenge Accepted (Method)

As is probably expected by this point in the blog posts – project worth doing, project worth overdoing.

Research: From the get-go in January sketchbooks were filled with notes, pages of lyrics that could apply to the monthly theme (From memory, the majority of Korean-language translations came from doolset, where I could I would translate the Japanese lyrics to the best of my abilities). After all, it’s easier to narrow down options from a short list.

2. Sketches: After narrowing it down to a top 3 or 4 and using it as an exercise to try and do several sketches for each, I would move onto a final composition in another A5 midori dot-grid notebook.

3.Digitally Finishing: Once the final sketch/es were completed, a photo was taken with the ipad, dropping it into a fresh procreate file to finalise composition, colours and add embelishments.

The themes that I participated in from first to last included:

January: Revolution
February: Connection
March: Objection (missed)
April: Passion
May: Deconstruct
June: Reunion
July: Restoration
August: Inception
September: Protection

Overall this was a fun way to launch from Lettering Sketchbook and Typism Summit into continuing to give my lettering work a cause and a reason for practice, as well as diving deeper into the lyrical content of Bangtan Sonyeondan’s rather vast discography.

Links

Words by Bangtan carrd
Words by Bangtan instagram | twitter/X
Doolset lyric translation
Where to find BTS songs/albums: Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon Music, Youtube Music, etc. I’m sure you’ll be able to find it somewhere if you haven’t already.

36 Days of Type

Writing this retrospectively means that remembering exactly who, or where, I found out about the 36 Days of Type. It could have been somewhere like Creative Bloq, or even lettering artists like Jessica Hische, Seb Lester, or Ian Bernard. But I can’t recall precisely where.

36 Days of Type was a challenge to draw a letter or number every day for 36 consecutive days.

It was the kind of once-a-year event that I would find out about after the event, swear to do it the next year, and then proceed to forget until it was over again.

But not in 2019.

At this point the “go hard or go home” mantra is probably pretty obvious. Why stop at a single letter, when it could be a launching pad to level up and work on my visual library of fonts and letterforms?

Initial spreads for different types of ‘A’ and ‘a’s, with no solid direction

Spreads for different types of ‘S’ and ‘s’, after redefining expectations

"So, you're putting these off?" 
"Yeah. Apparently." 
"Why?" 
"Lack of variation." 
"Lack of variation?" 
"This was meant to be a study of ligature forms across a string of styles. All that's been looked at - even though it's a wide category - is Script fonts." 
"What do you want to see more of?" 
"Base font types - serifs, san serifs. Even some blackletter varients and unical." 
Sketchbook notes, 2019

On with the Show

You can see just flipping through the sketchbook that it quickly tightened up from being a loose and aimless “draw as many types of <letter> as you can” to a very structured study with purpose:

How is the capital <letter> presented across different fonts within five main font groups (Serif, Sanserif, Blackletter, Script, and Display)
How is the lowercase <letter> presented across different fonts within the main font groups.

Each page was split into 5 rows, one for each font group. The challenge became less about just drawing a single letter and more about finding the ways in which letterforms were being drawn significantly different from each other, yet still recognizably that letter – which ironically meant paying more and more attention to the details. Unwittingly this was developing a skill that would come in handy when trying to identify or match fonts, as often has happened during my time at the printshop.

The final exercise came to 52 pages of letters (26 uppercase, 26 lowercase), with 10 pages of numbers (0-9, single-pages). And probably a little more than 36 Days.

Lyric Quest

Typism Skills Summit 2024

A 2022 post by lettering artist Ian Barnard put me onto the Typism books and by extension, the Typism Community. Based out of the Gold Coast, Australia, Typism is not only a community hub full of inspiration, but resources and skill summits. Subsequently I signed up for their newsletter, and pre-ordered a physical copy of Typism Book 8.

Two years later, as I was finishing up final projects for Lettering Sketchbook*, the 2024 Typism Skills Summit rolled around. It was perfect; I had built up some basic skills during the sketchbook course, and the summit was taking place over a long weekend. At some point between signing up for a free ticket and day 1, I decided to splurge the extra $60USD or so to upgrade to the VIP ticket and get all the extra bonus freebies, brushes, worksheets, and newsletter sign ups.

I sat down on January 26th for Day 2 with a hot cup of tea and some old sketchbooks with blank pages to fill:

It was time to level up.

1. SKILL UP: COMPOSITION

Vinithra Mammen’s talk about ways to create balanced lettering compositions got me started on taking the theory I was picking up throughout the days’ lectures and applying it in practice. She was the last speaker for Day 2 – so afterwards I could mess around with the prompt she gave viewers (“Better Every Day”). It was a good excuse to work outside of my comfort zone, at the time I had done very few lettering pieces digitaly. It turned out well – and to my surprise, even recieved a featured shout out in the Typism blog post (“Celebrating artwork from the Typism Skill Summit“).

Bonus EXP: Digital Lettering (+1)

2. SKILL UP: BOXY LETTERS

Day 3 featured Liz Volpi Impastatio’s creative workshop around Boxy Letters, creating fun and quirky cards for Valentine’s Day. The chunky, big lettering style reminded me of the “carve it out” exercise in Joanna Muñoz’s Lettering Sketchbook course. The examples were bright and fun, and I aimed to carry that across into my practice piece.

Bonus EXP: Digital Lettering (+1)

Because I started a day late, I caught up on Day 1’s lectures after the summit officially ‘ended’. And at the end of the last talk, I made a list of things I wanted to practice from the summit. Practice projects, to reinforce what I’d heard and made notes about.

3. SKILL UP: 3D LETTERING

Nico Ng’s talk touched on ways to simplify 3D Lettering, narrowing it down to three key types – Oblique, Isometric, and Perspective. Of course, that meant to put what he spoke about into practice, I had to do three pieces. One for each type he covered. Though I might have to revisit this again…

EXP: 3D Lettering (+3)
Status ailment: ??? Perspective ???? Math ????

4. SKILL UP: SCRIPT LETTERING

While there were several script lettering speakers at the summit, Thomas Hoyer and Maria Montes’ talks particularly resonated. Hoyer’s talk focused around flourishes, the lines and loops and angles, which paired nicely with the “Principles of Script Lettering” introduction from Montes. I got to pull out a few different pen types and play around in these notebooks, before throwing down pencils for another practice piece to call this skill check-in complete.

Bonus EXP: Loop-y Loop (+1)

5. SKILL UP: TYPE EVOLUTION

Technically Jimbo Bernaus’s workshop exercise only asked for a single evolution stream; a san-serif split into bold and slanted, a serif split into contrasted and condensed. And then the results recombined. But if you read Skill Up 3, you can see where this is going, right? Yeah. The talk was called “Letter evolution: Build letters with confidence“, and this was me. Building confidence. Because if I learnt anything from the 36 Days of Lettering** project, it’s that not all letters (or fonts) are the same.

EXP: Letterform Structure (+1)

7. SKILL UP: BLACKLETTER CALLIGRAPHY

Blackletter calligraphy was another topic that stuck out to me from the three day summit, especially talks from Tamer Goniem demonstrating techniques with colour inks, and Jacqueen Ortiz-Nunog’s dive into Blackletter. Using the supplemental worksheets from Jacq’s bundle goodies, I dived into playing around with the calligraphy brushes I had on hand to go over the drills supplied for stroke control and muscle memory (because, as seen in exhibit 3 and 5, we have form. Worth doing once, worth doing thrice).

With the strokes reinforced, I pulled out my copy of Medieval Calligraphy to reference stroke orders for font samples pulled from the 13th to 15th centuries (“Gothic Textura Quadrata”). These styles were closer in line with Tamer and Jacq’s works than the earlier Unical styles also covered in the book. Following stroke order for the blackletter fonts was oddly familiar, and it took me a while before realising it’s because drawing Kanji characters follows a similar pattern where being drawn (and catalogued) relies heavily on specific strokes.

I still am yet to pull out the nibs and nib holders to mess around with ink for ink’s sake – but playing around with Artline Calligraphy Pens and making other markers confirm to blackletter strokes has proven therapeutic enough as a starting point.

EXP: Traditional Penmanship (+1)

Note: Pages of columns of Blackletter calligraphy are from 2025, recreated in the same style as original exercises from 2024.

8. SKILL UP: DARK LETTERING

Initially just based on the talk’s title I was expecting Noeko’s Dark Lettering to be another variation on blackletter calligraphy, like Tamer and Jacq’s talks. I was quickly proven wrong, and the influence of heavy music in the work she presented piqued my interest even more. How to give letters those darker, sharper shapes and where (or what) to emphasise when it came to specific parts of letterforms.

(I need to visit this again – I may have flown a little too close to the sun here and gone from “dark lettering fun” to “needs to refer to notes to understand what it means”)

Bonus EXP: Circle Math (+1)

9. SKILL UP: VICTORIAN LETTERING

And of course I saved my favourite style for last – Sushimoon’s Victorian Lettering workshop. I was looking forward to this one, having played with more decorative fonts out of old Letraset books and gems like the Vintage Type Graphics book I picked up from the university store many moons ago.

Needless to say I had some fun with these.

EXP: Nostalgia Lettering +1

IN CONCLUSION:

While it took me much longer to get through all the talks than just the three days it ran for, needless to say I got a lot out of the Typism Skills Summit. It pushed me to try new things, or approach skills I already had in a different way. There are definitely pieces that came out of this that I’m still proud of two years later, and no doubt it has gone on to inform my lettering practice since.

Summit Results:
+11 EXP Digital Lettering
+46 EXP Traditional Lettering (Pencil, Pens)

Skill Level Up!
- Composition
- Boxy Letters
- 3D Lettering (Isometric, Oblique, Perspective)
- Script Lettering (Flourishes)
- Font Fusion/Evolution 
- Blackletter Calligraphy (Calligraphy Pen, Key Strokes, Font Styles)
- Victorian Lettering (Ascenders, Descenders)

New Skills Acquired!
- Dark Lettering (Horizontal, Round)

TO FIND OUT MORE…
– Typsim Community: https://www.typismcommunity.com/
– Typism Summit: https://www.typismsummit.com/
– Ian Barnard: Instagram / Linktree / Youtube / Resources
– Vinithra Mam: Instagram / Linktree / Website
– Liz Volpi Impastatio: Instagram / Links / Website
– Nico Ng: Instagram / Website
– Thomas Hoyer: Instagram / Website
– Maria Montes: Instagram / Linktree / Website / Educational Resources
– Jimbo Bernaus: Instagram / Educational Resources
– Tamer Goniem: Instagram / Website / Educational Resources
– Jacqueen Ortiz-Nunog: Instagram / Links / Website
– Noeko: Instagram / Links / Website
– Sushimoon: Instagram / Links / Website

*Lettering Sketchbook – Blog post to come, a Domestika course by Joanna Muñoz. Completed during 2023/24.
**36 Days of Type – Blog post to come. Inspired by the 36 Days of Type a study looking at different lettershapes and forms across capitals and lowercase characters, across a range of typefaces. Completed May-June 2019.

Song lyric references in the above pieces include:
The Freak Show by YUNGBLUD, Deep End by I Prevail, Read Between The Lines by Tom Cardy, Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley, Caramelldansen by Caramell, What Does the Fox Say by Ylvis, Deja Vu by Tomorrow x Together, and Merry Go Round by Yui

Blog

So… you want me to tell you more?

Welcome to the Bog. **I mean, Blog

Inktober (2017)

Lettering Sketchbook (2023)

Words By Bangtan (2024)

36 Days of Type (2019)

Lyric Quest

Typism Skills Summit 2024

So… you want me to tell you more?

Welcome to the Bog. **I mean, Blog

Inktober (2017)

Inktober (2017)

In Conclusion:

Inktober (2017)

Lettering Sketchbook (2023)

Lettering sketchbook 2023

An Introduction to Lettering

Creating Compositions

Putting It All Together

SIDEQUEST: Font Studies in Letraset

Final Project(s)

Lettering Sketchbook (2023)

Words By Bangtan (2024)

Words By Bangtan (2024)

Links

Words By Bangtan (2024)

36 Days of Type (2019)

36 Days of Type

36 Days of Type (2019)

Lyric Quest

Lyric Quest

SKETCHBOOK SIDEQUEST

LYRIC QUEST – IT BEGINS

Lyric Quest

Typism Skills Summit 2024

Typism Skills Summit 2024

1. SKILL UP: COMPOSITION

2. SKILL UP: BOXY LETTERS

3. SKILL UP: 3D LETTERING

4. SKILL UP: SCRIPT LETTERING

5. SKILL UP: TYPE EVOLUTION

7. SKILL UP: BLACKLETTER CALLIGRAPHY

8. SKILL UP: DARK LETTERING

9. SKILL UP: VICTORIAN LETTERING

IN CONCLUSION:

Typism Skills Summit 2024