PRIMARY TOOLS & MATERIALS:
INK, COMPUTER APPLICATION

Additional Tools & Materials: Adobe Photoshop brushes, Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet

This letter was created 100% digitally. I'm calling it a hybrid because the incredibly detailed photoshop brushes I used to create the ink splatter textures were all created by actually dripping ink and scanning the results. So yes, it's a hybrid, I'm just not the one who created the handmade elements this time. 

The first step in making this hybrid was playing with various Photoshop brushes in my collection. I began with Alex Dukal's Aquarellist Brushes for watercolor effects. Those are mostly what you see in slides 2 and three - me just playing with all the different textures, using my Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet. I tried drawing a few letter Hs with the pen, but they ended up looking... weird. I'm still getting used to the sensation of drawing on the Wacom. Instead I decided to play with some bigger splatter brushes by Blue Line Design. I liked these much better - they had more detail and they layered beautifully. I first placed the letter h in the typeface Gravitas One on my canvas and began "dripping" the splatter brushes all over, in the shape of an h. Then I turned off the type layer (see slide 4) but I thought it either looked too much like an n, or the splatters were just too precisely placed to capture that randomness I wanted to see. So then I turned the H type layer back on, and placed it in front of the ink (slide 1). Bingo. I liked the look of it - like a stencil after it's been used once. 

This would certainly be a fun display typeface but it would become difficult to read at small sizes. When I was first experimenting with these brushes, I wanted the letter to be red, but that started grossing me out the more it began to look like a crime scene.