My process for making fonts is very low tech. I write left handed, and can`t draw a straight line or a circle freehand with pencil and paper, but I get pretty good results using my right hand, drawing on the computer.
I select pictures, (photos or artwork), and crop/resize them to 280 pixels height, with variable width. I then draw on top of the picture in, (usually), light blue and dark red, composed for black and white. For most of the image, the colour choice is obvious, but there are a lot of decisions on which way to go with the `50/50` pixels around the edges. When straight lines are needed, I calculate the line slope from the coordinates of the start and the finish, and figure out the consistent sequence that will go from point A to point B. This font was mostly curved lines, which is a bit more of a challenge.
Turning a photograph into a silhouette is fairly easy:
I modified the bust line slightly, so there would be a bit of a gap between the breast and the back of the chair, otherwise the two would merge at less than 72 points in the font.
Sometimes a silhouette can suggest something very different, as in this one:
This picture of
Nastia Liukin from the 2008 Olympics reminds me of
Willem Dafoe as
Jesus on the cross in
The Last Temptation of Christ. I used
Nastia for most of the gymnastics silhouettes, both because of her height, (I think she`s about 5`3", which is very tall for a gymnast), and because she was 18 when the photos were taken. I didn`t want to use photos of a minor in an erotic picture font, even in a monochrome silhouette.
I started working on this next one, then quickly realized that it wouldn`t translate well to monochrome, but I really liked the way the light shone through the gap at the top of her legs, so I cropped the photo differently, and made a stylized letter O. I had completed the font before I realized that I had flipped the image horizontally at some point.
Sometimes I draw in three colours, instead of two, but still composed for monochrome:
The little black squares in the corners of the picture of the boots are used to establish the side, top and bottom of the image frame. The challenge with this picture was to find a stable grey tone for the fishnet stockings, one that wouldn`t become blotted when the image size was changed. In my font editing software, this particular pattern created diagonal lines of consistent thickness, and oval `floating` contours. I had to change the location of each contour by a fraction of a millimeter, (but I do this at about 30 times magnified), by dragging them from their position overlapping a line, to as closely as directly between two lines as I could get. You move the contour in the font making program by double-clicking the edge, then dragging it.
When I`m drawing the images, I`m usually looking at them at eight times zoom. If you download the pic of the boots, then open and enlarge it with MS Paint, you`ll be able to see how many contours I had to drag, once for each four pixel square in the stockings.
Faces are really hard to do, because they don`t naturally lend themselves to a monochrome interpretation. This picture of
Laetitia Casta:
came out really well, for a number of reasons. First,
Laetita is gorgeous. I can`t make a picture of a plain woman look beautiful, but it`s very easy to make an ugly picture of anyone. The fact that the picture was taken in black and white, and the professional lighting used, helped immensely. One of my very early fonts was all pictures of
Laetitia, and it was awful. That font prompted me to start using the larger source graphics that are my trademark in typography. I wanted to include at least one good
Laetitiabat in this project. If I could draw faces well, I would offer that service to Escorts who would like to be able to give people an idea of what they look like, but not a close enough likeness that they would be identifiable in public.
A recurring theme in many of my fonts is the use of three dimensional perspective. I spent many hours working on this one:
I was very fortunate that the source photo didn`t have to be resized; I just had to crop it, and add a bit of extra black to the top to make it 280 pixels height. I was able to add information in the crook of the knee by inverting the image colours. What appears to be almost pure black in this version will appear as two distinct shades of grey, when the colours are inverted.
I don`t try to reproduce the photograph, pixel for pixel. I`m trying to interpret it in one colour, which usually involves making it simpler, but sometimes, my version can contain more detail, if the source was resized, or fuzzy. Reducing a huge image will often yield good results. Enlarging a small one rarely does.
My experience has been that typography is a subject that many women find interesting, and can enjoy talking about at great length. The list of topics that can be of interest to both genders is relatively short.
Anyway, if the
Beautymarks font interests you, there`s more information about it in this thread:
https://terb.cc/vbulletin/showthrea...ter-font-is-Outstanding&highlight=beautymarks, and it`s available as a free download at
Dafont:
http://www.dafont.com/beautymarks.font. It`s been really popular, with more than 43,000 downloads since August 19, and 225-400 new downloads daily, depending on the day of the week.
I wanted to put this all in one post, so those who are not interested can just scroll down one post. I had to make it two, because of the images per post limit.