Following my previous blog post Making my own custom font! I have decided to challenge myself to make another font on Calligraphr.com - but this time, in a style similar to Chinese calligraphy.
In Chinese calligraphy there are many types of strokes, sometimes with pronounced start- and end-points, and always with a change in the line width based on the amount of pressure put on the brush (see chart below) .
Unfortunately, I do not have Chinese calligraphy supplies at home, so I had to make do with a custom brush in PaintTool SAI. I tried to mimic the stroke styles using pen pressure, and sometimes I had to improvise a new stroke style because English alphabets were often curved and rounded, and those shapes didn't exist in Chinese writing.
I then imported my writings into Calligraphr, and had to make multiple adjustments until I was happy with the spacing and the weight of each character in a collective.
At this point I also decided to create a variant for the font - it was very simple: I just had to trace over the existing characters, but making them ever-so-slightly different in shape or size.
HOW TO USE THE FONT VARIANTS:
In Photoshop, go to "Character Panel" > click on "Contextual Alternates".
In Microsoft Word, right click> "Font" > "Advanced" > tick "Contextual Alternates".
To be honest I actually prefer the default font because it looks neater and more aligned to me, but I guess it's good to have the variant option at hand, for a more "imperfect" look.
(See comparison below)
To conclude, I think this attempt at making a Chinese calligraphy style font was very fun! I am aware that there are similar (and more perfected) fonts such as the famous "Chinese Takeaway Font", but it just feels more rewarding to be able to make a font that is my own interpretation. Nevertheless, this font IS limited due to the fact that it only contains 75 glyphs because I'm using the free version, meaning that I cannot use this font to type special alphabets or symbols such as #$%^*_+\~... But It's good to know that if I ever needed, I could just purchase an upgrade.
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