About This Class

There is no shortcut to drawing letters that look built rather than scribbled. This class is the starting point I wish I had — the exact sequence I still use to take a phrase from a rough thumbnail to a finished piece, taught slowly enough that the reasoning sticks.

We begin with the vocabulary: what a stem, a bowl, and a terminal actually do, and why the same word can be drawn ten different ways without any of them being wrong. From there I walk you through building letters by construction instead of by handwriting, so your work stays consistent at any size.

Lessons in this class

The class is full of the small corrections I collected over eleven years of drawing letters for signs, book covers, and shopfronts — the sort of thing nobody writes down:

  • Spacing by eye when the ruler disagrees with you
  • Fixing an S that leans, without redrawing the whole word
  • Choosing a paper and nib that forgive a heavy hand
  • Knowing when a piece is done and when it is merely tired
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