{"id":3436,"date":"2015-09-21T04:51:53","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T08:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bob-easton.com\/blog\/?p=3436"},"modified":"2021-09-19T18:52:17","modified_gmt":"2021-09-19T22:52:17","slug":"hand-lettered-hand-painted-hand-carved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bob-easton.com\/blog\/hand-lettered-hand-painted-hand-carved\/","title":{"rendered":"Hand Lettered – Hand Painted – Hand Carved"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hand<\/a><\/p>\n

Hand Lettered<\/h2>\n

Hand lettering is enjoying a resurgence. Decades of vinyl letter signs, “desktop publishing,” computer replicated\u00a0fonts, and computer generated signs have left us with automated perfection that has become dull and uninteresting. Perfect replication of every line and curve is simply boring. Why? Because something is missing: evidence of a human hand.<\/p>\n

\"thumbnails<\/a>My son once asked why I leave facets in my carvings, why I don’t sand them to pristine smoothness. My quick answer was “to differentiate them from cheap Chinese carvings or the stuff that comes from CNC machines.” [It doesn’t hurt that I also hate sanding.] Just as facets left on a carving show us it was carved by a human, so do the little variations in hand drawn lettering make it almost immediately distinctive from computer generated material.<\/p>\n

Discerning people are searching for humanity in the things they read, everything from web pages to signs, and a new generation of artists with hand lettering skills are thriving. Witness: these images<\/a>. Witness:\u00a0\u00a0and these<\/a>.\u00a0They’re distinctive, they differentiate, and people are willing to pay handsomely for them.<\/p>\n

Witness too the online education available to those wanting to learn hand lettering. One of the best of these is Sean McCabe’s Hand Lettering Course<\/a>. The mere existence of his course, version 2 at $700 – up from $300 for version 1, shows strength in the resurgence of hand lettering.<\/p>\n

Hand Painted – a Tribute to Sign Painters<\/h2>\n

Until\u00a01982, nearly every sign you saw was hand either painted, or if needed in mass, lithograph printed. Just as today signs were everywhere, on store fronts, inside every kind of store, on churches, concert halls, theaters, hotels, on the sides of trucks, … everywhere.<\/p>\n

Sign painters made them, by hand, with paint and brushes, hand lettered from “alphabets” in their heads. Not fonts, alphabets<\/strong>; the printing industry used fonts. Sign painters used alphabets<\/a>. Sign painters were the ultimate hand letterers.<\/p>\n

Dad was a sign painter and a photographer. Sign painting was his mainstay while he built up a solid photography business. He worked for a sign company, C.W. East, in Bloomington Indiana for a couple of decades during the middle of the last century. \u00a0His primary work was paint on metal, outdoor advertising signs of all sizes, and signs on trucks. He had all manner of alphabets flowing from his mind through super flexible long bristled brushes. All of it was “hand lettered” before “hand lettering” became the term it is today. For many things, like the hundreds of ICC numbers on trucks, he used a simple chalk layout. For more precise larger work, he sometimes made a paper pattern and “pounced” it before painting. But in the end, it was all hand lettering, by eye, that made up the overwhelming bulk of his work … and fed a family with 4 children!<\/p>\n

My introduction to lettering was watching him at work. No, as a child I didn’t get to visit the sign shop much, but he often had showcard work or silkscreen stencil work that he did in his home studio. I recall spending the better part of one summer cutting silkscreen stencils from his drawings, a story for another day. I’ll also save for another day a story about a gold gilded sign on glass.<\/p>\n

Dad completed his move from sign painting to photography by the early 1960s. He left sign painting behind except for occasional jobs.<\/p>\n

1982?<\/h3>\n

That’s when computer driven plotters started cutting vinyl letters. Sign painting was never the same after that. Dad was gone by then, never learning about how much his former trade changed. Nor, did he see what “digital” did to photography.<\/p>\n

Recently, Faythe Levine and Ed Ruscha, exploring “hand made” work of all kinds, settled on sign painters as one genre they wanted to document. One of their results was a film<\/a>…<\/p>\n