Drawing an alphabet – J

Initial idea: paper cutout

As if the letter shape was cut out of paper. In practice, this would be much more untidy. Of course, I could have actually cut a shape out of paper and copied that. But I didn’t.

Perfection?

For some of these letters, I had trouble deciding how refined they have to be.

They’re meant to be imperfect. It’s the imperfection that makes them what they are. But what is picturesque imperfection and what is badly done?

Finding the point where a letter retains enough imperfection to give it character but not so much it looks rubbish is tricky. This is too perfect to be a cutout letter. Unless it was done by someone who was very good at cutting out letters. But then it might not look like a cutout letter either. Even if it was.

Work

This was easy to do and didn’t take long. I feel slightly apologetic about that. Which is why I mention it. I didn’t set out to make the most fabulous showstopper (good job) for every letter so it doesn’t matter. But it did remind me of the tendency to value ‘design’ with the amount of apparent effort that goes into something. (This is a big topic that I would like to rant about at some point.)

You wouldn’t be wrong if you guessed that this took me much less time to do this than the ‘T’. For most of the other letters it’s difficult to tell, just by looking at them, how much time each one took to do. Technology makes this more unclear. Software makes some complicated looking things easy to achieve, and vice versa. The amount of thinking, sketching and fine-tuning varies too. The important thing is how the design fulfils the job it has to do.

This is part of a project to draw the letters of the alphabet in different styles.