Typesetting
This week:
BUILDING AN ALPHABET
I wanted to expand upon the letters printed during the PEACHES experiment, and so used photoshop to edit, combine and transform the letters I had into new forms.
an O can also be a C...
I think a massive disadvantage of this is not leveraging the unique texture patterns you can achieve with linocut prints - If you used these letters repeatedly on a design, there’s a chance that the fact these letters are “almost the same” on what is clearly meant to be a printed, tactile media could cause a sort of uncanny valley effect, and take the viewer out of the image.
Texture Brush
As one of my goals for this module was to become more comfortable with digital thumbnailing without feeling as if I’m going too slowly or missing out on some of the tacticle responsiveness that I take alot of inspiration from as an Illustrator - I decided to spend some time trying to create custome photoshop brushes that might be able to help me achieve a similar “printed” quality while saving the time I would have spent printing!
At first I was wasn’t able to create a texture as much as just change the block colour of the image. I spent some time watching tutorials on the mechanics of how photoshop tries to create the brush and tried again. This time, I took a different one of the letters I printed and maximised it to a 400 pixel grid. I wanted some blank space within this design as using the rotation variation brush setting would create interesting patterns, but having most of it be filled in with solid black meant that I could get more value from the texture brush setting, which I found out work similarly to the hard light and overlay layer settings which I have frequently used in other projects.
Using this method, I have moderate success at making the two letterforms more distinct - but it seems like something that would be easier resolved by just reprinting the letter with lino and ink again. While I’m glad I tried this, as I think I learned alot about my own artistic process - I think I will stick to workflow method where I create some kind of small initial print rather than diving in digitally, as I found starting this week without that tactile responsiveness and immediate result to look at demotivated me in a way.
a slightly more unique c next to an o...
READING:
Ang, D. (no date) Custom Brush Settings Explained, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnvsoJCnJWY (Accessed: 10 November 2025).