Building the Alphabet:
lowercase part 8

Last week I did the diagonals: “v”, “w”, “x”, “k”, and “z”. This week I did the letter “s” to complete the basic Latin lowercase. There will be other characters in the lowercase I’m not as familiar with, but those will come later.

Lowercase s

Honestly, I expected this to be a lot harder. It was certainly awkward to draw, but again, drawing it just comes down to practice.

I will say this, however: I may need to redraw “s” later once it’s digitized and placed in context with other glyphs. This—painfully—may be true of any number of other characters as I move on to digitizing the letters.

Normally the spine of the “s” is thicker than the top and bottom. The Sharpie® doen’t lend itself to that kind of modulation. I let the tool do it’s thing, and the “s” worked out pretty well.

I had to work at making the counter on the bottom a bit larger than the one on top, balancing the negative space. I also had to work at making sure the counters had a similar shape.

Lastly, I tried to make the “s” narrower, as it was easy to let it get too wide. The “s” is a very narrow glyph.

Next: Uppercase

Next week I’ll begin working on the uppercase, starting with “H” and “O”. I’ll also lay out a plan for which glyphs I’ll do, and in what order. Good times!