Exploring creative lettering solutions using LetterStrokes and Illustrator. This project uses the Artistic-ChalkCharcoalPencil custom brushes supplied with Illustrator and the Oil Pastel brush in our Free Brush pack.

The idea was to combine two custom brush strokes in each letter to explore textured lettering.

The characters are taken from the ToonHand 'font' in LetterStrokes which is supplied as a symbol library to load into Illustrator. (Once placed on the page, the link with the symbol is broken to allow customisation.)

As vector character shapes the letterstrokes can be node-edited if required. Then each character path is duplicated so we can apply two brush styles.

For the 'A' the understroke is Chalk-Blunt and the overstroke is Chalk.

The 'B' character went a step further. The Chalk brush was applied to the stroke and then using Expand Appearance and Pathfinder Unite it was combined into a single object. Then a basic Flat Pen was applied to outline the object again, which produced the splintered wood effect.

The overstroke was simply the Chalk brush in a darker colour.

The final character used the Oil Pastel brush from our Free Brush sampler as the understroke and then Chalk was used for the overstroke again and node-edited to offset it slightly.