S.F. Gavin Richardson.As an artist, I always like to be creating something. The most fun way to do this, in my experience, is crafting something tactile with my hands. I had the idea recently to use Play-Dough to craft 3D letters I could use when designing posters to give them a unique aesthetic that would act as a recognizable graphic signature.
I used a can of yellow Play-Dough to sculpt the letters and used a blackboard as a dark, evenly colored, matte surface to work on and photograph the letters against. I then was able to easily mask out the background, creating clean letterforms for use on Canva or in Procreate.
But why not take this one step further? I could turn this into a typeface usable on any computer. Since fonts these days are mostly vector-based, I was not able to keep the distinct texture of the clay, but the forms of the letters still show off the playful outlines of this hand-made font.
Using FontForge, an open-source software (we love open-source!), I imported the outlines of the letters as SVG files. It was tedious to import and finalize each character, but I created a custom script using my StreamDeck to make this process fairly automated. (Did I spend more time making the custom script than it would have taken to just do it all manually? Absolutely!) After some trial and error, I am proud to present Village Fox Media’s first font, Sculpty Script!
You can use this in Canva, Procreate, Photoshop & Illustrator to make your graphic design feel more organic. I’ve included both the font and the transparent PNG images for FREE on my Gumroad storefront, as well as a Procreate Brushset for those iPad users out there.
If you have any feedback or questions about this typeface, email me at gavin@villagefoxmedia.com!
DOWNLOAD AVAILABLE FEB 1