Domestika Review: Havi Cruz - Ornamental Lettering

 

It's currently lockdown here in the UK due to the COVID pandemic so I'm using the extra spare time I currently have to work through as many online art tutorials as I can. It's a rare opportunity for me to spend time investing in my artistic development. Vintage lettering was always something I've wanted to try my hand at so when I saw that Domestika offered a course on this topic, I jumped at the chance.

Havi Cruz is a specialist in ornate hand lettered typographical designs. This type of lettering was most prominent in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Despite the ease with which one can buy digital victorian fonts and templates, nothing still beats a good old piece of original type hand crafted by an artist. Havi himself joins a select few other artists who excel at this type of thing - check out the stunning works of Tobias Saul, Dave Smith and Mateusz Witczak. 

This course is taught in Spanish and although the translated subtitles weren't particularly good, I managed to get enough information to understand. Havi began by introducing us to his influences and then discussed a few details that make vintage typography so special.

The first few videos of the course were fairly easy and straightforward to follow. These early stages of type design involved a lot of roughly drawn pencil sketches.

The problem I had with the course is that Havi then moved very rapidly onto the next stage which saw him re-draw his selected design in immaculate detail. He draws his letters with a few construction lines but other than that, he freehand draws his amazing letters. It was disheartening to see him do this with such ease because my own efforts were so poor by comparison.

To be fair, Havi does state that we will need to really practice hand lettering a lot. And refer to a lot of photo references too.

I decided I would proceed with what I had and hope it would look half decent. Luckily I had some graph paper to hand which helped a LOT.

During the vector drawing stage, Havi showed how he prepares his work in Adobe Illustrator, pacing special emphasis on precise guideline markers to mark out each part of each letter. This was really helpful to see and I tried my best to follow this advice.

However for my final piece, I did not proceed with the gold leaf effect he showed. Instead I went for a stripey look with 3D drop shadow - which I learned from this video. The great thing about working with vectors is that I can scale the design up without loss of quality, plus I can apply a whole range of treatments to it:

This course is a nice glimpse into the world of vintage hand lettering. But it's only that, a glimpse. In order to create anything half decent it's obvious it will take many years of practice and an in-depth level of knowledge of vintage lettering and ornamental designs. 

But it was very insightful to see how Havi goes about creating his design. It's given me a bit more of an understanding on how to make a typographic piece flow and look beautiful. I hope to keep working on this style for personal projects and maybe bring a little in to my client work.

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