Create a hand-drawn font: Drawing characters

- [Instructor] There are several approaches one can take to creating a font with Illustrator and Fontself. In this first example, I'd like to show you how to create a hand-drawn font based on handwriting. I'll come and open the Fontself Maker extension. Just would like to point that on the menu, there is a font template. Now, this is actually far more involved than I need for this simple project. What I have done is taken this and modified it. And I have reduced the opacity of the grid fields and the guidelines, and I just have two simple guides, one for the cap height, and one for the baseline of each of the letters. I print this out, and then in each of these grid fields, I draw my letters with a black marker. I then scan the page. Now if you don't have a scanner, you can just photograph the page, but in doing so, make sure that you get it directly from above, and that you are not introducing any kind of distortion from your camera angle. Then I open up the scan in Photoshop. And you'll notice that for some of the letters, I felt like my first attempt wasn't very good so I just had another go. What I'm going to do here is add a levels adjustments, and I want the light gray of the paper and the light gray of the guidelines to fall away and for the gray of the letters to become solid black. I will get my black point slider and move that to the right and my white point slider and move that as far to the left as necessary so that we can remove any guides. Now, it may be the case that I also want to just get in there with my eraser tool. And just rub out any guides that may still be showing.